Madwire Media providing digital marketing and more

LOVELAND — Madwire Media competes nationally in the digital marketing services arena, and yet it started out as a small Loveland-based business in 2009.

Now the company, which was founded by Joe Kellogg and his son JB Kellogg, has 220 employees, had $18.9 million in revenue in 2014 and is growing like, well, mad.

Mad stands for marketing and design. The Kelloggs started the company because “they saw a huge need for digital marketing services,” said Farra Larimore, public relations director for Madwire. “There was a big up-and-coming trend of advertising through Google and other digital means and they saw a huge opportunity in that industry.”

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Most competitors were offering software as a service (SaaS) options at the time, but the Kelloggs realized that there was a gap in the industry.

“All these small business owners were working for a means to advertise their business online … but most business owners don’t have the time and expertise to purchase marketing software,” Larimore said.

Madwire stepped in and developed what it calls SaSH or service and software hybrid. What that means is that Madwire clients receive marketing software but also the help they need from marketing executives, content writers, designers, Web developers, videographers and photographers that Madwire has on staff. They target small- and medium-sized businesses.

“What we realized is that business owners want transparency. They want to be able to see where their marketing dollars are going and what they are being used for and how they are performing,” she said.

They want to see all of this information 24/7, without having to call a marketing executive to go over it with them, she said.

Madwire’s Marketing 360 platform allows it to do all of that and contact the marketing firm directly through its software.

Joe Kellogg, co-chief executive of Madwire, was the founder of Traders Network, a futures and commodities brokerage for 20 years. It was there that Joe and JB first began testing out digital marketing through Google and other online services.

When JB graduated from college with a degree in business and marketing, he began doing marketing for his father’s company. He began researching cheaper and more targeted methods of advertising online, which brought him to Google AdWords when it first came out. He realized that this model was the future of marketing and pitched the idea for a digital marketing company to his father, who bought in immediately.

“We were doing a lot of the things we currently do here. We set it up to work on the same model we understood,” said Joe Kellogg. “We were always active in the marketing space, so for us this was the natural next step.”

The Kelloggs used data as the anchor for most of their own decisions. The company’s Marketing 360 platform does most of the heavy lifting. It analyzes key data points of customer marketing campaigns and splits out the key points customers need to see to make improvements to their marketing.

“That is how we are able to grow and drive success for the customer,” he said. “Along with the software application, we have the marketing executive, which is critical in terms of doing analyzing and strategizing with our customer, and it is the marketing executive’s job to push that strategy forward and do most of the heavy lifting.”

Only about 20 percent of Madwire’s customers are local. The rest are all over the United States, United Kingdom and Australia.

“The digital marketing space allows you, no matter what business you are in, (to) be in any part of the country you want to be in,” he said. “If you are successful in the digital space, customers will find you.”

Madwire is one of 26 Google Premier Partners across the country, which means it’s privy to any changes coming up in online marketing before they are released to the general public. The company also is a platform partner, which means it is tapped into the back end of Google.

“We pull data from Google to fuel our Marketing 360 platform,” Joe Kellogg said. “We have a good relationship with Google.”

As part of Marketing 360, a Madwire customer with one marketing budget can dedicate money to advertisements on Google, Bing, Yahoo!, Facebook and Instagram and track how each campaign is doing. The newest version of the platform will launch in November. It will include CRM to manage a company’s customer contacts and sales processes.

“For us it now gives us the ability to understand where that customer first entered the sales funnel. What key words did they click on in terms of their search,” he said. “It can show them true ROI across all marketing channels. We are pretty excited for that.”

The Kelloggs aren’t surprised by their company’s success.

“We have been blessed, certainly, and we have been fortunate, but the digital marketing space is a huge landscape so we believe we are just getting started,” Joe Kellogg said. “We just barely scratched the surface.”