Behind the Screen with Digital Market Director Catie Holoubek

The 2060 Digital Chicago team is led by Catie Holoubek, who draws on her experience in both the push and pull mediums of marketing to bring clients the kind of digital advertising strategies that get them real ROI. Catie shares the career journey she took to get to 2060, some inspiring client success stories, and more!

What was the path that led you to the position you’re in now as the Digital Market Director in Chicago.

It’s kind of like the Grateful Dead line, “What a long, strange trip it’s been.” I was a journalism major in college for both broadcast and print, and I became the Program Director of our college radio station and had a morning show and a political talk show. After college when an opportunity came up at the local Country station I grew up listening to out in Plainfield, IL, I took it and did promotions and on-air.

I started posting on social media during my show, and I would link back to our website, which I noticed needed some serious help. Since I took some coding classes in college, I started helping on the web and graphics side. And I started coming up with some ways to help clients increase engagement with their radio campaigns.

Eventually we started offering digital services to clients, and they wanted me to help translate why media and digital work so well together. And I absolutely loved it. When the company was sold, they didn’t want to expand their digital offerings, but I was hooked, so I found a place at Hubbard Interactive in Chicago.

Then when 2060 Digital needed someone to run the Chicago market, I said I’d be happy to take up the challenge, so I dove in head first…and haven’t come up for air.

So what would you say some of the best things about your position with 2060 Digital are?

The people. We have a unique group of backgrounds in Chicago that offer an amazing set of experiences for our clients to pull from.

And our clients are amazing too. In a large market like Chicago, there’s so much more competition in every business vertical than there is in a smaller market. So our clients are pushed quicker to try new things like digital marketing, because there are plenty of other businesses that are going to be taking their customers while they wait.

How have you seen digital marketing really work for clients, especially if they’ve never done it before?

We have a car dealership who was struggling with sales to the Hispanic population – they were losing car sales to their competitors. The only thing they’ve done differently in their advertising is adding a display campaign with us and their year has completely turned around.

All it took was one of our strategists figuring out that the way Hispanic auto intenders consume media is mostly on their phones – they do 80-90 percent of their browsing on their mobile devices. So we knew we needed to make sure that the landing page was not only properly translated, but also mobile ready, we needed to do a mostly mobile campaign, we needed the ads to look a certain way because of how they’re going to read them. It’s really just taking it – as marketing should be – from the level of the consumer, and then translating it into the strategy.

So, a display campaign isn’t just a set of ads that are set up to run for certain dates. There’s a more holistic approach.

Exactly, it’s not just the ads, it’s what happens after they click on the ads, and where they go, and what type of information they see, and what they do after they see that information. Those are the pieces that get forgotten when other agencies just try to move a client through the process.

Another example is a venue that we did event marketing for, in which we hooked a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign to their ecommerce platform for the day their summer program tickets went on sale. We wanted to make sure consumers were purchasing tickets from them and not a third party. They’d never done PPC before, and we only did a 12-hour campaign, but they were able to track double the revenue back to their spend with us. It’s a great example of how PPC should be used.

Would you say 2060 Digital’s unique as far as how we approach digital marketing?

Absolutely, and again, a lot of it is the people. I say to clients all the time, the magic of digital marketing is in the man-hours, the fingers on keyboards. We see clients who’ve worked with other agencies because of their low fees or low CPM. And the reason those fees are lower is because there’s fewer man-hours used on the campaign. All of the details that should go into digital strategy aren’t there when you don’t have someone critically looking at the campaign.

In the PPC example, the ads were written very carefully for each show, and we had someone monitoring that campaign live for 12 hours. For the dealership, it was someone looking at the campaign on a mobile device and really experiencing what the consumer would experience. It’s that kind of attention to detail that ensures the success of the campaign. And that’s what you see throughout our agency.

That’s true – you’re not going to get that attention to detail without someone actually paying attention to the details.

Right, you can’t programmatically pay attention to the details. Someone has to do it. That’s something I think 2060 does above and beyond, really. Not only do we have great people with great skills who are on the team and do the work, but it’s also the way that they believe in the work that they’re doing, too.