Trade Digital

After 14 years at Microsoft, Maria Dijkstra walked away without a clear plan—but with a passion for digital marketing. She partnered with a co-founder who had successfully built multiple businesses, and together they launched a two-person consulting agency. Their early clients were emerging B2B and e-commerce businesses looking to scale their digital presence.

Within the first year, Maria and her co-founder realized that while consulting was profitable, it was also deeply time-consuming. More importantly, clients kept asking them to "do the work"—not just advise. This feedback led to a pivot: instead of consulting, they would build out a full-service agency. The key to their scalability was a distributed team model. They kept high-touch client work in the US while outsourcing backend operations to teams in Russia and India. This allowed them to keep pricing competitive while maintaining quality—a significant advantage in a crowded market.

Trade Digital's customer acquisition strategy became deeply rooted in social media, particularly Twitter. Maria developed a systematic approach using Hootsuite to listen for conversations. She'd set up streams for specific keywords (like "startups" and "Seattle"), monitor mentions, and track what competitors and influencers were discussing. The real magic came in the engagement: rather than broadcasting, Maria would identify decision-makers, follow them, and engage with their content through retweets, likes, and thoughtful replies. She pioneered what she calls the "five-fifteen-five" formula: spend at least 5 days a week, 15 minutes a day, engaging with at least 5 people. One consulting client landed a major customer with a five-minute Twitter conversation started by answering a prospect's question.

Maria learned that automation felt hollow to prospects. While tools like Hootsuite could schedule content, generic auto-replies and mass follow-backs were turnoffs. Instead, she built a system of 50+ contextual questions to ask new followers, tailoring each response to what the person was discussing. The agency also cracked content strategy by listening to customer questions on social media and turning them into blog posts and resources. They published a book called "Twitter ABC: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide" on Amazon, which became a lead magnet driving subscribers and customers back to their site. Maria emphasized the 60-30-10 rule: 60% of shared content should be from other sources (adding value), 30% their own content, and only 10% direct calls-to-action. She stressed consistency over virality—small, regular engagement compounds over time.

Trade Digital has grown from two people to a globally distributed team and shifted from pure consulting to a scalable agency model. Their own Twitter-based lead generation machine continues to be a core competitive advantage. One e-commerce client they worked with (a tea subscription service) generated 70 new subscribers daily through Twitter engagement alone—before any traditional marketing. Maria continues to mentor founders and serve on the board of Women in Wireless, while her agency scales through the leverage of distributed teams and the relationships built through consistent, authentic social media engagement.