NORTHAMPTON — Its advertisements are affixed to billboards along Interstate 95 in Connecticut, broadcast on local television stations in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut and printed in magazines.
New York Bariatric Group, which specializes in weight-loss surgery, is not only promoting its work in conventional ways, but it has an ongoing $3 million advertising buy for social media sites that ensures even more direct targeting of future clients.
It also has a secret weapon of sorts: Marketing Doctor, a digital marketing and online advertising services company based in Northampton. The agency’s motto? “Ordinary is not in our wheelhouse: Marketing Strategy, With A Twist of Rebellion.”
On the other side of the country, the same Northampton agency is doing similar advertising buys on the Waze navigational app, which will direct more people to the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle, especially those who are searching for urgent care.
Using both social media, as well as conventional media and advertising techniques, Marketing Doctor is seeing so much growth in deploying its strategies that the company recently relocated to a new office on Damon Road that is four times the size of its previous site on Industrial Drive and can accommodate its growing staff.
“We’re a ferocious little team,” says Janet Casey, who founded the company in West Springfield in 2003. “We’re like a pit bull on steroids.”
She’s not kidding. When the Gazette visited the office last week, Casey brought about half her team into the interview, with people explaining the work they do and their passion for promoting their clients. As her staffers fielded questions, she finished up some work on one of the billboards, wondering aloud why anyone would buy an advertisement on a rotating electronic billboard when you can only get about 20 percent of the bang for your buck compared to a traditional billboard.
Casey, of Hatfield, oversees 15 employees total, 90 percent of whom are women, and often brings in students from the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts to help them get their foot in the door of the marketing world.
She started the company after leaving a job at WGGB Channel 40 in Springfield as a way to balance work and motherhood. She has four children, including one daughter who was hanging out at the office after finishing her last day of school.
She said she feels her current team can compete with the best Madison Avenue and Boston-area agencies.
Working for 25 to 35 clients per month, Marketing Doctor often has multiple campaigns taking place at the same time, executing what the customers want through both traditional media and new digital buying.
“Our job is to execute the creative for them,” Casey said. “That’s where we thrive, that’s our charge.”
Though Marketing Doctor doesn’t necessarily do the creative aspects of advertising campaigns, it can handle visual, design and content writing and has a studio in its new office where it can film and photograph.
For many businesses and clients, doing the work in-house comes with too many risks, said Carol Lucardi, account executive and director of traditional and digital media buying. “People don’t know what they don’t know.”
Marketing Doctor provides measurements of success as a return on investment, or ROI, said Michaela Schwartz, account executive and director of client services.
“We do not stop until we get that return on investment and are beating our own metrics,” Schwartz said.
The metrics are key to proving the agency’s success. Much of this success comes through digital advertising on sites such as Facebook, Google, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube and LinkedIn. Each of these platforms allows the agency to reach a distinct audience and demonstrate that it is getting an increase in clicks and impressions.
Recently, the agency worked with the National Guard, which provided all the pertinent information and creative materials to the team, but needed the expertise of Marketing Doctor to highlight the most eye-catching details. Marketing Doctor chose to spotlight the fact that the National Guard gives incentive for college tuition, with the reasoning that the financial incentive would make the recruiting advertisements more attractive to people on social media.
Casey said that, with digital advertising, a client can be more efficient and know that advertisements are being seen by the people who are supposed to be reached.
Sitting at a conference table that Casey refers to as the dog bone, a six-member digital team pays close attention to how all these social media efforts are doing.
“The main goal is to figure out the audience we are targeting,” said digital strategist Estee Limoges.
Through tools such as internet dashboards and algorithms, the staff members learn about how people are being directed, the clicks on a client’s website and measuring the reach of an advertisement in real time.
The staff can also determine if sales have increased. “In that case, we’ll go as far as how much are they making back (on their investment),” Limoges said.
Kate Popp, account executive and sales director for Marketing Doctor, said the digital team also knows the ins and outs of advertising on Facebook.
“Facebook, in particular, is very sensitive about the content of the ads we’re running,” Pop said. “We have to make sure the language is written the right way and meets all restrictions Facebook has.”
Though nonpartisan, Marketing Doctor has done political campaigns, including placing between $20 and $30 million in advertising for Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign in 2012.
“We got the job because we’re good media buyers,” Casey said.
While Casey wouldn’t divulge Marketing Doctor’s annual revenues, she did say that revenues have been growing by “double and triple digits” each year.
And though the company specializes in social media, Lucardi said that print advertising, whether in newspapers or magazines, remains an important element for clients, even as the ways in which people are reached through advertising continue to evolve.
“Our dream for any client is to do an efficient mix of digital and traditional media,” Lucardi said.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
