Des Moines-Based Marketing Agency with a Global Perspective

David Tracy is an award-winning marketing and advertising strategist with a global perspective whose specialty is to curate effective, in-depth marketing campaigns that bridge international and cultural gaps. He is the Founder & CEO of Northgate Marketing, an international marketing agency based here in Des Moines.

Tracy has over 12 years of full time non-profit management experience and directed his own non-profit in Panama City, Panama that focused on projects ranging from urban community development, medical brigades, earthquake relief, building homes for marginalized communities, education amongst indigenous tribes, and more. He has traveled to over 40 countries for his work, and his perspective is on the macro-level when it comes to life coaching and consulting.

The Ethics of Northgate Marketing

While bringing a product or brand to market, it’s Tracy’s philosophy that although he is exceedingly confident in his team’s abilities, he never guarantees a specific performance outcome due to all of the dynamic variables that exist within the industry. In some cases, the outcomes are much more positive than even he had expected. This is a place where he can position his business as an agency that actively under promises and over delivers to his clients, building the type of trust that will sustain a business relationship in a longterm capacity. On the opposite end of that spectrum, Tracy referenced the COVID pandemic as just one example of an unexpected variable that could impede any given campaign’s performance. His main prerogative is full transparency, and he believes that this is the foundation for any successful business - marketing or otherwise.

Business & Personal Branding

When considering branding himself and his business via social media platforms, Tracy says that his personal brand and the brand of his company are two separate entities that are both integrated in the essence of who he is as a whole person. His personal brand encompasses who he is as a life coach, a keynote speaker, and a marketing strategist. This is in an effort to tell his story about his persona, his abilities, and his message. When it comes to Northgate Marketing, his branding is an expression of the collective efforts of himself alongside his staff and the work that they produce.?

Of course, the different social media platforms also lend their own facets of his business or personal brand depending on the audience. On LinkedIn, it’s very uncommon to share anything about one’s personal or family life unless it relates directly to their career. On Facebook, it’s uncommon to share exclusively about business. However, it is wise for an agency head like Tracy to make sure that he sprinkles in segments about the goings on with Northgate Marketing as a gentle reminder that he is, in fact, a marketing guru. This balance aids in business development by digital word-of-mouth amongst his peers.

Developing a Marketing Strategy & Customer Experience

Tracy prides his business in the fact that no two of his marketing strategies look exactly the same. “Just as all of my clients have different objectives and target audiences, so too do my marketing modalities. I don’t do cookie cutter strategies across the board. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.” He continually follows industry trends to tailor-fit effective campaigns to his client’s audience. Tracy looks for patterns that are proven to work for specific industries and takes note, though that doesn’t mean it will end up as a part of his final product that is rolled out for public consumption.

“First and foremost, I always have an initial conversation and eventually a more in-depth discovery meeting with my clients that typically lasts anywhere from two to three hours,” he continued, “I absolutely have to understand not only the targeted outcomes, but also how my clients actually run their day-to-day operations.” After that process, he’ll start in on his own research of the company’s competitors, their target markets, products and services. “In the simplest terms, I’ll listen to what my clients say they want, and then I get to work on how I believe that we can actually achieve it.”

Northgate Marketing is different than most agencies because of this. If Tracy or his team have identified poor business practices in the operations of a prospective client, he’ll simply turn away the business. It is more important, in his eyes, to establish quality expectations that can be achieved. If he sees substantial areas that need improvement or red flags with staff or customer experience, he will be fair and upfront about the fact that they need to first establish tools to correct these issues prior to spending money on branding the company. At the end of the day, he can get the phone to ring and eyeballs onto the website. But once that interested online party makes the decision to reach out and has just one bad experience, that same company can just as quickly lose the lifetime value of their consumer from their first impression or bad experience. This is more costly to his agency than signing on new clients just to turn a quick sale of services, and he has the experience to decipher the types of businesses and clients who align with his values.

Targeted Marketing

In order to build a marketing strategy, Tracy takes ample time to research in order to give his best recommendations to then set his clients up for success. He believes that far too often, marketing agencies will take a client’s prospective budget and immediately (and lazily) start placing a portion of that into Google AdWords, and jump right into the the simplistic process of picking the keywords that make best sense for their customers in relation to their online search activity. It’s his opinion that this type of complacency with so many agencies right now is what sets him aside, and why his agency has seen such tremendous success in their outcomes.?

David went on to outline how the majority of his clients actually find more success through organic results, in general, versus search engine optimization, or SEM. In some cases, search engine optimization, or SEO, is created not only by the amount of visits to a company’s website, but also the maturity of the site, and the amount of and correct placement of coding, as well as links to their websites from as many outside sources as possible across the web. “The more places online that I can identify as quality real estate to place a link back to their main website, the more tentacles I’ve now got out there. And they’re all driving traffic back to the main page, giving it more gravity. That means that when a person is searching keywords related to my client’s industry, you can almost always find them on page one of the organic Google search results - something that search engine marketing cannot achieve no matter how many dollars you throw at it.”

While Tracy’s process may not be the cheapest option in town, it’s tried and true in regard to retaining his clients and saving them money. With his durable marketing campaigns, he can effectively keep a business’s customers engaged while also bringing them new business and a clear understanding of how they arrived in that position with the guidance of Northgate Marketing.