Chicago Avenue at Sheridan Road in Evanston Photo: AlphaBeta135 / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
Kelly Cutler has started two marketing companies and sold one. The second, Kona Company, opened in 2014 at 721 Chicago Ave. in Evanston, less than a month after the sale of her first firm.
Cutler graduated from Michigan State University in 1999 with a film degree and hoped to work in Chicago’s film industry. When that did not pan out, she moved into internet marketing, working at Apartments.com, the agency DigitalWork and then AOL Time Warner. After about six years she left corporate life to found a River North agency specializing in search engine optimization, at a time when many advertisers did not know what to ask for. She said she saw an opening in being the person who asked what a business was actually trying to do.
What the firm does
Kona describes itself as a digital strategy firm. Work starts with a client’s goal: selling products, steering customers to a mobile app, driving store visits, booking appointments or generating leads. From there the firm builds a plan from the usual pieces, including websites, mobile apps, search optimization, social media, analytics, display advertising and remarketing.
Clients are a mix. A few long-term accounts already spend heavily online and tend to expand their budgets as results come in. Others are newer businesses that know digital will matter and want a partner. Cutler said the firm works across industries, among them financial services, e-commerce, business-to-business, health care and nonprofits, partly to keep staff from being limited to one client or one field.
She also distinguished between business and consumer accounts. LinkedIn offers a different value to a marketer than Facebook does, she said, so an agency has to be proficient on every platform it manages.
Why a small client list
Moving to Evanston and broadening the business beyond search was a conscious choice, Cutler said in an interview. Her aim was more strategy and planning work, such as remarketing, rather than only search. Growth was meant to be slow: she preferred deep relationships with a small number of clients to shallow ones with dozens. By May 2015 the three clients Kona started with were still on board, and each had raised its billings. One planned to quadruple its budget over the next year.
Cutler is now on the faculty of Northwestern University’s Medill School, according to the school’s directory.
Sources: interview with Kelly Cutler, May 2015; Medill faculty directory.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
