Today we’d like to introduce you to Duane Carey.
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
I moved to the Baltimore area in 1999 as a hydrogeologist. That is a geologist who specializes in groundwater. So, I helped industries and governments clean up contaminated groundwater, and also helped municipalities locate and develop aquifers capable of providing large volumes of drinking water.
So, how the heck am I a digital marketer with a national niche in dog boarding and dog daycare?!
I had gone back to school to earn my MBA at Johns Hopkins University. Having always had an entrepreneurial bent, I was restless and took a huge gamble on a business. I left an excellent career in my early 30s – with an 18-month-old child and a newborn – to do something I had absolutely no experience with, advertising. I acquired a coupon magazine from a neighbor and started selling ads to local businesses. Overnight, I had become a very small business owner. I was also continuing to do some environmental and hydrogeology consulting on the side to make ends meet.
While at Johns Hopkins, I had one marketing class. It was taught by a woman who owned the predecessor to my current company. I’d taken her to breakfast to try to get her to recommend my coupon magazine to her clients. After the meeting, she called with an epiphany that I should take over her business. At that point, it was a full service marketing and PR agency with no employees.
That was 21 years ago. We are now 16 people with around 130 clients with maybe 15% of those clients here in Maryland and the rest throughout the U.S. We are a Google Premier Partner, which is a designation exclusively for the top 3% of advertising agencies in the country.
Around 10 years ago, we had a referral to a pet resort in Montgomery County who thought they could do better with their lead generation through Google Ads. They became a client and we doubled their leads and business in just over a year. That led to another referral, which led to many more. Now, we actively manage the marketing for over 100 pet resorts throughout the country and are the leading marketing company in that space.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Business is never smooth. People really don’t understand how many trials and tribulations there are along the way. Demand fluctuates with the economy’s ups and downs. Employees come and go. In marketing, especially, the digital tactics that we use change constantly. Probably one of the biggest struggles was finding our niche. At one point, we had multiple government contractors in the IT space. That would seem like a good niche since there are so many of them here in Maryland. But they were a very bad fit – it turns out the technical people don’t want to hear about tech from marketing people!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know?
We approach marketing not as a creative agency that does branding and beautiful graphic design, etc. Instead, we approach marketing as people who understand math and finance. For us, it’s all about the numbers, the results. So, we quickly moved out of full-service marketing and PR to focus on digital marketing where everything is measurable. We keep close track of our clients’ ROI and proudly won’t take on a client unless we are quite sure we can deliver. I have a science background and an MBA in Finance, and our first hire – who is still here – has degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. So, the firm has always had a strong focus on analytics more than pretty pictures.
Also, we have a super strong ethic toward transparency and building trust. Many, if not most, companies have had bad experiences with marketing companies. They’ve been promised the moon and been delivered an ant hill. Our job is to undo that negative history as soon as possible because clients need to have high trust to be successful. So, although it might be a bit off color, we take pride in calling ourselves the “no BS marketing firm”.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
We are fully remote. Most of us are here in Maryland, while one is in Connecticut, plus another in Belize and one in Serbia.
Finally, Let’s Go O’s! and Go Ravens!!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.impactmarketing.net
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/impactmarketingpr/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ImpactMarketingPR
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/duanecarey/
- Twitter: https://x.com/Impact_MD
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@IMPACTmarketingpr
