Frontier Marketing is hitting double digits this month! A decade ago, on May 6, 2014, Joe Bongiovanni founded our growing company to provide digital marketing services to local businesses in Chicagoland. These many years later, we’re still doing just that – except we’re providing our locally-geared services to clients all over the nation.
To our dedicated team of marketing professionals, nothing is more fulfilling than knowing you’ve made a difference in someone’s life. Our combined efforts have made life easier (and more fruitful) for numerous small business owners – and, to us, that’s our decade’s most outstanding achievement.
But what has Frontier Marketing’s last ten years looked like? A lot has changed in the digital landscape since our company was first founded, and we’ve weathered a few economic changes along the journey. Below, we’re sharing a snapshot of these ten fantastic years.
Adapting to a Decade’s Worth of Change
The last decade has been a whirlwind of change that our company has managed to adapt to and thrive in. When COVID-19 created instability in the world, our team weathered the changing environment from our respective home offices and buckled down to help our client’s businesses survive those uncertain times. We’ve always been a remote company, so it was easy to remain “local” despite expanding our reach.
We’ve seen changes to the way marketing works since 2014, too. For example:
- The introduction of artificial intelligence (AI)
- The birth of new social platforms, including Snapchat and TikTok
- The virtual “death” of social platforms, including Vine, Musical.ly and Google+
- Google making 90+ confirmed algorithm updates
- A bigger shift towards digital marketing over print and in-person methods
- A switch from accessing the internet from mainly desktops to mainly smartphones and tablets
- The introduction of Facebook Live, YouTube Live and Instagram Stories
- The death of “keyword stuffing” and content written for search engines
- The rise of sophisticated SEO tactics and content written for user-friendliness
- A switch in focus to responsive design, location-based ads and QR codes
A lot has changed in the past decade, and we’ve tackled each one with dedication and earnestness. We’ll continue to adapt and help our clients thrive in a constantly changing digital landscape!
Attracting New Clients
Our dedication to staying on the pulse of marketing for our clients has allowed us to expand and grow ourselves! A decade ago, we only had a few clients – some of which are still with us today. Today, we have about 42 clients in 14 states, and we continue to add more each year.
In the last year, several new clients began using our ongoing services:
- Automated Outdoor Solutions
- Fox Waterway Agency
- B-N-K Plumbing
- Organica Cleaning Services
- Caldwell Travel
In addition to our clients using ongoing services, we’ve been excited to create several new websites, including:
- Environmental Landscapes
- Gough Heating and Air Conditioning
- Howling Coyote Remote Observatories
- Lovebird Family Therapy
- LYT Signage
Plus, we’ve significantly expanded our services for our Financial Executives International (FEI) clients! Years ago, the Chicago FEI chapter was one of our first clients. In recent years, we’ve significantly expanded the number of chapters we serve to 15! These include FEI chapters in:
- Austin (Texas)
- Boston (Massachusetts)
- Chicago (Illinois)
- Cincinnati (Ohio)
- Dallas (Texas)
- Detroit (Michigan)
- Houston (Texas)
- Indianapolis (Indiana)
- Los Angeles (California)
- Nashville (Tennessee)
- New Jersey
- Orange County (California)
- Portland (Oregon)
- Seattle (Washington)
- Utah
Adding New Team Members
It’s not just new clients we’ve added but also new team members! Over the last year, we’ve added two incredibly talented marketing professionals to the Frontier Marketing family!
Chelsea Hammond
An ASU graduate from Florida living in New Jersey, Chelsea brings 15 years of content writing and SEO experience to the team. For as long as she can remember, Chelsea’s greatest passions have been writing and marketing—and she’s beyond grateful that she has a job where she does what she loves every single day! Her expertise and passion have helped propel the content marketing department to the next frontier, and we can’t wait to see all her future progress!
Karla Lerma
A proud graduate of UT Austin’s Moody College of Communication, Karla draws from her eight years of experience in the social media field to deliver outstanding value to our clients. Her proactive nature and excellent communication skills form the foundation of strong client relationships built on trust and transparency. Karla has taken our stellar customer service to a new level, and we know her dedication and positive attitude will continue helping us advance!
Retaining Excellent Talent
We have to take a moment to talk about the people who have continued making Frontier Marketing a success over the last few years. Pernille, our all-star social media and email marketing manager, has been with the company for two years. Diana, our astounding reputation manager, has been with us for six years. Together, these two have been integral in bringing their unique marketing departments into the future!
