captiva
marketing
10805 Sunset Office Drive
Suite 207
St Louis, Missouri 63127
Ph: 314-822-3656
Toll Free: 877-227-8382
Fax: 314-822-3734
About Us
Written by Mark Forst, President and Founder
Our History
Bill Brasser and I started this company in May of 2002
after witnessing first hand the incredible results
that could be achieved with search engine marketing.
It all started when we were running sales and marketing for a global plastics manufacturer during the recessionary times of late 2000 and 2001. The market for our products was weak and competition had been getting more intense, yet we were tasked with growing revenue. Furthermore, we were going to have to do it with a significantly reduced budget.
So, we had to figure out some way to generate leads in a more cost effective manner. While poring over the data, we noticed one bright spot leads coming in from our website were growing at a very fast pace. With few other options, we made this our top priority. Over this two year period, we built and re-built our primary websites, installed tracking programs, optimized the sites for the search engines, and engaged in this new form of promotion called Pay Per Click advertising. The results were incredible. We were able to achieve a cost per lead of less than $3 while our traditional activities (print advertising, directory advertising, trades shows, and direct mail) ranged from about $40 per lead to $125 per lead. Plus, we were able to generate huge numbers of leads in comparison.
Based on this incredible success, we took the leap of faith and started Captiva Marketing. We gave the company this rather generic name (named after Captiva Island, Florida) just in case search engine marketing did not work out and we needed to provide other marketing services to make this business a success. Starting out with just one customer, we immediately started spreading the word about the power of search engine marketing, resulting in the rapid growth of our business.
Captiva Marketing Now
As the company grew and search engine marketing became
more complex, it was obvious that we needed to add
web design and development talent to our staff, if
we were truly going to build a firm that could provide
comprehensive online marketing programs. We now operate
as a firm with four distinct capabilities - Strategic
Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Design, Web
Development & Server
Administration - each of which can compete on its own
merits, but which together make us very unique. Since
2002, we have designed, developed, and implemented
over 250 search engine marketing programs. We have
designed over 100 web sites and currently have dozens
of web applications in use.
Despite our rapid growth, we remain completely debt free and continue to operate by the principles on which we were founded:
- Be a trusted partner to our clients.
- Spend their money as if it was our own.
- Provide sound, ethical advice regardless of how it affects our bottom line.
- Never sell a service, ask questions, analyze data, and then propose only those services that will help our client succeed.
- Never take on two accounts that compete directly with each other.
- Hire intelligent people and give them the freedom and power to be successful for themselves and our clients.