Straight answers
Extra Medium is a marketing agency in Chicago that runs digital as one system, not a pile of vendors. SEO, paid search, paid social, email, web and analytics get planned together and judged against revenue. One team, one dashboard, no account-manager telephone game.
Digital marketing usually arrives in pieces: an SEO retainer here, a paid media buyer there, an email tool nobody opens, a website last touched two redesigns ago. Each piece reports its own numbers and the pieces never add up to growth. We run the digital stack as one system: search, paid, social, email and web planned against the same strategy and the same revenue line, so a change in one channel is made knowing what it does to the others.
Chicago is a commuter city with a long winter, and both facts shape digital behavior. People research on the train, buy on their phones, and search by neighborhood and suburb far more than by city name. Winter pushes whole categories indoors and online for months; summer empties offices and fills festival calendars. A digital program built for this city plans around those rhythms — seasonality, geography down to the neighborhood level, and the Bears-Bulls-Cubs calendar that quietly moves attention around all year.
Every channel can produce a chart that goes up and to the right. The only question that matters is what the spend produced. Our digital engagements report against revenue and pipeline, and they include the unfashionable part: what got stopped, and why. When a channel isn’t earning its budget, the budget moves. That discipline is most of the value; the tools are the easy part.
Key takeaways
The ones closest to existing demand. For most local and regional companies that means search first, both organic and paid, because it captures people already looking. Social, creators and email then build the audience search can’t reach yet. The order matters more than the list.
Yes, deliberately. Paid search tells you which queries convert this week; SEO builds the position that makes those clicks free over time. Run by separate vendors, each optimizes against the other. Run by one team, they compound.
In writing, through the contact page. Bring the site, the spend, or just the suspicion that the numbers don’t add up. We’ll tell you what we’d look at first and what we’d stop paying for.
Let’s talk
Don’t know exactly what you need? Good. That’s our job. Tell us where the business is headed and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help — and if we can’t, who might.
Usually replies within one business day.
