- What does your Company do and what services does it provide?
Stage Marketing is a global revenue operations-as-a-service provider that helps companies elevate sales, marketing, and customer success with a 360-degree, full-funnel approach to revenue.
We concentrate on a full-funnel digital, experiential, and partner marketing and sales strategy that focuses on driving top-line revenue and bottom-line profitability for clients in the healthcare, high-tech, and real estate industries. Stage Marketing is aptly named for its expertise in live-event, “on-stage” marketing; its focus on marketing to the stage of the customer journey; and its strategic, digital transformation consulting based on the stage of the business. Stage Marketing’s unique value proposition for customers includes flexibility, affordability, and transparency in pricing—uncommon in agencies of its caliber. Stage Marketing is a HubSpot Platinum Partner and Google Partner.
- Where is your Company located and are your services offered globally?
Stage Marketing is based in Orange County, California, with services offered globally. Stage Marketing has locations in Utah, Arizona, Florida, Guatemala, and the Philippines. Stage Marketing features a hybrid remote workforce, with employees living throughout the United States as well as the Philippines and some in Central and South America.
- Who are the founding members, what is their professional background and what do they bring to the table?
Dr. Amy Osmond Cook founded the company in May 2009. Amy’s business acumen was first tested when her husband, Jeff, lost his job after Lehman Brothers went bankrupt in the subprime mortgage crisis in 2008. Initially, she took part-time writing and editing jobs to help her family’s finances stay afloat. However, when Jeff came to her with their $10,000 tax refund a few months later, he proposed a challenge: “Let’s each take $5,000,” he said, “and see who can make the most from their half.”
Challenge accepted. Jeff invested his half in real estate, while Amy took her share of the family’s tax return and founded Stage Marketing.
Fourteen years later, Stage Marketing has been named one of the fastest-growing companies in Utah and remains a vibrant, award-winning marketing agency that enjoys particular success in the healthcare, real estate, and technology verticals.
Amy is an irrepressible personality—an experienced editor and writer with bylines appearing everywhere from blogs and newspaper columns to books and business magazines such as Forbes and Entrepreneur. She serves as a fractional CMO to several companies under the Stage Marketing umbrella. She received her doctorate from the University of Utah in organizational communication, and her research interests, informed by critical theory, include organizational identification, communication ethics, and gender dynamics in the workplace. She continues to serve in education as an adjunct faculty member at BYU-Hawaii and has taught business and communication courses at BYU, the University of Utah, and Arizona State intermittently for more than 25 years.
- How is your Company different from other companies in your field?
Increasingly over its 14 years, Stage Marketing has broken all boundaries of traditional marketing and communication while establishing itself as a comprehensive and modern marketing solution provider. The company is built on the four core principles of kindness, quality, flexibility, and grit while making its mark in the areas of strategic services and digital, experiential, and partner marketing.
One key differentiator for Stage is the ability to offer a blended rate while pivoting quickly between multiple and varied services. For example, if a client needs a website overhaul one month and an event managed the next month, Stage’s competitive blended rate allows for a quick, easy pivot without incurring additional costs.
“There is no other agency that can deliver high-quality services with the flexibility, affordability, and transparency that Stage Marketing offers,” says Amy Cook. “We are a full-fledged marketing solutions provider. Our affordability is centered on the fact that we aim to be the most business-friendly marketing agency and function like a true extension of an internal marketing department. In many cases, companies use us as their full outsourced marketing department because we offer 100 percent utilization, complete transparency, and a specialized workforce of true experts in their fields for the same price as a small in-house generalist team. There simply is not another solution out there like ours.”
- How do employees collaborate in your office?
Despite many of the team working remotely, Stage Marketing employees remain connected both professionally and personally via daily video chat meetings with their respective work teams, employee chat communication channels, monthly interactive full-company video meetings, and in-person regional get-togethers. Additional video meetings frequently occur between coworkers and managers as needed to help maintain that personal work connection and in-office vibe. Numerous monthly awards, spot bonuses, and friendly competitions help keep fun infused in the workplace.
- What are your goals for the industry you are in?
For all our clients, our goal is to deliver the right message to the right audience at the right time in the right channels. We are customer-obsessed and will continue to launch strategic campaigns with a customer 360º view to deliver results.
- What does the Company aim to achieve by next quarter?
We are currently continuing to build out offerings in the SAL and SQL stages of the funnel. We will launch several offerings in this quarter to fully flesh out our full-funnel offerings.
- Is your company an advocate of any social causes, and are the founders involved in the same?
Amy Cook is extraordinarily active in community and volunteer causes. In addition to serving as the executive director for the Association of Skilled Nurses, she also lends her talents to groups including Aspire Higher, Safety Net Committee, and Operation Underground Railroad, among others. In 2022, Amy spearheaded a company humanitarian effort to war-torn Ukraine, filling a plane with $55,000 in medical supplies. She also helped raise $100,000 in donations in one hour to the Children’s Miracle Network for another program.
As a company, Stage Marketing provides employees with paid volunteer time off, which may be used for service opportunities. All full-time employees are eligible to receive four hours of paid volunteer time off per quarter, allowing them to make a difference in their communities for causes that they are personally passionate about.
- What are a few things that you would like to change about the industry you are in?
- Marketing is a million little things, which makes it extremely complicated. I would like to help make other departments more aware of all of the different types of expertise required for different channels.
- One thing that other departments don’t understand sometimes is how technically astute most marketers must be to be effective in the digital age.
- Another is that most CEOs don’t fully understand how privacy laws restrict digital ad channels and others from sharing data. This makes getting to the prospect level on buyer intent nearly impossible.
We hope to demystify some of these challenges and overcome them with good communication and interdepartmental collaboration.
- How are your company’s services/products impacting lives?
Stage Marketing measures its success by helping clients achieve their business objectives, whether through an elevated brand, profitable growth, or an exceptional customer experience. Taking it one stage further than that, whenever one of the company’s clients reaches a new customer and that customer’s life is impacted in a positive way, Stage is proud to be a part of that process. Stage Marketing believes it is only as successful as its clients. The company’s marketing assets help clients generate leads, delight their customers, and help them grow profitably.
