Today we’d like to introduce you to Tony Chopp.
Tony, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
I got my start in digital marketing 11 years ago in 2007. After graduating from Michigan State University and moving to Orange County, I started working for a local plastic surgeon. Not my expected industry necessarily, but a perfect real-world training ground. Over the years I tried just about every marketing vehicle you can imagine–TV, radio, billboards. But it was digital–and particularly search marketing that became my go-to tool.
I learned some critical skills working for a small business. Most importantly that small businesses need to have a clear understanding of return on investment. Every dollar has to count. And I learned how to demonstrate the effectiveness of a marketing investment with analytics.
After opening up to the idea of starting some side projects for friends and family, it became quickly apparent there was plenty of demand for our expertise and Claim Your Space was formed–officially in 2016.
In 2017, CYS helped our clients invest $1.2M in advertising budgets and generated over 144k leads: www.cysppc.com/blog/2018/1/8/cys-2017-highlights
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Not smooth, but not too bad either. The biggest lesson we’ve learned is to focus on what we’re good at. And that’s search marketing, web analytics, and demonstrating documentable ROI. It’s hard when you’re a young company. You want to take any job that pays. But that just takes you off your base. Every time we’ve made the choice to stay focused on our core skills other pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place. It becomes more efficient to hire and train new people. It becomes easier to price and market our services to new clients. And it becomes easier to identify projects that are a good fit for our team and for our clients and partners.
Please tell us about Claim Your Space.
Claim Your Space (we call it CYS for short) is about driving ROI. We focus on three main components:
- Driving traffic to website via paid media (AdWords, Bing Ads, Facebook Ads, LinkedIn Ad, Pinterest Ads, Adroll, etc).
- Measuring outcomes with web analytics. Websites are supposed to ‘do’ something. A simple example would be–get a user to call the business. We measure how frequently that happens, and at what ‘cost-per-call’, and which of those above-mentioned marketing channels produce to most, and highest quality calls.
- Measuring ROI. Talking about leads isn’t enough for CYS or for our clients. So, we press analytics into our client’s business systems to connect marketing spend to dollars made–so we can quantify a strategy and predictably grow a business.
We’re certainly proud of our results: www.cysppc.com/results
And personally, I’m proud of the culture we’re creating. What we do is hard work, especially that last part–“connecting marketing spend to dollars made”. But that is for sure what sets us apart from many other search marketing companies. Helping our clients see through the fog of marketing options and tools and actually find something that works, that they can understand, and that they believe in is incredibly rewarding.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
Break off on my own sooner. It’s safe working for someone else. You have health insurance, steady paycheck. But if I could do it again, I would start down my own path sooner.
Contact Info:
- Address: 1048 Irvine Ave
#1008
Newport Beach, CA 92660 - Website: www.cysppc.com
- Phone: 949.565.2117
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cysppc/
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