We were initially retained by Tradeking in September of last year and we loved the story: fast growing B2C ecommerce / online trading company that was beating the big boys (etrade, schwab, ameritrade, etc.) using web 2.0 strategies and amazing customer service. Super smart bunch of guys based in Boca Raton, Florida (actually right across the street from the beach on A1A). They also have offices in Charlotte, NC.
We interact primarily with Brad Hoppmann, their Director of Marketing and Tom Desmond, their Cheif Growth Officer. So far we have placed three people there: an Online Marketing Manager that is handling all of their paid & natural search efforts, an Online Community Manager that is promoting and managing their industry-leading Social Media strategy and a Director of Business Intelligence that is acting cross-functionally to get data to finance, marketing, product devmt and C-level execs.
Our biggest challenge has been their location. We thought it would be easy to get people to relocate to Boca – I went to school down there and remembered it a cheaper place to live with incredible quality of life. So we started pitching pitching people in Minnesota and the Nort East and all of the cold places that we could think of. Turns out that nobody wants to move to Florida – it is expensive in Boca and it is kind of a career wasteland for online marketers.
We were able to find one person who lives locally (a miracle), one who was willing to relocate to Charlotte and the third is working remotely from Arizona.
As of now we are still looking for an Online Marketing Manager to run & optimize their banner spend – they just went to Dart for ad serving so they are looking for someone with some experience using that tool or one of the others (Atlas, etc.). Ideally, the person would also have some experience with affiliate programs. This position can be based either in Boca or Charlotte and will pay about $75-80k + bonus + equity, so it is really a job for a 2-3 year marketer that wants a lot of experience, a lot of autonomy and a real opportunity to have an impact on growing the business. Working for Brad and Tom is one of the biggest selling points also. We work with lots of people in similar roles and have found these guys to really get it. They are super nice, incredibly dedicated and focused on growing that business and they are having a lot of fun (not to mention a lot of success) doing it. It is a great place to be.
From an analytics perspective they just went to Omniture and they have one of their top guys – Adam Greco – handling the fine-tuning.
