Powerful Digital Marketing

Nick Bjorn came to digital marketing through eight years of agency experience and a focus on search engine optimization. He co-founded Powerful Digital Marketing in San Diego with two partners, Grayson LaFriends, who handles business development and team management, and Robert Rodriguez, who handles finance. Nick runs marketing.

The company launched in 2012, and Nick says it started "literally" in a urinal factory, a humble beginning for a business that became a full-service agency. Its first-year revenue was about $500K against a goal of $250K, which Nick described as a result that doubled the target. By 2015 revenue reached $3.2M, and the team grew to about 37 employees largely organically. The agency offers SEO, pay-per-click, paid social, community management, a PR department for outreach, a content department, and web services, which it combines into custom strategies for each client.

The agency works on six-to-twelve-month contracts, which Nick said helps with forecasting and gives SEO time to produce results. Monthly engagements start around $5K to $6.5K, with retainers of $50K or more per month. Nick said the sweet spot is roughly $8K to $12K per month. When asked about current recurring revenue, Nick estimated it was about 364 thousand per month across roughly 60 clients. He also said a 2016 goal of about $6M would be a near-doubling, with a 2017 target of $10 to $11M, partly booked through annual contracts.

The clearest example is SoccerLoco, a soccer equipment retailer the agency has served for almost four years. SEO has been central, and the agency targeted keywords such as "cheap soccer cleats," where the client ranks second, to liquidate post-season inventory. Its approach relies on topic modeling and interlinked content ecosystems, along with link building. The agency said Google's rules against paid product-review links forced it to move link building to PR professionals who build editorial relationships. Paid ads had previously failed for the client, but the agency later tuned them to a viable conversion rate. The agency also noted that the client initially pushed back on the word "cheap" before accepting that it matched what customers searched for.

As of the interview, the agency was about to close 2016 with revenue near its $6M goal and was building its own page-level analytics software. That tool would show each optimized page's traffic, lead generation, and revenue trends over time, reflecting client demand for clearer SEO attribution.