Most marketers approach digital marketing knowing what “should” be done, but not knowing “how” it should be done. Businesses know their customers well, but the rapidly changing pace at which advertising platforms change makes them hard to use effectively
This has led to the rise of thousands of digital marketing agencies over the last decade.
And while many agencies – especially the big ones – are adept at planning beautiful, creative, and compelling campaigns that sound amazing… they fall flat when it comes deploying the campaign at scale in a competitive, global environment. Even worse, they often have little to no idea how to prove the return on investment (ROI) of their work.
Digital Key Marketing takes a more engineered approach. In fact, the agency was created by a marketing-engineer: John Crimmins, a UF Industrial & Systems Engineering graduate with a focus on sales engineering. After suffering a neck injury while working in tech in 2018, he was bedridden for 4 months and had to find a way to continue to support himself from his parent’s house. Adept at using social media and technology, he started by managing social media campaigns for his doctors in exchange for medical services.
Early on, Crimmins noticed that very few companies engaging at the time in social media knew how to measure or prove ROI; the other agencies he spoke to only talked about Reach, Impressions and Followers. As a small business owner himself, Crimmins knew marketing efforts must be tied to the top or bottom line; it doesn’t matter how many followers you have if it’s not increasing sales or decreasing expenses.
Crimmins knew there must be a better way. After experimenting with Facebook & Instagram ads and the Facebook Pixel, he found it wasn’t hard to track marketing campaigns and measure ROI, it just required some know-how and, at times, a little code. Owning two small businesses based in Miami – ANNEX Miami and The Speaker Boyz LLC, John started building digital marketing solutions for his own businesses… and quickly found that fellow business owners needed help with theirs as well.
After freelancing for months and uncovering more and more demand for the service, Crimmins grew frustrated with how much opportunity businesses were leaving on the table when it comes to social media.
“Since I was a kid, I have always been obsessed with efficiency. To me, the process is everything. I do not like inefficiency, and it made me uncomfortable how much money businesses were wasting on poor performing ads with minimal conversions – which only upset customers – when all they often needed were small changes to start seeing the 3X, 5X, even 10X returns they saw others getting on social media.
He realized he could help more businesses achieve more online with a team around him – a digital marketing agency – and together they could solve the problems which were creating so much inefficiency and frustration. In October 2019, Digital Key Marketing was born.
Nowadays, marketing is completely driven by data. Those who have not adapted are quickly waning away. Instead of spending time obsessively designing the perfect campaign and hoping it boosts sales, Digital Key Marketing focuses on first deeply understanding the client’s business and customers. They then A/B test a wide variety of messaging, creative content, and offer types across diverse customer audiences, generating data. Then they analyze the data to decide what ads to scale and what to cut. In this way, they always know exactly what variables customers respond most favorably to online. On the backend, they use proprietary in-house strategies and software to optimize ads on a minute-to-minute basis, keeping advertising costs low and ROI high.
In this competitive environment, it’s important to know what the competition is doing. Pioneering an emerging trend can boost market share gains and generate outsized returns – quickly providing the fuel rising stars need to get ahead. Digital Key helps clients avoid “reinventing the wheel” with an in- depth competitor analysis and by reverse engineering what top competition is doing.
The firm identifies nearly everything behind the digital presence of top competitors in any space: from revenues and sales figures on Amazon, the ads competitors run and why they work; even identifying actual customers, and can produce a diagram detailing their entire marketing technology stack. They leverage this to direct marketing strategy and identify where clients can compete and overtake.
Of course, in order to reverse engineer what the competition is doing and identify gaps between clients and their competition, it is critical to deeply understand the client’s business. Their onboarding process, while considered a bit intensive to some, provides a strong foundation and firm understanding of who the customer is and how to serve them.
Digital Key Marketing is based in Gainesville, FL but they serve clients worldwide. More info can be found at digitalkeymarketing.com.
