JDM’s 2022 Highlights: Growth, Fun, and Resilience

It’s always a great exercise to zoom out of daily initiatives and challenges and reflect on the past year. I had the chance to do that before last week’s virtual holiday party (you’ll see evidence of plenty of cheer below), and I’m beyond proud and grateful for what our team and our clients have accomplished in 2022.

Let’s get to the highlights!

Big Wins and Client Success

Here are a few high-level highlights from the past year that have enabled us to help our client partners continue to grow:

• Launched new growth-oriented services including content marketing, email marketing, GA4 migration packages, and Google Business Profile management
• Onboarded 27 new clients
• Helped generate over 5 million organic site visits for our SEO clients
• Launched 5 new client websites (and redesigned many others)
• Managed over $55M in ad spend across 19 ad platforms including Google, LinkedIn, TikTok, FB/Instagram, Capterra, Reddit, and Snapchat
• Rolled out new and improved reporting dashboards with an emphasis on down-funnel metrics
• Improved client onboarding processes to streamline and increase efficiency
  
  

Team Growth

We’ve got a lot of incredible team call-outs here. Our team grew by 24% since the beginning of the year. Our new members accounted for a new Content team, our first Sales hire, and increases in our SEO and paid media teams. 

We’ve been proudly remote since our 2017 founding, and JDM can be found in 14 states from coast to coast.

The stat I’m most proud of: 30% of our team members got promoted in 2022.

Content Highlights

We doubled down on thought leadership in 2022, giving our team of great marketing minds lots of opportunities to help push the industry forward.

We published over 100 posts on the JDM blog! Some of our most popular posts from the year included:

• Top 5 Quality Link Building Strategies to Use in 2022
• Connect CRM Data to Google Ads
• What to Know About Google’s Performance Max Campaigns
• 4 Content Marketing Mistakes to Avoid
• Google Ads evolved, The Alpha-Beta Process has to evolve too

We launched JDM Bytes, our monthly marketing newsletter; published a half-dozen client case studies; and authored guides helping readers tackle GA4 migration, Facebook advertising for D2C companies, and TikTok ads for B2B.

I’m really encouraged that the industry is picking up on what we’re building here. I’m still excited that Crunchbase featured my 7 Hard-Learned Lessons from Building a Remote Business, and we were featured in a few other outlets including FierceNow and the radio show Spar, with Jamila Bey.

I’ve been an avid fan of Search Engine Land for years, which makes it even cooler that Head of SEO & Content Adam Tanguay and Head of Paid Acquisition Laura Schiele are both monthly columnists now. Adam’s posts included a widely read column introducing an SEO forecasting template, and as I write this, Laura’s December post on the best and worst updates from Google ads in 2022 is trending as the most-read post of the week.

People & Culture Initiatives

As the team grew, so did our focus on building a great culture, from the hiring process forward. 

To refine our hiring process in alignment with our goal of being a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive company, we:

• Added optional demographic questions and Equal Opportunity questions to our job ads to better understand whether our ads are appealing to a diverse candidate pool.
• Asked for preferred pronouns in our application process.
• Built resources and training for inclusive interviewing and unbiased hiring.

To improve our employee and managerial development, we: 

• Implemented employee check-ins to identify company trends and areas for improvement and areas of strength.
• Implemented leadership training for all managers.

To improve the inclusivity of our culture, we:

• Recognized Juneteenth as a paid U.S. holiday.
• Introduced a gender-neutral travel reimbursement policy to cover medical reimbursement for procedures not provided in each employee’s geographical area.
  
  

Fun and Celebrations

All of this hard work needs some fun and team-building to balance it out, and we took our fun seriously in 2022.

The team-building highlight of the year was a summer meet-up in Denver to celebrate JDM’s fifth anniversary.

We celebrated 22 workiversaries, 1 wedding, 3 new furbabies (Kahlua, Freya, and Chimichanga), and my wife and I welcomed our first kiddo, Lily, this summer.

Our Halloween costume contest winners included Little Red Riding Hood and company, a cross-universe wizard/witch family, and a cowpoke duo. 

We wrapped up the year with a virtual holiday party fueled by DoorDash gift cards, hot cocoa kits, and custom JDM cookies for the occasion. We brought our festive attire, played games, celebrated the year, and most importantly had our first annual JDEmmies ceremony.

Looking Forward to 2023

All in all, 2022 was a year to celebrate, and I’m happy I get to do it with the best marketers in the business. We’re looking forward to helping more clients grow, continuing to provide new services, and sharing our marketing insights along the way. Here’s to a great start to 2023!

Interested in joining the team or working with us this year? Check out our open roles or contact us to see if we’re a fit to help your company!