You know what they say; “Time flies when you are having fun”, and that sure is the case when it comes to the last 2 years at Water Bear Marketing. It’s hard to believe that on November 11, 2018, Water Bear Marketing came to be with just an idea and a dream… but here we are surviving and thriving. This week is extra special for us waterbears, as we are celebrating the 2 year anniversary of Water Bear Marketing.
After more than 12 years in the marketing industry, our CEO, Nate Louis, knew that he wanted to do things differently than the companies he had worked for. He had a goal and vision and that turned out to be Water Bear Marketing. Lucky for us, he has let us all join him on this journey.
At Water Bear Marketing, we believe that in today’s world, there is no room for guessing with your advertising dollars. We help our customers get a return on their online advertising dollars and prove the results with our reporting. Our team has managed thousands of online marketing campaigns for retail, industrial, and commercial businesses, such as: agencies, law firms, medical and dental practices, non-profits, construction companies, country clubs, banks and schools.
We separate ourselves from our competitors by leveraging proprietary technology that gets smarter over time and tracks phone calls (includes call recording), emails, and website submissions. We provide 24/7 reporting access to prove return on investment. In the reporting, you will be able to see what ads are working, what ads are not working, we will track website form submissions, and most importantly to our clients, call tracking which includes call recording. We report on impressions, clicks, click-through rate, calls, emails, form submissions, keyword reports, and more.
Water Bear Marketing is built with the main goal being to get things right. When our customers succeed, we succeed. The past 2 years have been an adventure. We sat down with our CEO, Nate Louis to ask him a few questions about the past, current, and future of the organization. As always, the answers were entertaining.
Q: What would you say is the biggest accomplishment Water Bear Marketing has had this year?
A: Our biggest accomplishments had to be a combination of our new reporting dashboard and our WordPress plugin for tracking purposes.
Q: How many clients has Water Bear Marketing helped with their marketing needs since it was established in 2018? How many campaigns have you run and how many websites have been built?
A: We are closing in on 100 customers that we have worked with where we have generated over 11,000 leads (phone calls, or website form submissions) that we have reported on in our reporting dashboard. In the last 18 months, we have built 25 websites for our clients. Two of them were major builds that were extremely complex. They had many moving pieces that not only involved e-commerce, but had database integrations, APIs, and other grouping complexities. We had two decent sized builds where we moved the clients from Magento while rebuilding a clean new website in WordPress with Woocommerce. The rest have been very straightforward.
Q: How has Water Bear Marketing evolved over the past 2 years? What has changed?
A: I would say that WebsiteDesign was not part of the business model when I laid out the initial roadmap. I can also say the way we look at our client data has evolved significantly. We have learned a lot about how to manage our clients’ ad campaigns more effectively and how to get our customers an even better ROI. We have also added new waterbears to the crew which always brings a different dynamic.
Q: What are you most proud of about Water Bear Marketing?
From a client perspective, I can’t put into words how good it feels to help our clients generate a great return on their investment. Most of our clients increased their ad budgets within the first 120-150 days because of the number of leads we have generated for them. We work mostly with small and medium-sized businesses that depend on us to do a good job for them and generate leads to grow their business.
I am very proud of the technology that we have developed in the last 2 years. In fact, I really can’t think of another company our size that has all the tools we have built. We have an algorithm, we have a live reporting dashboard that integrates with multiple marketing platforms, and we can leverage our tracking plugin.
Q: What have you learned in the past 2 years that you will take into Water Bear Marketing’s future?
1. Make time and show appreciation for your family; they sacrifice more than you can imagine.
2. Plan, build, get perspective… adjust, build, get perspective… repeat.
3. A ruby is not a diamond.
4. You must have the stomach to succeed as a business owner. Everyone we work with; I truly appreciate their position. The late nights, early mornings, and the sacrifices they make for their employees or customers. I really understand it and I want to help them all succeed.
Q: What is on the horizon for Water Bear Marketing for the immediate future (in year 3)?
A: In Year 3, I have 3, that I would consider, very large goals:
1. Open our agency/partner white-label platform to every agency in the USA. Right now, we are still beta testing and altering the dynamics of the platform along with the product offerings.
2. I would love to see us continuing to retain around 80% of our current clients and improve their ROI month over month.
3. I plan to add 1 or 2 more products to our platform and continue to improve the capabilities and functionality of our reporting dashboard.
All of us waterbears are thrilled to be going into year 3, where we see so many promising things on the horizon. Being a part of this Water Bear Marketing journey is an adventure and we are adrenaline junkies excited to continue the ride and bring you all along as a part of it.
If you would like Water Bear Marketing to help your business catapult your online advertising, contact us today for a free consultation.