What’s The Story Of Robben Media?
The story of Robben Media goes back to my college bedroom when I started the blog takeyoursuccess.com.
In college, I spent all my free time building and writing for that website. Obsessed is a good description. My desire to attract more readers pushed me to self-learn website design, SEO, and online advertising. In 2015, far before these were popular, I instantly enjoyed the business of building a company. Then, when I wrote three books and marketed them to my million page view audience, I had three Amazon bestsellers.
These initial successes turned me from interested to hooked on digital marketing.
First Customer
With my blogs, books, and a large social media following, many people in my network took notice.
One day I realized that I knew too much about online marketing to keep all of this information to myself. Especially after seeing the value of teaching and inspiring others to champion themselves, I felt open to working with customers if it made sense.
It wasn’t long after that until Dr. David Puder hired me to do his Twitter and Instagram marketing in March 2016.
I did well for Dr. Puder by growing both his Twitter and Instagram to over 10,000 followers. We ultimately helped his podcast get ranked on the first page of iTunes for the keyword “psychiatry”.
Because of this, he introduced me to another doctor who became a customer, and as they say, the rest is history.
Illumen Media
In the spring of 2017, I decided to partner up with Kyle Gundrum and form an official company, Illumen Media. Being that he had the technical, web development skills that I lacked, and I had more sales and marketing skills, it made sense.
After deciding on becoming a full service digital marketing agency, many pros and cons presented themselves.
For the positives, we could service almost every business in any means. Be it creative (logos and branding), technical (API integrations and mobile apps), or digital (website design, SEO, and ads), we did it all and got paid for our large service offering. This helped us reach a six-figure rate in 6 months.
The downsides stacked tall as well. We had to hire a large team of specialists to fulfill our diverse range of offerings. This meant a heavy management and communication load to get projects completed at the highest satisfaction levels.
If you have experience hiring a team, you can know these challenges can present themselves:
- How much time should I spend on the business versus in the business?
- Do I invest in training contractors who may be here a minute and gone the next?
- What’s the solution to servicing customers at a high-performance when the founder stops working one-on-one with each one?
We serviced over 30 customers and had a good run for a little less than a year, before things changed with Kyle. I bought out his shares and renamed the operation to what it goes by today, Robben Media.
New Beginning And Focus
After scrapping the generalist agency, I took Robben Media in a more focused direction. We set out to specialize in three core services: SEO, paid ads, and website design.
Why these three offerings? I’m certain that the bulk of lead generation and business growth is found in these three channels.
Here’s why. A customer can pay for these services and have themselves a repeatable system that attracts new customers with predictability every single month. The same value can’t be said about logos or a brochure design.
With enough paid and organic traffic, to a well-designed page that converts, your entire business can change in a matter of months. Go from 6-figure business to 7, or from regional player to national brand with the right digital marketing strategy.
The real winners in business have a stream of traffic and a system to convert this traffic into paying customers. That’s how you can grow exponentially.
And for these reasons, we have put all of our time into mastering these principles of driving traffic and conversions to truly grow a business.
Talented Team
As a one-man show, I saw how quickly my time became limited for servicing customers and acquiring new business. That’s when I made the brilliant decision to hire my right hand, a person I believe in to the core, my sister, Alli Robben.
With Alli on the team to handle customer work with grace and classy professionalism, I added additional team members, like web developers, digital marketers, graphic designers, and sales reps.
My newest addition is an executive assistant who has been wonderful in giving me my time back. This allows me to better invest in our vision, team, and business growth.
Our team is our greatest asset at Robben Media. It’s not even close.
Creating Systems
Complementary to great people, we went from doing customized work, to creating systems that we follow step-by-step to ensure repeatable success for every customer. This has been a game changer in our performance and customer satisfaction.
In the past, if I or a key player was absent, we’d struggle to deliver the same results in a timely fashion. Now, it’s “the next person up” mentality because we have documentation that they can walk through to run ads, perform SEO, or assist a web design project.
Customers love it, our team does too, and because of that, I’m a big fan. There’s nothing much sweeter than success and happiness across the board.
And this efficiency is extremely appreciated when we’re working with over 50 customers per year. Without it, we’d be a mess.
Robben Media Is Evolving
To date, Robben Media has:
- Worked with over 126 satisfied customers
- Driven millions of views to websites
- Reached over 29 million people in digital advertisements
That’s the story of Robben Media up to this point. But this is just the beginning.
We’re always evolving, getting smarter, utilizing more efficient strategies, finding passion in serving customers, and becoming experts at growing businesses.
Our mission is to give business owners more money and time back, to treat customers and consumers like we treat ourselves, and to change the world one customer at a time. We’re here to help, always.
Want to work together? Contact us.