How a Full-Service Marketing Agency Fueled Rapid Growth
How Full-Service Marketing Helped App Assistant Land Global Brands…and a Bigger Office
Like many startups, App Assistant began in a dorm room. Before long, it was growing steadily and making mobile games and apps for SMBs with small budgets. But when it was time to elevate the brand and start competing for enterprise contracts, it needed a full-service marketing agency.
DigitalCreat Marketing was there to show the way.
Thinking back to where we were when we started with DigitalCreat, it’s night and day.
My business partner and I started the company our junior year of college. So, it had a stereotypical college dorm room startup vibe. We were fortunate to make enough money before we graduated to take it full time. We decided to run with it and switched from doing our own apps to doing client work, with the message of being an “app partner” to our clients. We saw that software was going to become less of a product in a box that you shipped, and more of an ongoing service.
At the beginning of 2011, it was still just the two of us. By the end of that year, we had a 20-person team. Starting out, a lot of the business we were getting was through bidding sites, where we could compete against other agencies to try to win a particular project. But we wanted to step back, look at our brand, take it to the next level, and begin a more proactive, outbound marketing approach.
We started reaching out to nearby agencies in the tri-state area to see who would be a good fit. What DigitalCreat did a great job at was taking that step back and looking at the overall picture. The one thing they said, which no one else said, was basically, “your website sucks.” And that it was going to be the center of this new, evolved App Assistant brand. Not a single other agency of the half dozen we spoke with thought to tell us the truth.
We were looking for an agency that was going to treat us like how we treat our clients. So, that really resonated with us. From there, we decided they‘d be the partner.
It wasn’t just the website, it wasn’t just the professionalism of our marketing materials. It was everything about how we operated, how we talked about ourselves. Flash-forward a few years, and what they’ve helped put into place is a confident brand aspiring to be one of the top agencies in our space – in the country, not just the city. We moved into this office a year ago. It’s double the space, with a great view. When I see that view, it’s the manifestation of the progress we’ve made.
A lot of that credit, I think, ultimately goes to the DigitalCreat team.
Key Results
App Assistant more than doubled its overall business, including numerous high-profile contracts from household-name brands.
Team size grew quickly, including an upgrade to brand new office space in Brooklyn.
A company born as a startup quickly became a proven professional services provider.