JXM

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the VP of marketing and PR at Advia Credit Union, a company with a presence in Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin and with nearly 200,000 members.

What challenge were you trying to address with JXM?

We needed someone to help us navigate our media strategies for both consumers and commercial members.

What was the scope of their involvement?

JXM has been an instrumental partner in helping us navigate both our digital and traditional media strategies. When we became Advia Credit Union, they helped us with our brand look and feel, as well as with introducing our brand messaging to our current members. Additionally, they helped us advertise our new brand to new potential members. Since then, JXM has helped us develop a very targeted and tailored digital and traditional media strategy within our tri-state membership area.

Every year, we work with JXM and provide an overall marketing plan for the year. This plan addresses our key strategic challenges within any specific markets or business unit plans, whether commercial lending, mortgages, or credit cards. Additionally, we address other objectives, such as introducing our brand within a new community. Throughout the year, JXM helps us navigate all our various marketing challenges.

For this, JXM helps us define and create our media strategy, which includes print and digital advertising. As for our digital advertising, their team focuses on all of our social media channels, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Moreover, they help us with display ads, video ads, and over-the-top (OTT) media placements. As for our traditional advertising, they help us create print ads for our commercial and consumer accounts, as well as billboard placements.

JXM mainly focuses on media placement; however, they occasionally help us produce videos and develop other creative assets. Additionally, they help us with business consulting to some extent. We typically present them with a marketing or business challenge, and they help us evaluate some strategies.

What is the team composition?

We primarily work with Jim (Co-Founder) and Laurie (Managing Partner). Occasionally, we also work with Matthew (Co-Founder).

How did you come to work with JXM?

The emerging credit union that we were partnering with had worked with JXM previously; that was how we met them.

How much have you invested with them?

Our budget varies depending on our media plan for each year. Typically, we spend between $1 million–$1.5 million annually with them.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working together in November 2013, and our engagement is ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement? 

Typically, our success metrics include click-through rates and other KPIs regarding our users' activity on our website. Although we don’t have any similar competitive analysis to compare our data against other financial institutions, we feel that the rates and metrics we’re achieving are very beneficial.

We’ve maintained very healthy numbers regarding our ROI, usually achieving an over 1,000% ROI rate, and JXM’s work has really contributed to that result. As general feedback, we’ve always been incredibly pleased with the results we get from JXM, and we’re very thankful for having them as our business partners.

How did JXM perform from a project management standpoint?

JXM always stays within budget and is incredibly responsive; they always respond to our inquiries within the same day. As for project management tools, they use Basecamp to keep us updated regularly and produce excellent reports. Moreover, we meet via Zoom once a month to catch up on key projects and marketing metrics, as well as to discuss upcoming projects.

What did you find most impressive about them?

What makes JXM stand out is their level of commitment to our company. They’re incredibly responsive and work hard to learn as much as they can about our industry. Additionally, they’re incredibly knowledgeable about digital advertising, and they have an entrepreneurial spirit that they bring to our relationship every day.

Are there any areas they could improve?

There are a number of tools and strategies we haven’t explored yet with JXM. For instance, we would like to explore some PR work. Although I see ourselves exploring other strategies, JXM is a small team, so I don’t know if they have that type of expertise in-house. Still, I wholeheartedly trust that they can direct us to an appropriate business partner if they don’t have those skills. They’re always willing to help, which I find very special about them.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Get to know them and give them time to learn about your industry. You’ll be very impressed with their level of commitment to learning about your industry. Overall, working with them is a pleasure.

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I’m the owner and primary operator of Post Woodworking. Our company manufactures storage buildings and custom garages.

What challenge were you trying to address with JXM?

We hired them for their SMM, SEO, and PPC services.

What was the scope of their involvement?

JXM handles our digital marketing needs. They’re mainly in charge of creating and managing our ad campaigns across various platforms, including Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. This also involves doing community management and creating assets for each ad. Additionally, their team manages the SEO of our website; we let them lead the keyword research process.

What is the team composition?

