In this interview series by
Website Planet, I invite online business leaders to reveal how they identified and solved the most urgent problems in their fields, How they stand out even in the most competitive markets, and how they’re positioning themselves for the future. A condensed playbook backed by decades of experience and data to help you validate your ideas, position your solution, and find the best growth levers.
Maxwell DesMarais is the director of strategy at Vital Design, and a digital marketer with a proven track record of delivering 1,000% ROI for a diverse range of clients. He leads Vital Design’s SEO, digital strategy, and paid ads teams. Beyond his agency role, Max also founded Hikingandfishing.com, a rapidly growing outdoor platform with over 120,000 monthly visitors.
In 1-2 sentences, what is the most pressing pain point that you solve, and what are your numbers right now in terms of revenue, customers, and team?
Our primary focus is helping clients stand out and thrive in crowded digital landscapes by improving their visibility, engagement, conversions, and revenue. We currently have a team of about 100, with 90+ clients in monthly digital marketing retainers.
Some recent results:
- University of San Diego Professional: +20,000% in traffic
- UMass Lowell: +120% in Conversions and -53% in Cost Per Conversion
- Texture Plus: +30% in YOY ecommerce sales and -28% in cost-per-lead YOY
What unique approach, features, or capabilities give you a unique advantage, and how? Can you share metrics and examples that show the difference you’re making?
Our unique, holistic approach delivers a dramatically greater return on investment (ROI) than agencies with a more narrow, tactical focus. That’s because we start with an in-depth assessment of your digital marketing foundation. We identify and repair any holes or weak spots. Then we create a comprehensive strategy to meet your goals.
We have created a disciplined process of continuous improvement for our clients that has led to average performance of our clients to the tune of 514% organic traffic growth, 450% more leads and 19x ROI.
What are the biggest challenges your company has overcome since its founding, and what lessons did you learn from these experiences?
Constant adaptation is key to success in an everchanging space like digital marketing. New tactics, new tools, new strategies are constantly emerging. It is one of the most competitive industries on the planet, and we have learned over time how important it is to continuously innovate, to be testing new approaches, and to pivot tactics and strategies for clients quickly when needed.
In our time, we have watched both the organic and paid advertising space in digital marketing change drastically, and finding a way to drive results across various industries has posed great challenges. We’ve found that if we have the most talented team, we are able to innovate and have success for our clients.
“Vital understands the competitive online degrees marketplace. We rely on their targeted strategies and solutions.”
Brandon Gregory, Senior Director, University of San Diego Online
Since you started, what have been the most impactful strategies to drive traffic, conversions and sales on your website? What KPIs did they move and by how much?
Driving organic traffic to our website from our target audience at all stages of the buyer’s funnel has been crucial for us as an agency. We practice what we preach for our clients, and it has led to us driving over 1,000 leads per month through our website. This gives us at bats to win the business of some incredible organizations.
What are the tools you can’t live without, and why? What problems do they solve for your business, and what benefits do they bring?
We couldn’t live without WordPress, which enables us to build an incredible website, and to keep up with our marketing efforts.
We also couldn’t live with our CRM and marketing automation tool––Hubspot. It allows us to take the leads we are generating, and market to them and push those early stage leads through the funnel and to opportunities for our organization.
Are there people in your industry, books, podcasts, or other resources that helped you succeed? What makes them so valuable to you?
There are too many to mention in the digital marketing space. That being said, a favorite among our strategy team here at Vital is
Search Engine Journal. It allows us to stay up to date with anything that is changing in SEO. When news comes out, we can begin testing and diving in further to these topics ourselves, but it acts as a feeder for the ideas and topics we need to investigate further.
How do you foresee AI and other emerging technologies transforming your industry in the next 5-10 years, and what’s in your roadmap to get ready for these changes?
AI will continue to revolutionize digital marketing through predictive analytics, customer behavior insights, and personalized content at scale. We’re investing in AI tools and training our team to leverage these advancements to improve campaign efficiency, audience targeting, and automation.
AI has made it easier and faster to produce high quality content. That means, as marketers, we need to excel at leveraging AI to make us better marketers, more efficient at the production of content, and the analysis of data.
To wrap up, if you had to share one tip that goes against common wisdom for those who are just starting out, what would it be?
Focus on building strong client relationships over rapid scaling. Sustainable growth comes from delivering consistent results and nurturing partnerships that drive long-term success rather than focusing solely on acquiring new clients quickly.
We have created specialized verticals to help us succeed for certain client types. For example, we have an ecommerce vertical, and a higher education vertical, among others, that allows us to have teams dedicated to success and innovation in those areas. Specialization like this has been key for us to create more trust when onboarding new clients, and to be able to innovate and have success in competitive spaces.
How can our readers connect with you?
LinkedIn:
- https://www.linkedin.com/company/vital-design
- https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxwell-desmarais
