Lori Highby From Keystone Click
Lori Highby is a podcast host, speaker, educator, and founder of Keystone Click, a strategic digital marketing agency based in Milwaukee, WI.
With education as a core value of Lori’s, she has taught and guest lectured to hundreds of students and professionals on various topics surrounding business and marketing; most notably, as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, she taught B2B Sales & Marketing and Principles of Marketing.
Using her vast multi-industry knowledge – gained from experience and education, She has the ability to see the potential of greatness within the already established good of a business. Through strategic actionable moves, she has worked with Fortune 500 companies such as ABB and Syngenta to micro-business owners, to achieve their marketing goals.
She has a BS from Marian University and a Masters from Cardinal Stritch University.
Lori carries her energy and drive into her professional engagements in order to empower and educate other fellow life-long learners. When she’s not guiding clients or teaching agency account executives how to reach professional excellence, she can be found playing hockey, golfing, brewing beer with her husband Andy, or going on ridiculously long bike rides just to see if she can!
Please tell me all about your agency and what makes it unique?
Keystone Click is a strategic digital marketing agency. Helping their clients build brand awareness and generate leads online. This is done by first conducting research to help clients better understand their customer. Once that information is gathered, a full plan is created that is in alignment with the goals of the organization. Keystone Click then supports the implementation of the strategic plan.
Can you describe your journey to becoming an agency owner?
Working at two agencies prior to starting Keystone Click, Lori Highby started at a website development company and was doing SEO and PPC work before those were common acronyms in the industry. After 5.5 years there, she moved to a traditional agency that was interested in getting into online marketing as an offering. There, she learned a lot about outdoor, print and radio advertising methods and practices. The agency didn’t move as quickly into the digital space as Lori would have liked, so she started looking elsewhere for work. It was 2008 and a poor job market. Eager to get back into the digital realm, she started Keystone Click as a web development firm. With the evolution of the web and digital marketing, she’s evolved her firm to be a strategic digital marketing agency.
What do your clients like most about your agency?
Keystone Click’s clients value the educational approach that is taken with them. When clients bring suggestions or ask questions, Keystone Click is honest and transparent with the reasoning behind why or why not a specific tactic or approach was taken. Taking a strategic approach in all marketing will result in greater reward versus throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping it pans out.
Let’s face it, agencies are a dime a dozen. How do you make your agency stand out?
Keystone Click stands out because they practice what they preach, they value education and make that a focal point of their business by continually learning and they consider themselves middle-brained with a healthy mix of creative and analytics involved in their core deliverables.
If you could pick your dream brand to become one of your clients, which brand would that be?
A dream brand would be a manufacturing company that is ready to disrupt their industry. They want to step outside of the ordinary and move into the extraordinary with regards to their marketing, messaging, and communications approach. The brand would have a budget that allows for a lot of creativity and visual assets.
What would you say are the top 3 strategies used by your agency to land new clients?
Top three ways Keystone Click lands new clients are 1) thought leadership through webinars, podcasts and speaking engagements. 2) Practicing what they preach with digital marketing activities via SEO, email marketing and social media. 3) Networking through various organizations locally and nationally.
What works best when it comes to retaining clients at your agency?
Client retention requires ongoing communication. With a philosophy of overcommunicate and education while serving our clients to the best of their abilities. Active clients receive at minimum a weekly email status update on the progress of their projects.
What are some of the pain points you experience as an agency owner?
Lots of pains are experienced by agency owners, some of the hardest times include when the market is slow and clients are reducing budgets or new clients aren’t quite ready to get started on projects. This carries down to the agency team members when there is less work to spread around.
What advice do you have for someone who is just now starting their agency?
Biggest advise to offer someone getting started is to find your cheerleaders and peers. Consider joining a mastermind group with other agency owners where you can learn and grow from each others experiences, wins, losses and challenges. Lori Highby, the CEO of Keystone Click, has been in a peer owner group with Agency Management Institute for the last 10 years and has found significant value in the relationships and learning opportunities.
Can you think of a time in your agency journey when you made a mistake and learned from it? Please explain.
Yes. Early on, we made the mistake of agreeing to try to develop a website on a platform that we were not familiar with. That being said, the project was significantly over budget as we had a huge learning curve and the client was not pleased with the end product because we promised things that we realized were not realistic to complete on that specific platform. Now, we stick to what we are confident in and are direct in our communication related to the scope and capabilities of our team.
Looking ahead, what do you think will change about the agency landscape in 2024?
Artificial intelligence is creating a larger role in the marketing agency landscape. Content creation will no longer be a core service offering within agencies. Rather, leaning into strategy around how to use the tools while also focusing on the quality of output generated by AI. The story behind the data will continue to become an important factor when it comes to communicating with clients.’
