Beyond-Clicks was founded by Lee Mills back in 1999 when interactive marketing was in its infancy. At the time Lee had already honed online direct marketing while serving as the Marketing Director for Backup.com. Lee was one of the first employees and with limited start-up marketing budgets he had to get creative to drive traffic, acquire customers, optimize website conversions and deliver ROI. Th
ru effective SEO, SEM (way before Google) and non traditional online media deals (cost per click and revenue share) Lee proved a customer acquisition model that resulted in VC funding to further propel the company growth. The money came with a few management turn overs and Lee decided to step out on his own to utilize his expertise to help other companies find success on this thing called the web. Our first client was Olympus. They retained us to launch the digital camera. That’s how far back we go. Olympus and their agency of record at the time didn’t know where to start with online media. They found us thru our relationship with PCWorld.com and retained us to develop a comprehensive online marketing strategy. The goal was to measurably build their digital camera brand thru reaching unique eye balls in relevant media while building a consumer database to share with their retail channel and market to. Always at the cutting edge we broke through all the online clutter and went beyond the banner with several tactics. The most powerful and engaging was a Rich Media – a video competition on RealNetworks where users could upload captions for famous celebrity gossip photos and enter to win a camera. We dominated sponsorship of all camera reviews, utilized advertorials, newsletter sponsorships and dedicated email blasts to targeted amateur, consumer and professional photography audiences. Combined with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click Search Engine Marketing (SEM) the results were a wildly successful program for Olympus that garned over 50,000,000 unique impressions (a lot at the time) and a database of over 100,000 photography enthusiasts. Wherever the digital camera conversation was, Olympus was there. Since then we’ve worked with a wide variety of companies in both the B2C and B2B space. Big brands you interact with every day and small start-ups that you have not hear of “yet”. Our experience includes working in-house, inside agencies and on the client’s side which gives us a holistic view as to how to make marketing programs successful.