RAMP is Born to Run

Two and a half weeks. That’s all it’s been since I left to start my own company for the third time in the past decade. In that brief period I’ve signed four clients including leaders in Social Media, B2B Services, Politics and Auto. Every day is filled with talking to prospects, potential investors, potential employees, current and potential partners. Buried in all of this are the more practical and often more fun parts of a start-up that include finding a name, creating an identity, building a website and ultimately establishing a culture. Oh, and there’s real work to do on top of all this! The momentum has my head spinning. So, without further ado I’m thrilled to present my new company to the world.

RAMP Digital

RAMP stands for Relevance Amplified but it means much more. The name combines my love for improving results, launching new ideas and the one thing I know is true about digital marketing — the more you amplify relevance to people in their digital experiences, the happier they will be and the more successful you will be.

What is RAMP?

RAMP’s foundation is made from the tried and true digital marketing methodologies I’ve developed over the past decade and three basic principles that I believe will define success for digital marketing in the coming decade.

Intent & Affinity are the Root of RAMP’s Segmentation Strategies

I believe that understanding intention is the key to direct marketing success and discovering affinity is the key to brand marketing success. I hate to stovepipe these practices because there is cross-over in each but this basic understanding helps deliver relevance both contextually and directly. Most importantly, understanding consumer intent and affinity allows for the development of segmentation strategies to target creative and messaging. This segmentation provides a core foundation of intelligence to optimize the presentation and delivery of marketing and advertising.

Achieving Success with Advanced Marketing Technologies is RAMP’s Core Value to Clients

In my last post I briefly mentioned the new wave of emergent technologies that are coming upon marketers fueled by the investment boom of the past two years. They will create new ways of advertising, new tools for optimization and a higher degrees of intelligence and analytics than ever before. The problem is most agencies don’t have a clue how to be successful with them. RAMP will be the go-to agency for what we believe will be the best-in-breed of these technologies. We are partnering with emerging players in Social Media, Display & Semantic Web to serve as a conduit between their mind-blowing technology and real world client results. In the process we’ll build a few really cool applications of our own that I hope people and businesses will want to be a part of.

RAMP will also work with marketers using Omniture Offermatica. Having already built a services company around the technology and having used the technology across more clients and with greater success than anyone over the past three years, I anticipate this will be the biggest part of RAMP’s business for the foreseeable future. Certainly the services market around optimization technology is going to explode.

Testing, Targeting & Optimization is RAMP’s DNA

For most agencies and marketers these practices are add-ons. For RAMP, A/B and Multivariate testing, targeted content and profile creations are embedded as part of everything we do. Every RAMP landing page, microsite, widget or application comes with a test plan, optimization roadmap and targeting plan. The technology to measure and optimize results are an embedded as part of the deliverable. We know digital marketing success is based on iterative strategy and the velocity of intelligence collection — both of which lead to consistent performance improvement. We will always be testing, targeting and optimizing and our clients will have the results to show for it.

So we’re blasting off. These are incredibly exciting times for our industry and I’m privileged to have the opportunity of a lifetime to help shape what’s possible. As always I look forward to sharing success stories (and failures) with you here to help further the dialog around digital marketing optimization. I will keep speaking about optimization, delivering case studies and developing the next generation of marketing solutions to keep pace with the needs of the most aggressive marketers.

Rave on, turn those amplifiers up to 11 and make your performance spreadsheet look like a ramp.