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BBB Profiles Captiva Marketing
The BBB spotlighted Captiva Marketing for their work with clients and their A+ rating with the Better Business Bureau in their June eBridge newsletter.
Captiva Helps Firms Master Search Engine Marketing
A BBB Profile In Customer Service
By Jerri Stroud
BBB Editor
When Mark Forst and Bill Brasser started Captiva Marketing eight years ago, he spent a lot of time explaining search engine marketing to prospective customers."No one knew what it was," Forst said. "So first we tried to educate people. We didn't want unhappy customers.
Captiva designs customers' websites so they will rank high on popular search engines like Google, Yahoo!, MSN or Bing. The ultimate goal is to get to or near the top of search results.
Forst began researching search engine optimization in 1999, when he was sales and marketing director for a plastics molding company in Arnold. At the time, not much had been written about the topic. Search engine companies were very secretive about the algorithms that determined website rankings in searches.
"I spent every night learning how the rankings work," said Forst, who has always been fascinated with lists and statistics, including baseball batting averages.
The field has exploded in the last five years, and Captiva has more than tripled in size, from five people to 18. In the last two and a half years, Captiva also has developed a content management system called Empoweren that clients can use to make their sites more search-engine-friendly.
"We're trying to give smaller to mid-size companies the tools to do a lot of this on their own," Forst said. "We've really worked hard to educate a lot of clients so they can do it."
When Captiva starts working with a prospect, an account manager trained in search engine marketing is assigned to the account. The manager goes along on sales calls to listen to what the client wants, what needs to be done and to help communicate what's possible.
"We've found this has worked very well because the account manager takes ownership of the client," Forst said. "Expectations are set within manageable parameters, and it eliminates the need for a department to make sure the client is happy."
Captiva helps clients understand how to analyze their site's performance, using Google Analytics, a free service provided by Google.
"The main goal is that if you understand how it works, you will know that what you're doing works or that you need to hire us to make it start working," Forst said.
Forst said he hasn't figured out the best formula for hiring new account managers, but he looks for marketing and communications people who are detail-oriented and able to analyze data. About half of the people he hires make the cut after six months with the company.
"We look for people who are internally motivated," Forst said. "We want people who want to take care of the client, not bill the maximum amount."
He doesn't set financial goals for the company or individual managers, as long as expenses are covered. "If you start doing that, you will start selling services just to sell," he said. He'd rather have people stay in contact with the client, analyze their statistics and propose services only as analysis shows they're needed. Year-end bonuses are based on company performance as a whole.
The company is in the process of rolling out its new Empoweren software, the content management system geared toward helping companies manage sites on their own.
"You have to learn that search engine marketing isn't something you do once," he said. "It's evolving every day. You build it by doing press releases and writing more content.
"By empowering our clients to do more search engine optimization internally, we are seeing them generate more ideas and wanting more consulting, design and development assistance," Forst said. "The more we educate people, the more they want to do."
