Colorado has a thriving tech industry and one of America’s best-educated workforces. Those two factors by themselves go a long way toward explaining the proliferation of great digital marketing agencies in Denver, where much of the state’s talent is concentrated.
But explaining why these web shops consistently turn out great work is a discussion for another day. We’re more interested now in highlighting what that great work is.
Below are 13 digital marketing agencies in Denver that have — through content, advertising, web development or some other means — taken their clients’ brands to new heights.
LRXD: Relaunching the Curves Brand
In 2012, North Castle Partners bought fitness club franchise Curves, Inc., and immediately went about rebranding the company — no small feat for a company that had 7300-plus locations spread across 90 countries, but necessary given that a year before the Wall Street Journal ran a story titled “Why is the Curves franchise in such bad shape?”
LRXD was brought on to execute a multi-million dollar campaign to reintroduce Curves to the world. This included ads across print and television, and a top-to-bottom reimagining of Curves’ web presence. Also included in the campaign was a relaunch of the Curves Complete fitness program.
Three years in, the rebranding campaign is still a work in progress, but the agency has already had some wins: Membership for Curves Complete has doubled in the United States (it even tripled in Canada), and in 2014 fitness celebrity Jillian Michaels came on board as a spokeswoman.
Location3: SEO Work for Stetson
Famous hatmaker Stetson hired Location3 to bring in more organic traffic, and in the process the agency ended up creating some really excellent content for the company.
It started with a deep dive into the world of fashion bloggers, a journey that turned up a great photographer named Ray Gordon. Location3 hired Gordon to do some photos for the blog The Selvedge Yard (think denim, Triumph motorcycles and pinup girls), and Gordon went the extra mile by shooting a great video, too.
The direct result from the photos and videos for Stetson was nearly 200 highly qualified prospective customers sent to the company’s website, the vast majority of whom stuck around to explore the site, according to traffic numbers.
Carbon8: New Site for One World Labs
One World Labs offers customers a service in which the company scours the Deep Web — that vast universe of digital dark matter uncrawled by Google or any indexes — to identify potential threats to a customer’s identity or online assets.
Most people aren’t even aware that a Deep Web exists, let alone what threats to them it may contain. Therefore, Carbon8 relaunched One World Labs’ site with a focus on education and spelling out pain points; simply listing services wouldn’t cut it in this market.
Carbon8 reports that the redesign lent a great deal of credibility to One World Labs’ brand, and it began to generate new leads for the infosec company.
Digital Fusion: Promote Oktoberfest Events for Paulaner Munchen
From one beer capital to another — legendary German brewery Paulaner, in Munich, reached out to Digital Fusion to find a way to engage serious beer fans online in the run up to Oktoberfest.
The agency took a dual approach. First, the team set up a contest for Paulaner fans to vote on their favorite beers in exchange for a chance to win a trip to Munich for Oktoberfest. Then, over on Untappd, an account was set up to reach some of the beer community’s most hardcore fans.
The result was 30,000-plus new fans for Paulaner, another 15,000-plus check-ins on Untappd, and some exposure for the 30 Oktoberfest events that took place around the US.
Faction Media: Rebrand for Integra Telecom
B2B digital marketing agency Faction Media was tasked in 2012 with a rebrand for a large, private telecoms provider based in the Pacific Northwest. The scope of the project included logo design, a new tagline and a brand-new website.
“Faction developed a full brand book, establishing brand meaning, mission and direction as well as articulating the uses of the logo, tone and voice, and graphic and color palettes,” the agency writes. “It’s a deep document that is specific, but allows the Integra brand to grow and evolve over time by establishing principles of design over prescriptive usage.”
And Faction knocked that one out of the park: The redesign won the agency awards from both the Colorado American Marketing Association and the International Academy of Visual Arts.
PILGRIM: Marketing Collateral for Peer to Business Investor
Standing out in buttoned-down trade shows can be tough for investment companies, so the advertising and digital agency PILGRIM went right after an iconic symbol of conservatism with its “How to Untie a Tie” theme for P2Bi’s trade show materials.
P2Bi was already operating outside of the establishment with its crowd financing platform that targeted accredited investors. To drive that positioning home, PILGRIM gave the company a powerful visual to work with. “We created collateral and t-shirts with the idea of un-doing traditional business lending and encouraging old-school banker types to consider a new, innovative option,” the agency writes.
An untraditional company can still look dapper, though: Click through that link and check out those tartan brochures.
BOOYAH!: Facebook Campaign for Vail Mountain
Vail Mountain was already the fifth most-Liked ski resort on Facebook when it reached out to BOOYAH! advertising agency, but the popular resort was aiming even higher.
So, the agency straight-up asked people to Like the resort with a landing subpage on the resort’s Facebook page, then it drove qualified traffic there via Facebook ads. That strategy was straightforward and effective: In just a month, the campaign brought 10,400 more Likes to the page and moved it up from No. 5 on the most-Liked list to No. 3.
