In today's Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur Spotlight, we feature Mary Casey, founder of a thriving full-service marketing agency. Mary's journey from employee to entrepreneur is marked by her dedication to helping small and medium-sized businesses grow through expert content marketing. Offering a comprehensive range of services, Mary’s agency tailors strategies to meet client goals with a strong growth mindset. Join us as we explore Mary’s inspiring entrepreneurial story and the insights she’s gained along the way.
Hi, Mary! Thanks for joining us today. Tell us about your business. Who do you serve, how do you serve them, and what's the impact that your business and work makes?
I run a full-service marketing agency, specializing in content marketing. I’m most valuable to small/medium businesses that either don’t have a marketing team or have a small team that needs to outsource certain marketing tasks. As a full-service agency, I provide email, social media, web content, brand messaging, blogs, newsletters, and now SEO. Essentially, if it’s marketing, I do it! I cater my strategies towards my clients’ goals with an emphasis on driving growth. I always keep a growth mindset and tailor my strategies to reach more customers effectively.
Tell us about the moment you finally felt like you went from wantrepreneur to entrepreneur.
The moment I signed my third client (a big client!) was the moment I felt like I was a true entrepreneur. It was at that moment that I thought, “ok wait, this is happening and it’s happening fast and there’s no going back now!” At that moment I had a decision to make: jump in with both feet or put one foot in and keep the other foot working for another employer. I chose the former and it was right after I signed that third client and knew I had some good momentum going.
Describe the moment or period in your life/career that motivated you to make the entrepreneurial leap.
I worked for a great VP of Marketing a few jobs prior, and he told me once that I had an entrepreneurial mindset and that I was headed for a big career in marketing. At the time I was toying with the idea of starting my own company as a side business and when he said that it was like the entrepreneur seed was planted. Believe it or not, a few days later I was chatting with a neighbor about how they were thinking of starting their own company. I offered them my help in marketing and found myself thinking about how I could help a lot of businesses with marketing. That encounter was the universe making sure I heard the calling loud and clear!
Describe a tool, service, or software that has been a game-changer for your business. How does it contribute to your success?
Email campaign platforms and social media scheduling tools are game changers for me. I use a lot of different email platforms depending on the client, but all of them allow me to automate campaigns, segment contact lists, and pull the right analytics to determine the campaign’s success. At Maxima, email marketing is alive and well!
There are a lot of social media schedulers out there and they all offer something different. I like Semrush Social and Loomly so far. These tools allow you to create workspaces (or calendars) for each client and link all their social accounts so it’s all in one place. Plus, you get extra analytics. When you’re managing socials for brands, you don’t want to keep logging in and out of multiple platforms and keep track of all the login information. This lets you streamline and be more efficient.
We know that success is very often a non-linear path. Tell us about a failure, pivot point, or lesson that changed your course or direction and helped to get you where you are today.
You really do need to find a niche when you’re starting out. A lot of us feel that choosing a niche means we’re limiting ourselves, but that’s not the case. Just like the saying, “walk before you run,” you need to establish a foundation and a customer base and the best way to do that is to decide on a niche and tailor your messaging to that. A great way to do this is to think of one problem that you solve that people need. Just one. After you’ve gotten enough customers and a solid foundation, then you can start to generalize more. They say the riches are in the niches, and that’s true, but it’s more like, “the riches are in the niches, initially.”
What unconventional strategy did you employ that significantly impacted your business?
I mix both the creative/content and the strategic/analytical aspects of marketing in my services. Many businesses will specialize in just one, but I love both equally and provide more value to my clients if I can provide them with the strategies and then execute them with the creative content. I also don’t recommend tactics to clients solely because they’re trending. I like to help clients see that the best way to reach customers is to be where they are and tailor your messaging to what they’re looking for. For example, TikTok is great but if that’s not where your audience is, why would you spend so much valuable time creating TikTok-specific content?
What’s something you wish you knew sooner that you’d give as advice for aspiring or newer entrepreneurs?
I would tell any new or aspiring entrepreneurs to invest in some type of invoicing platform. Something I didn’t anticipate was how much time I would spend “chasing down” payments, so having a platform or software that can automate that process and do the chasing for me would have saved me a lot of time in the beginning.
Also, you’re going to fail sometimes and that’s ok. Just learn from the mistake, don’t linger on it, and take the lesson with you to the next challenge.
Want to dive deeper into Mary's work? Here are a couple of links:
- Visit Maxima Marketing Strategies' Website maximamarketingstrategies.com
- Follow Maxima Marketing Strategies on Instagram @maxima_mktg_strategies
