It’s been 15 years since Connections Marketing first helped a few local clients flourish through little-known marketing and web development strategies. The firm stayed ahead of the latest trends, offering social media services at a time when the medium was a punchline by business leaders who didn’t see the value in things like Facebook and Twitter.
Rick Rivero, founder of Connections Marketing, envisioned an ecosystem that would enable brands to grow more efficiently through various, interconnected digital marketing strategies offered under one roof, a change from the disjointed strategy a lot of companies still take to this day. He achieved this gradually, adding specialized departments with an expert in charge of each – web design, app development, content marketing, social media, and so on.
This approach gives you a one-stop shop to address all your marketing needs, where team members help one another problem-solve so every business can achieve its goals. Today, we are proud to be serving roughly 100 SMBs through a sophisticated process that has been fine-tuned since we first launched in a Chicago-area basement. Our services include SEO, PPC, and content management, as well as traditional strategies that can be customized to address your growth goals.
How We Made Ourselves Stand Out in a Climate of Intense Competition
Every day, digital marketing is changing, too fast for the average person to keep up with. As you may have noticed, you can be a whiz on your website’s back end, yet fall behind because yesterday’s SEO is now hurting instead of helping your online rankings.
Our clients get this. They want a partner who is able to interpret the latest search engine guidelines and knows how to apply it to their marketing campaigns. By delegating their marketing to experts, business owners have more time to focus on their own areas of expertise.
But the truth is, it takes more than that to sustain a solid relationship in today’s highly competitive climate. We have so many long-lasting partners because they can rely on us in a way that goes beyond their marketing needs of the day. Since we only succeed when they do, clients find in us a consultancy that is dedicated to truly understanding what they need and whether our strategies are working as promised.
One practice that distinguishes us: our inspection of clients’ intake processes before we even get started. This helps us learn what metrics to look for, implement the most appropriate strategies, and analyze the results to ensure what we’re doing is actually working. It’s also how we recently doubled the number of states we operate in while managing to hold onto our 90% client retention rate.
“Consistency is key in business,” says Rivero. “They know we’re reliable and we’ll be around.”
Our Commitment to Collaboration & Continuing Education Helps Our Clientele Grow
Connections Marketing staffers meet in Chicago on a monthly basis as part of our commitment to internal growth and collaboration. We introduce new concepts, discuss industry changes, solve problems, and explore new challenges as a team. Our collaborative process ensures the sum is greater than the individual parts.
Being a team of dedicated specialists, our ongoing learning and development has been crucial to our success. We’ve seen how even tech-savvy brands end up chasing outdated practices. They get distracted by AI or over-rely on keyword usage, drop in search engine results, and don’t know how to measure performance in their campaigns.
That’s where our individual expertise comes into play. Ongoing, hands-on training keeps the whole team up to date in our respective areas of expertise. When Google released its core algorithm update instructing businesses to focus more on content quality than offsite marketing, our clients looked to us to ensure they can still be found in online searches. If we notice a web page has a high bounce rate, we will bring it up to the client, investigate the issue, improve our strategy and monitor the KPI to help us determine the success of the adjustment.
Where Does Connections Marketing Go from Here?
“The core of digital marketing has always been good digital content,” says Rivero. “When we started this company, a lot of what we based our strategy on was inbound marketing.” While our tactics have changed, our focus as a whole still remains on creating authentic, relevant, high-quality content that users want to interact with for every client.
Our goal moving forward is to be a leading provider of digital marketing services in more spaces across the country. Having focused on honing the way we support our 100 regular clients, we are positioned to scale our offerings to expand our reach to more brands in 2025.
Connections Marketing guarantees the highest of standards by providing ongoing training in order to renew our advertising certifications, as well as to ensure our most relevant skills are up to date.
Contact us to discuss how we can resolve your marketing needs today.