Measuring media planning and buying success for our clients and ourselves.
A new year is a natural jumping-off point, a time to think about future goals and set our sights on what’s up ahead. It’s a busy time for a media planning and buying agency as we prepare to launch new campaigns in the new year. It’s also the season when we look back over the past year, acknowledging (and celebrating) successes and finding meaning in the challenges we may have encountered.
Around our office, time is a precious commodity. All the campaigns we manage are time-sensitive and we are accustomed to being surrounded by deadlines. Progress in advertising is measured in small increments and the media metrics reports we prepare provide us with meaningful data on audience reach and engagement via our internal metrics dashboard. Staying on top of these fast-moving media buys takes patience, diligence, and attention to detail. We’re accountable to our clients and the advertising we place on their behalf from the moment a contract is signed.
It’s through this fast-paced lens that we’ve watched Richardson Media Group continue to grow in 2019. This time last winter, we were relatively new to Portsmouth, still getting to know the landscape. Flash forward to this December and we’re fully at home in this beautiful city on the ocean. Establishing new friendships, forming local agency partnerships and building strong client relationships have kept us engaged, excited, and optimistic about what’s to come.
One of the year’s highlights was welcoming Brenda Brooks to our team as Marketing Operations Manager. Thanks to her stellar organizational abilities and tech-savviness, we’ve seen the processes and the software we use to manage them become more efficient and reliable. Brenda has also led the charge towards helping us become a more sustainable and socially conscious organization, keeping us on track through our words and deeds. We joined NH Businesses for Social Responsibility, have shown our support for local charitable organizations, and are actively planning more sustainability initiatives for 2020.
We formally expanded our service offerings into content strategy and SEO in 2019. This combined effort stems from our desire to do whatever it takes to ensure greater performance from our ad campaigns. We know that content strategies are more fruitful when they are integrated into the ROI goals of the paid media plans we manage. In addition, experience (and data) shows us that websites and landing pages optimized for organic search equate to more visitor traffic and higher conversion rates. Our team attended Digital Summit Boston this fall where we enjoyed seminars with our fellow practitioners, collecting great information on content management, SEO, and paid media to further our professional development.
This year we invested in both advertising and SEO for ourselves. Being one’s own client isn’t always easy, but we learned a lot about what it feels like to be on the receiving end of an ad campaign and how to make the process even better. A relatively short-term paid search effort attracted more leads from media vendors than clients but delivered a decent number of impressions, raising awareness of our agency across New England. Ongoing SEO initiatives have lifted our page ranking significantly. We’re currently sitting (happily) on page one for “media planning Boston” “media buying Boston” and “SEO agency Boston.” When speaking with prospective clients, we love to quote these first-hand experiences. Yes, these tactics work!
On August 1st we marked our five-year company anniversary, a major milestone! Anne continues to drive our agency’s new business efforts while running the media department and overseeing client service. Recently she was accepted into Leadership Seacoast’s class of 2020. Over the next six months, she’ll join her fellow classmates studying different aspects of the seacoast community such as education, criminal justice, environment, economy, and arts & culture. The group will read and share their thoughts on the book, “Seven Pillars of Servant Leadership,” (Sipe, 2015). It promises to be a fascinating and energizing experience.
Our agency remains committed to maintaining a partnership model, connecting with other firms who complement our abilities and bring their own areas of expertise to the table. We appreciate the talented folks who’ve sided with us with over the past year including, Trigger Digital, Modern Influence, Graphic Details, kor group, Stout Heart, Brown & Co., Stark Raving, Branding Band, Trellis, and 36creative, among many others. Thanks to these generous agency partners and our loyal clients far and wide, we have ventured boldly into new arenas, formed some wonderful new collaborations, seen a tangible increase in our online visibility and referral business — all signs that our hard work is paying off!
Of course, none of this would be possible without the love and support of our friends and families who keep us grounded and inspired every day.
Happy, healthy, and prosperous New Year to all!
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