We primarily work with three people from their company: Matthew (Co-Founder), James (Co-Founder), and Laurie (Managing Partner).

How did you come to work with JXM?

It was actually James who found us. He was familiar with our business and sent us an email to connect.

How much have you invested with them?

We’ve spent over $1 million on their services.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in January 2015, and our engagement is still ongoing.

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

Thanks to JXM’s help, we’ve noticed improvements across various metrics. Our CPC rate has been decreasing steadily while our close rate has increased consistently year over year. Moreover, our value per acquisition has quadrupled, and our conversion rate has improved as well.

How did JXM perform from a project management standpoint?

They communicate frequently and have stayed within budget. In terms of timeliness, they don’t meet our deadlines consistently due to the creative nature of their work, but they always complete tasks within a reasonable timeframe. For communication, we interact via email, phone calls, and face-to-face meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We’ve made a major branding shift over the past few years, and JXM has done an excellent job of helping us identify who we are as a company and what niche we fit into. Overall, their team has been very instrumental in that process.

Are there any areas they could improve on?

I can’t think of anything that JXM could improve on at the moment.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Keep an open mind, stay in your lane, and let them do what they do best.

Please describe your company and your position there.

Former Director of Marketing and Communications for a dental association.

For what projects/services did your company hire JXM, and what were your goals?

Our association has been running a public-facing advertising campaign for over 30 years. Up until we hired JXM in 2016 the campaign had been mostly using a more traditional strategy including TV and print ads.

Our goal with the public advertising campaign was to drive awareness for Michiganders on the importance of oral health and connecting them to one of our dentists. Knowing that most people search for healthcare online, our strategy was to drive awareness and conversions to smilemichigan.com through an extensive digital marketing strategy.

How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?

In 2015 we went through an RFP process reaching out to over 20 creative agencies and we have 11 responses, including JXM. Our decision matrix we used to evaluate all submissions included past experience and success with implementing digital marketing campaigns. Myself and our CEO narrowed the list down to our top three who were then invited to present their case to our board of trustees, who would make the final decision.

Not only did JXM meet our needs in terms of their past experience with successful campaigns but because they were a smaller agency we knew that they were willing to work harder to exceed our expectations in terms of service- they were more hungry and to be honest more down-to-earth and fun to work with.

Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and marking tools used.

We started with gathering as much research and data to provide JXM as possible to guide their strategy. JXM developed a comprehensive digital strategy that included SEO, Paid Search, Social Media Ads, Display Ads, Website Content, Creative Strategy, Video Production, and Ad Content Development. They also included extensive campaign reporting to measure the effectiveness for each ad.

How many resources from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?

My main contact was Jim P. (Co-Founder). Matt M.  (Co-Founder) would provide the creative strategy and development. Laurie B.  (Managing Partner) would provide media strategy and campaign reporting.

Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?

The public advertising campaign was incredibly successful in terms of increasing engagement with the ads and driving higher conversion rates to smilemichigan.com. It was nice to provide the board of trustees with actual campaign KPIs versus with the older campaign that focused heavily on impressions and reach.

JXM's digital strategy could show each quarter actual engagement from clicks and views to traffic on the site and how many people searched for a dentist on the site that was a result of seeing the ads. This level of campaign performance was never available for the MDA until we hired JXM. Some of the campaign ads delivered over 60% conversion rates results in 4K+ dentist searches per month.

How effective was the workflow between your team and theirs?

JXM's communication and ability to meet and/or exceed deadlines is none like any other professional vendor I've ever worked with. I would talk to Jim on a weekly basis and we used Basecamp to track deliverables and review campaign content daily. I never had to reach out to them to ask for a status update.

What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?

The most impressive and unique attributes of working with JXM is their exceptional service and support they provided me as a client. Always willing to go above and beyond even for last minute changes or urgent projects that needed a 24 hr. turnaround. They gladly made time to help us anytime we needed it.

Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?

No, there is nothing I would change or recommend improvement on based on my experience of working with JXM.