Of course, Frontier Marketing wouldn’t be what it is without our owner and CEO, Joe Bongiovanni, and his partner, Nikki. These two have been with the company since day one and represent the backbone of everything our team stands for. This year, Joe expanded his family with the birth of his first child, Baby Emily!
Continuing to Help the Community
From the beginning, one of the core values of Frontier Marketing has been helping our community. We’ve remained dedicated to this value, and our team members spend time working individually in the community. Among the many places we’ve donated and volunteered over the last year include:
- Our churches
- Our local school systems (in both Illinois and New Jersey)
- Local children’s sports teams
- The Ronald McDonald House Charity
- Wreaths Across America
- Local women’s centers like CARA
- New Directions Addiction and Recovery Services (where Joe is a founding board member and serves as Vice President)
- Planning and Zoning Board for the Village of Fox Lake
- McHenry Alano Club (where Nikki serves on the Board of Directors)
- Red Cross (where Diana regularly donates blood)
Plus, we dedicate several hours each month as a company to doing free or significantly reduced marketing for several non-profits! The organizations we support in this way include:
- Promote Fox Lake
- New Directions Addiction and Recovery Services
- The Knights of Columbus
- McHenry Alano Club
- McHenry Chamber MC2 Networking Group
Of course, each member of the Frontier Marketing team strives to help our neighbors in everything we do. The expansion of our remote team nationwide has enabled us a greater reach for community efforts, and nothing makes us happier than knowing we’re making a difference in the world, one small act at a time.
Consistently Looking for Improvement
At Frontier Marketing, we’re never stagnant. No matter how many years of experience or how confident we feel in our current abilities, it’s never enough. We’re consistently looking for improvement – and that desire to be better has seeped into everything we do.
Once a month, we meet with our entire team to share what’s going on in our lives personally and professionally. We discuss a book we read throughout the month at the beginning of each meeting. A few of our latest titles include The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle, Good to Great by Jim Collins and StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Don Clifton.
Every team member gets a few hours each week to use towards professional development, and we constantly work together to share our incredible 50+ years of marketing experience. We apply our shared knowledge to our weekly analytics meetings, a collaborative effort between departments. We use quarterly reviews and SMART goals to help us take greater ownership of our respective departments.
This year, we’re focusing on taking deeper dives into competitive research and tracking with more specific KPIs. While creating measurable results has always been a core focus for us, we believe that our newest efforts will provide even more insight into how we can best help our clients.
Investing In Our Team
As our company has grown, so has our ability to provide for our essential team members. Throughout the years, Joe has added excellent benefits to the salaries the Frontier Marketing team receives – and he’s listened to what employees most wanted or needed! But this goes beyond the monetary benefits offered at Frontier Marketing, like health, life, vision and dental insurance or guaranteed annual raises…
At our digital marketing company, our department leaders are treated as people. We’re offered an excellent work-life balance you won’t find elsewhere, with the ability to work remotely, flex time and unlimited PTO. Our team also has an exceptional support system that feels more like a family than coworkers or bosses.
Joe is always looking for new ways to invest in our team. Most recently, Frontier Marketing began offering a competitive 401(k) with company matching that will help secure our team members’ futures!
Remembering Bob Kauffman
Unfortunately, this year, we also want to take some time to remember an integral part of Frontier Marketing’s success – and the individual success of our leader, Joe. Today, we want to spend a moment remembering Bob Kauffman, who taught many of the skills we use here as a team. He even worked with our (then much younger and greener) team in group sessions about eight years ago to provide much-needed guidance.
On April 14th of this year, Bob lost his battle with cancer. But before he did, he touched so many different lives. As the owner and founder of Critical Thinking for Success, Bob helped countless people through cognitive behavioral therapy. Joe and Bob continued one-on-one sessions for years and attended a Men’s Support Group together. When asked, Joe said, “Bob Kauffman was the most influential person in my life, other than my parents.” He will be greatly missed by all who knew him.
Looking Forward to the Next Decade!
This last decade has been incredible for Frontier Marketing, and we look forward to seeing what the next one brings us! If you want to be an integral part of our next ten years, call us today! We’d love to discuss how our digital marketing company can help your small business meet its goals!