Think Tank Live Topics

1.WebPages are More Than a Brochure

2.Inbound Marketing and Management:
Having a SEO Mindset for all Operational and Marketing Issues

Hi Chris, what is the history and story of your company?
Lakeshore Branding is a Chicago interactive marketing that helps companies drive more sales, leads and conversions by utilizing digital marketing. We started in 2007 as a search engine marketing consulting company has quickly grown to a small boutique online marketing agency. Our clients come from diverse industries at various stages of growth, from startups to Fortune 500.

Chris, what is your approach to internet marketing?
Our clients utilize us as a resource to help them identify new ways to get leads or sales online. Our team sometimes comes back with outside the box ideas. For example we have a client that started selling their product on Amazon and it now drives 70-80% of the sales each month. A traditional agency might have said lets do an ad buy or invest in search engine optimization. While both strategies can be effective, this strategy helped increase the bottom line of the business and turned a fixed cost into a variable based on sales.

What is your latest project?
We are really excited to be working with Apartment Vigilantes, a Chicago apartment rental service. We are helping them manage their entire online presence through online advertising, SEO and social media management of their blog, twitter and Facebook. We are working to build links so that they rank for Chicago Apartments, which had a quarter million searches last month in Google. We are excited because this will be a challenge to launch a new company into a very competitive keyword category. We are hoping that we can rank them for long tail phrases later this year for keywords like Lincoln Park apartments and Gold Coast Apartments.

We have been working with lots of local companies to help them grow their online presence like a Chicago plumber, a Nutraceutical fulfillment warehouse, a tinley park retirement community and products like shoe insoles.

What are you favorite tools for competitive intelligence?
Well I actually wrote a blog post on my 29 tools for website competitive intelligence. From that list Spyfu is great to analyze competitors pay per click advertising.

I really like the new tool from SEOmoz, Open Site Explorer for off page analysis and the URI Valet, which takes an in depth look at onpage SEO.

Any tips for people just getting started?
When I first got into internet marketing several years ago, I attended every class, workshop and seminar that talked about online marketing. I am a visual learner so I went out and bought a few dozen domains to test some different theories that I have learned and that foundation has lead to many of the successes that our clients have experienced.

I also spend a few hours a week reading current trends with the top online marketing blogs and I am in a book club online marketers. Get involved in the local online marketing community, share your ideas with your peers, attend local meetups and networking events. I learn more from the marketers in Chicago, than I have ever read or learned from an online blog post. This is why I am really excited to be a part of Think Tank. All I could think about the past few weeks was how exciting it will be to hear presentations from all the local experts.

What are the best restaurants in Chicago?
I am a huge fan of Chicago pizza, I consider myself some what of a pizza snob. I think the top places in Chicago are Gino’s East, The Art of Pizza, Giordano’s, Lou Malnatis and Pizano’s. For burgers I think the Metropolitan Club in Willis tower and State Restaurant in Lincoln Park have the best burgers in town.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?
I would like to become a college professor and possibly become an angel investor in the next few years. I am very passionate about entrepreneurship and I hope that by teaching in a business school I can inspire some young minds of their true potential.

What inspires you creatively?
My biggest inspiration come from my team, clients and friends.

I am lucky to have friends with passion for life, its the optimize of glass half full that rubs off and creates a great circle of people to hang out with. The team at Lakeshore Branding are a bunch of rockstars, they get me excited to come to work everyday. Finally my clients are so passionate about their companies that

You can contact Chris Campbell on the phone at 312-229-0038 or email him directly at chris @lakeshorebranding.com