What just happened?! Running a marketing agency in 2020 required a cohesive team, ingenuity, agility and a whole lot of spunk! As we look back on the last 12 months, we’re giving each other socially distant high fives.
We’re going remote? Easy peasy.
We started the year by remodeling our Burnsville, MN offices. We would not have predicted that as the project neared completion, the world would be on lockdown. It would be months before we ventured back into the building, armed with hand sanitizer, masked up and six feet apart.
But since we were already accustomed to doing business remotely, with clients as far away as Asia, South America and the Middle East, our full immersion into the world of Google Meets, Skype and Zoom went seamlessly. It was business as usual, with nary a meeting, task or deadline missed.
Lights, cameras, interviews!
With in-studio interviews on hiatus, our first priority was to ensure our clients and key opinion leaders could conduct professional interviews from their homes. We devoted hours to the pre-work: helping each spokesperson adjust their lighting, microphones and cameras until our results were as good as any accomplished by professional news producers. (It helps that we’ve been co-producing news segments for decades.)
The media appreciated our attention to detail and our clients were welcomed back frequently. We even booked clients in media with which we’d never booked before including Dr. Axe online (3,000,000 visitors); six clients on The List (17,000,000 viewers) and an accomplished international business consultant on The Tucker Carlson Show (4,500,000 viewers).
Delivering out-of-box ideas (literally)
Since many clients planned to exhibit at now-cancelled trade shows, we devised creative ways for them to reach their most important prospects. We designed and mailed VIP boxes, filled with full-sized products and/or prototypes plus colorful sell sheet inserts and fun swag. Clever email campaigns engaged the recipients before and after they received their boxes. Whether they contained functional chocolate, pasta, granola bites or hand cream, these VIP boxes delivered new business for our clients.
We welcomed 29 new clients
When the world is topsy turvey, using strategic marketing to stay visible with the right messaging becomes more important than ever. We were honored to welcome 29 new clients in 2020, representing a breadth of industries and interests ranging from health and nutrition to cleaning, social and environmental services, thought leaders and businesses that provide wholesome entertainment.
And that’s how ecommerce is done, folks
When a long-time global client wanted to create very detailed ecommerce sites, our digital team ran with the challenge. Because we are proficient in Shopify (and a lot of other ecommerce platforms), we got busy syncing inventory, adding multiple product variations, creating subscription options, implementing special tax software and customizing the options for multiple countries. Our client was thrilled when the launch went without a hitch.
Staying pawsitive
Working from home was a purr-fect opportunity to introduce our coworkers to our four-legged family members. Robin and Lonny Kocina launched our virtual Take Your Pet to Work Day by sharing photos of their beautiful Bengal cat, Captiva. Soon, we were all uploading cute photos of our furbabies.
We’re heading to class
We’re so proud! Airport traffic may have been sparse this year, but Lonny Kocina’s best-seller, “A CEO’s Guide to Marketing; the book every marketer should read before their boss does,” was flying off the shelves, pun intended, at airport bookstores.
His award-winning book, which describes our Strategically Aimed Marketing (SAM 6®) process, is so popular that publisher Greenleaf Book Corp. is now transforming SAM 6 into a marketing course: Effective Marketing: Methods, Models, and Processes to Ensure Success. The course is part of Greenleaf’s ProThink Learning program and should be available in early 2021.
To whom much is given, much is expected 
We believe strongly in using our strengths and talents to lift up others. One of our recipients in 2020 was Hands of Freedom, an organization that works to save impoverished women and children in India’s slums from sex trafficking and other atrocities. These slums have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic.
To raise donations for Hands of Freedom, we launched PostandPaint.com. This is a site where anyone can upload a treasured photo and artists will transform the images into works of fine art. If you haven’t yet checked out this website, please do! We also created the first-ever personal fundraising pages for Hands of Freedom supporters to share with their friends and family.
Bring it on, 2021!
We were tested by 2020; and the result was a more energetic, more cohesive team intensely focused on the best interests of our clients and each other. Throughout the year, we consistently brought solutions to meetings instead of problems.
Having an upbeat, can-do attitude is how we roll. If we sound like the kind of marketing team you want on your side, give us a call at 952-697-5269 or use our handy contact form.
