Social media boom shifted practice at Wax Marketing

Wax Marketing Inc.

Description: Integrated marketing communications agency

Headquarters: St. Paul

Founded: 2002

Founder and President: Bonnie Harris

Employees: Zero, though she has a network of contractors

Website: www.waxmarketing.com 

Bonnie Harris regularly popped up in Upsize Minnesota’s earlier issues, whether it was offering advice on marketing, contributing articles on pricing or on starting a new business segment.

In 2007, the founder of Wax Marketing Inc. created WaxCoach.com to complement her main business. The idea was that she would offer tips and articles about do-it-yourself publicity and marketing. A free membership got access to a newsletter while $139 got subscribers lifetime access to discussion boards where they could pose questions.

The site was aimed at sole proprietors, authors and other smaller entities who didn’t have the cash to pay for a retainer, though Harris thought with the right help, they might grow and someday become her clients.

“There were a lot of small businesses that were asking for help,” she says. 

Then social media hit the scene, not only making it easier for those smaller businesses to create their own voices and ways to be heard, but also changing the landscape for her traditional clientele at Wax Marketing.

“It became much easier for smaller businesses to do their own marketing and not have to navigate that more complex landscape of traditional marketing,” she says, though adding she will still do one-on-one meetings with small companies who seek her counsel. She just doesn’t do it as a formalized business.

She still believes in the concept of having multiple complementary revenue streams, but to grow WaxCoach.com on its own, she decided, would be a distraction. She had enough going on maintaining Wax Marketing as the industry changed. 

“It just wasn’t something I had enough time for,” Harris says of WaxCoach.com. “The other part of my business really got busy around 2009 and 2010. A lot of what I was doing shifted for some of the same reasons.”

The hundreds of new mediums through which businesses can communicate with potential customers also changed how Wax Marketing worked with clients, moving most away from doing traditional public relations centered around earned media and toward multi-pronged plans. Harris became an integrated marketer, focused on creating strategies that utilize whatever the best channels are for each individual client, typically mid-sized growing companies with revenue between $20 million and $100 million who are competing against well-known brands.

In addition to running her company, Harris got a master’s Degree from West Virginia University in integrated marketing and now teaches it there, as well.

“We determine the audiences these companies are trying to reach, both their target customers and those who influence them, and we create strategies that try to reach across these channels and integrate those channels, so it’s a much more powerful program,” she says.

As these marketing opportunities have evolved, so has Wax Marketing. Her work with any individual client is likely much longer term than it was 15 years ago. Harris is often hired to help create a marketing program, then retained to execute those plans or train internal employees to do so. 

This allows Harris to pick and choose her clients in a way that maintains her work-life balance. Once involved with a tech start-up that was sold in the mid-1990s to a publicly held technology firm, where she toiled during the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s, she’s less interested in massive growth and more interested in doing interesting, satisfying work that pays her bills. 

“My goal in this company was never to grow it to a large agency and sell it,” she says. “My goal was to find really interesting work, help the business community grow, and pay my bills and be able to have the quality of life I didn’t have when I was in tech.”

Harris has, in fact, actually downsized a bit. Around 2010, she had a couple handfuls of employees during the middle of the Great Recession and was growing more than she initially intended when she had an a-ha moment. She wanted to spend a day with a dying pet but instead had to go to the office to fix a computer.

“It was one of those moments where you just go ‘wait a minute, what do I want my life to be,’” she says. 

She closed her Grand Avenue office and started using contractors instead of employees to help with her work. While her time in the tech industry was successful, Harris learned she doesn’t mesh well with the “profit for profit’s sake” mentality, preferring the socially responsible outlook of today’s younger workers.

She still tries to spend around 10 percent of her time doing pro bono work for interesting people or causes she finds worthy. 

Harris still billed her biggest years in 2018 and 2019. She decided to scale back in 2020, then her work in the health care sector took off due to COVID-19 and the need to help medical clients navigate through challenges such as virtual doctor visits. It was more work than she intended for the year, but it came with a lot of satisfaction.

“Growing a company bigger is always the idea of what people think they need to do,” she says. “I love choosing the work I do. I’ve been really lucky to be able to do some cool things and if it’s grown, it’s grown organically in different directions rather than size. That has been the metric of success for me.”