Impact Networking’s new ES99 division provides marketing services to the dealership’s SMB customers.
Risk is always a watchword in business, something to be calculated, managed, and leveraged. Still, in the era of compounding uncertainty, it’s understandable that many people feel an instinctive desire to retreat into safety, the well-worn patterns that produce predictable returns. It’s not the time to try something new, certainly not the time to change careers. Well, don’t tell Aaron Dyck that.
Dyck, the former senior vice president of marketing at Clover Imaging Services Group, packed up his home in Canada in July and moved to Chicago with his family to head up ES99, a full-service marketing agency started by Impact Networking. ES99 is a combination of 1999, the year Impact was founded, and Einsteinium, a highly volatile element first discovered in the residue of the impact crater of an early atomic bomb test. ES99 functions as a division of Impact, supporting the parent company’s customers in the SMB space.
“We do all scopes of marketing: We do print ads, we do websites, we do digital marketing, SEO, SMO—really, it encompasses everything,” said Frank Cucco, CEO and founder of Impact.
Keeping ES99 under Impact’s umbrella allows the division to focus on its core mission. Impact’s 120 salespeople, stationed across four states, find clients for ES99, and then, Dyck’s team steps in to handle the creative side.
Because ES99’s clients are often smaller companies that haven’t used a full-service marketing company before, a large part of the process is education, helping companies understand their needs and options.
“We’re not just giving them a website or some sales planner,” said Dyck. “We’re taking a deep dive into their market, their industry. We have a team of folks who provide research into their customer profiles, into their local markets, competitive analysis. We look at how people search for their product or service, and we identify areas we can target from a marketing perspective to drive new sales opportunities. It’s a comprehensive, well-rounded approach.”
A key part of the ES99 strategy is offering marketing services accessible to the clients that Impact works with, companies that may have only marketed themselves with the help of a small internal team before. Traditional ad agencies have little interest in serving this end of the market that comprises small-to-medium companies with small-to-medium budgets.
“The reason we’ve been able to penetrate the SMB market is because we finance it over a five-year term,” said Cucco. “Instead of going to a client and saying, ‘You gotta give us $250,000 and we’ll get started for you,’ we say, ‘Well, it’s gonna cost you five grand a month, it’s a 60-month deal.’ And they can understand that. They’re used to those kinds of contracts. That doesn’t scare them.”
This longer-term payment structure offers tangible benefits (less money upfront means less impact on a small budget, an easy risk to take), and also psychological ones. The payment structure is similar to other service contracts the client might have such as managed print services, and month by month, that $5,000 payment stays the same, but the cumulative benefits of the marketing strategy it is funding start to add up. A year into the process, that $5,000 could be returning $60,000 worth of marketing results. As clients get more confident, ES99 adds additional services and contract amendments, growing as the client’s business grows.
“The SMB generally has no marketing,” said Dyck. “It might be a flyer or something like that. And marketing only works if you consistently do it over time. It’s about convincing them that, ‘Hey, if you do all these things, we’re going to make you cutting edge, and we’re going to help you grow your business.’ And we use Impact as an example because we do a ton of marketing and we’ve grown 27% year-over-year for 20 years.”
Another benefit to the client is that ES99 cross-pollinates across Impact’s strategic services, app developers.
“It really is helpful to the client when you have all these resources, not just the ES99 resources, but also Impact’s resources to do more sophisticated projects for them,” said Dyck.
Companies in industries such as manufacturing or distribution that have back-end development needs would normally need to go to an outside company for help with things like app integration, but ES99 is able to refer those clients right back to Impact, which has the IT resources to handle the technical side and keep everything aligned with the work ES99 is doing. A streamlined process isn’t just more efficient, it’s less stressful for the SMB client, who typically wants to focus on producing what they produce, not vetting new vendors.
Dyck’s experience in the dealer space prepared him well for these kinds of in-depth conversations with a client, understanding their business not just at the marketing level—what they sell and who they sell it to—but also how they operate, pain points, and particularly for SMBs, what they’re apprehensive about. But ES99 doesn’t just serve dealers, and that opens up a whole new world of business types in which each provides its own challenges.
“That’s the coolest thing about this,” said Dyck. “Copier dealers are different shapes and sizes, but the thing that really gets me pumped up about ES99 and where we’re going is the diversity of the clients. It could be a thousand-employee customer with multiple locations around the United States, it could be someone just locally based in Chicago. It could be in food and beverage, it could be in transportation. The customer, from an SMB standpoint, is diverse.”
Dyck and Cucco see ES99 as the logical extension of the office technology industry’s diversification. The past decade has seen a seismic shift from products to services. Printers and copiers are still important, but managed IT services are where most companies are investing now, betting on the steady income and multiple avenues for upselling that a long-term service contract provides. Impact’s venture may be the first rumble of another shift, as companies look at the client relationships they have and take a wider look at what those clients’ needs may be, and what they can do to address them.
“There’s a lot of upfront investment and time and commitment that goes into building these things out,” said Dyck. “Whether it’s managed IT services or developing a marketing business like ES99, the barrier to entry is pretty big. I think that’s why you don’t see a lot of dealers jumping into that space now.”
“The dealers have to be willing to take the risk to do these things, to want to invest in it, and to be able to stick with it and develop it over time,” added Cucco. “It seems to me like a lot of dealers generally do something for a short period and then give up on it. These things take time to develop.”
Just like ES99’s SMB clients, dealerships that want to explore offering marketing services can start small—just a value-add for existing clients. Cross-selling is always a challenge, but it’s worth the investment even if the earliest returns are just deepened client relationships.
“If I can help you grow your business, then you’ll buy more of my things, so it’s a nice win-win,” said Dyck. “I help you grow and become a better business, and you look at me like a partner that can help you. And when you’re a small to medium-sized business, a family business, something that’s handed down by generation, watching that turnaround and grow to the next level is a gratifying part of the job.”
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