OTM on leading edge of marketing

FORT COLLINS — Miles Kailburn of Fort Collins didn’t set out to start a full-service, cutting-edge marketing firm when he and his wife, Vallene, moved to Colorado from Rochester, New York.

“We accidentally founded it and unknowingly kept going,” said Kailburn, CEO of OTM in Fort Collins and board president for the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce. “We took it day by day, week by week, and added some clients and team members. We ran it unknowingly as a company.”

Kailburn and Vallene founded Old Town Media in 2007 as a small, web-design company that, over time, became a full-service creative consultancy for large and small businesses. They rebranded Old Town Media as OTM in 2023 to align with how their clients refer to the company and to support its continued expansion nationally. 

As a B2B marketing firm, OTM combines business strategy with marketing services to help CEOs overcome challenges and grow their businesses. Those services include digital marketing, branding, design and public relations, which are offered by other firms, but what sets OTM apart is The OTM Path to Growth.

“We created a proprietary framework to help clients close the gap between business objectives and marketing strategy,” said Kerrie Luginbill, partner at OTM. “The framework, which we’ve trademarked The OTM Path to Growth, is a series of collaborative exercises that solve specific pain points for businesses looking to position themselves competitively in today’s marketplace. The output is a defined market position accompanied by messaging, a marketing strategy and a roadmap for growth.”

OTM helps its clients develop a clear strategy for anything from a new website design to full brand development or a full-funnel marketing plan. OTM doesn’t take a one-size-fits-all approach but instead begins every engagement by focusing on the “why,” instead of the “what,” like most other marketing agencies. 

OTM encourages clients to take a step back and invest in strategy before discussing tactics and moving forward with a marketing plan. The strategy can include any of a number of potential collaborative exercises and projects, such as market research, focus groups and customer interviews, persona or audience development, brand story development, market positioning, journey and experience mapping, and go-to-market plans.

“Leaning on our OTM Path to Growth process, we’ve been able to successfully differentiate from our competitors, while gaining a ‘stickier’ relationship with our clients,” Luginbill said. “Stickier means higher retention or more repeat business.”

OTM has two core principles, that of Constant Innovation and Compounding Improvement. Constant Innovation refers to investing in innovation that can strategically grow the team and improve client outcomes, while Compounding Improvement is about the value and effectiveness of working to be 1% better every day, implemented in 2013 and adopted to James Clear’s 1% Rule in 2020.

“Our industry has a very fast evolving cycle, so it helps us align with the external speed of change in a constructive way,” Kailburn said. “It also embraces how our systems, processes and services evolve.”

The 1% Rule provides structure and allows the team to zoom out and see compounding improvement, Kailburn said. The business is viewed as an operating model, and changes are logged to see improvements, resulting in more stability, he said.

“The industry has a pretty fast rate of change,” Kailburn said. “The challenge is maintaining a competitive advantage and staying ahead of that curve when the rate of change has doubled.”

Every 18 to 36 months, OTM evaluates its service lines, determining which ones to change, expand and sunset, while facing the challenge of maintaining a competitive advantage. In quarters 3 and 4, OTM plans to expand into new markets and geographies but is not ready to announce specifics. OTM also saw 39% growth over the past two years, reaching $2.84 million in 2023, compared to $2.04 million in 2021.

“In the near-term, it’s a continued shift to leverage data and technologies to solve client problems,” Kailburn said. “In the long-term, the work of marketing, in some ways, is going to get a lot harder. There’s more technology and tools, but on the flip side, there’s more regulation around data privacy. Clamping down on that will make the work harder but not necessarily in a bad way. It will separate the people who enjoy marketing as a passion versus those who look at it as a professional career.”

OTM’s 16-member team, consisting of strategists, innovators and developers, displays that passion and are encouraged to experiment first. They use a process called the System of Refinement where they can submit ideas for process refinement or new product and service offerings. 

“This allows us to remain innovation-focused while inviting the whole team to participate in creating the future of the agency,” Luginbill said. “Our team continues to make OTM a top-tier agency in Colorado. Words like accountability and passion are easy to gloss over, but by shaping our internal processes around them, we’ve built these values into our daily operations so they reflect in the work we produce for our clients — and the way we approach our work — every day.” 

One of OTM’s clients, Breeze Thru Car Wash, wanted to work with a more modern advertising company that understands its brand, so Breeze Thru hired OTM five years ago. Breeze Thru, based in Fort Collins with car wash locations in Northern Colorado and Cheyenne, works with OTM for its digital advertising, graphic images and two years ago a website relaunch.

“It offers proactive solutions to your marketing needs,” said Wade Keith, co-owner and brand manager of Breeze Thru. “It’s a forward-thinking company that stays in front of the learning curve. … It is constantly educating about new trends.”

Steve Phillips, marketing and communications coordinator at Breeze Thru, likes how OTM organizes and comes up with alternative ideas for the company’s social media campaigns.

“We let it know what promotions we got going on, the things we want to bring awareness to, the things we’re doing in the community, and it helps us space it out in a way so it’s not overwhelming to the customer base,” Phillips said, adding that the posts are “as much helpful stuff as promotional.”

Another of OTM’s clients, the Fort Collins Area Chamber of Commerce, needed help with a platform and its website and newsletters. The chamber hired OTM in March 2023 to develop a platform for sector partnerships, fast tracking the work to meet the six-week deadline, making sure to set goals and a timeline.

“It met every one of those benchmarks. It took it on and did great work,” said Yvonne Myers, vice president of strategic initiatives for the chamber.

OTM also rebranded the chamber’s website, a nine-month project that went live in April, coordinating the branding with the chamber’s newsletters. Again, OTM met every benchmark and deadline, Myers said.

“They’re (OTM staff) fun, and they’re easy to work with, and they’re so talented,” Myers said. “They got a lot of work done fast. They have good systems; they have great communication; and they have a great team.”

See related story.

BizWest honors IQ, Mercury 100 winners

on Facebook on LinkedIn