COHN: New Branding for Sun Cups
Makers of candy cups face an uphill battle because no matter how strong their differentiating factors, their product runs the risk of being perceived as the Betamax to Reese’s VHS. This was a clear challenge for COHN when it created a new brand for Sun Cups, which makes nut-free and gluten-free candy caps so that kids (and adults) with gluten and nut allergies can enjoy these candies.
COHN was masterfully subtle in inviting the comparison, though, with the tagline “Finally, Chocolate Fun For Everyone.”
“After completing the full brand development process, COHN created a look and tone that bring the joy of candy cups to the masses,” the agency writes.
The branding approach worked: Retailers and stores across the country began stocking Sun Cups, and online sales increased by 60% in the first year after the new brand’s launch.
Wick: Rebrand for YMCA of the Rockies
After a rebranding for the national organization, local branch YMCA of the Rockies asked digital agency Wick to help with its own rebranding.
Wick’s team identified several different elements that required their own websites or subdomains: The Estes Park and Winter Park locations, plus the youth summer camp program, incoming donations, and the conference center.
In addition to getting YMCA of the Rockies caught up to the national brand’s standards, the new sites were better optimized for organic traffic. Wick also bought Adwords and Facebook ads, which saw conversion rates of 28–30%. All told, web traffic has grown by more than 50% year after year, and today total annual traffic exceeds 1 million visitors.
Motive: Developing a Web Presence for Van’s Natural Foods
Motive, with offices in Denver and New York, has an impressive client list that includes Pepsi, Mountain Dew and Sobe. But it’s the agency’s work with Van’s Natural Foods that deserves special recognition.
The once little-known company hired Motive a few years ago to first redesign its website. Then, Motive supercharged the company’s social media presence with a contest called Breakfast Bedheads that encouraged followers to submit photos to the Van’s Facebook page.
After just three weeks, the campaign gathered thousands of email leads, got thousands of coupons into the hands of customers, and helped get Van’s to 400,000-plus Likes (the company’s Facebook page has since exceeded the million Likes mark).
ClearPivot: Growing the Audience for Collector Raleigh DeGeer Amyx
ClearPivot’s work with Raleigh DeGeer Amyx demonstrates how powerful a good inbound marketing campaign can be, no matter what the market is.
Amyx is perhaps the best-known American collector of historic memorabilia from presidents, the military, the Olympics and even NASA. The market for, say, a Rolex owned by President Eisenhower might be narrow, but it’s nonetheless a lucrative one.
ClearPivot cast a wide net at the top of that sales funnel with a variety of content, plus the development of email and social channels. “Because of the nature of his industry, his sales funnel is unusually wide at the top, tapering steeply to a very narrow neck,” the agency writes.
“That’s because, although his buy-and-sell targets represent a very small niche audience, there is wide interest in the subject matter of his blog, which talks about the personal side of his artifacts — the famous people and circumstances behind each item.”
That strategy has paid dividends, though: Over a three-year period, Amyx’s earned audience increased by 2200%(!!).
blue onion: Rocket Fuel for Einstein Bros. Bagels’ Websites
This next story is going to feature some ridiculous numbers.
Einstein Bros. Bagels’ parent company tapped the blue onion agency in 2011 to redesign its websites for more traffic and a better customer experience. “The old websites were built in Flash and while fun and cool looking, they were cumbersome and a point of customer and internal complaints,” blue onion notes.
The agency planned the new sites around three main functions: The stores’ menus, nutritional information, and a store locator. Then, blue onion zeroed in on an SEO campaign that put Einstein Bros. at No. 1 for 60 different keywords.
The result: The sites went from an average of 5,000 visitors a month to 288,000 visits per month(!!, again). To put it another way, the relaunched sites brought an additional 55 visitors for each visitor on the original sites.
It should be noted here that the parent company, Einstein Noah Restaurant Group, was sold to a German holding company in 2014 for $374 million, a deal that “in theory could yield some breakfast-oriented synergies,” the New York Times wrote, because the holding company already owned Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Caribou Coffee and D.E Master Blenders.
Parallel Path: Turning Destination Maternity Into an Online Retail Powerhouse
Destination Maternity, a publicly traded company and the world’s largest designer and retailer of maternity wear, began its push nearly a decade ago to move from brick-and-mortar retail to selling online.
Parallel Path offered a vision in which the agency would be the partner in this process, doing everything from training staff in best practices to identifying KPIs to setting up SEO and PPC campaigns. Essentially, Parallel Path had to construct a sustainable system for imparting its own knowledge of online retail on Destination Maternity.
Through a number of SEO wins and by setting up a variety of sales channels, Parallel Path has been able to increase sales by 130% and decrease cost per acquisition by 232%.
images by:
mclcbooks / Flickr
Joshua Earle / Unsplash
Craig Phillips / Unsplash
Josh Felise / Unsplash
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