Chicago Marketing Agency

Marketing Agency Chicago

About us.

We provide scalable solutions with industry expertise.

We’re the only Chicago marketing agency with a proven track record of utilizing systematic experimentation, measurement, and optimization to grow businesses across all of Chicago’s growing list of industries.

If you need global spanning capabilities, ranging from an international influencer network to a team of data-driven creatives and SEO focused copywriters, we provide a custom tailored experience to scale your market.

TOP Chicago

20 West Kinzie St

Chicago, IL 60654
United States of America

We’re the only Chicago marketing agency with a proven track record of utilizing systematic experimentation, measurement, and optimization to grow businesses across all of Chicago’s growing list of industries.

If you need global spanning capabilities, ranging from an international influencer network to a team of data-driven creatives and SEO focused copywriters, we provide a custom tailored experience to scale your market.

Our approach

Chicago Marketing Agency

From deep dives to broad appeal.

We believe that every campaign we work on is an opportunity to improve our skills and learn something new. We've worked for brands in dozens of verticals and developed deep expertise across a myriad of industries. We not only bring those insights to our clients working within those verticals, but discover ways to apply lessons across the board, improving effectiveness for all of our clients. It is exactly this approach that has allowed us to create innovative marketing and public relations campaigns that raise our clients and the entire industry to another level.

How we work.

Your background + our data.

We always begin our client partnerships with a closely collaborative merging of insights. We take your invaluable industry experience and then combine it with our extensive mass media analysis. Through social media listenings, surveys, and focus groups, we develop comprehensive understandings of your market, your competition, and your opportunities for expansion to deliver data-driven, effective campaigns that hit agreed-upon KPIs to reach our shared goals.

A full-service Chicago marketing agency

From the Millennium Park to the Magnificent Mile, we help Chicago companies market at scale

Chicago is home to some of the most forward-thinking, and storied companies in the world. With all of that talent walking around everywhere, we have a front row seat to the future of marketing, tech, and, PR that is second to none.  This allows us to not only have our fingers on the pulse of all the latest trends, but to put our own stamp on them, staying at the crest of the wave of digital marketing and social media at all times.

We collaborate closely with your internal brand team to align on key messages from minute one in order to make sure we fully understand your business and your needs. This understanding allows our brand strategists to take a holistic view and uncover the “white space” that separates your from your competitors. We don’t simply broadcast our messages in to the ether and hope that our audiences are paying attention, we prioritize the end audience, their needs, and specific use cases to break through the noise and rise above the din.

Are you in need of in-depth marketing research to understand your competitive strengths and weaknesses in the marketplace?  Our expert marketers are the best in using mass media analysis, social media listening, surveys, and focus groups to find the best angles to attack the competition and raise your brand above them.

Looking for world-class digital marketing that designed to integrate seamlessly with non-digital tactics? TOP’s team of keyword researchers work, landing page optimizers, and pay-per-click experts, work hand in hand with broadcast media buyers, out-of-home planners, and a full creative team of writers, makers, and strategists for a truly integrated 360-degree marketing experience.

This is all in the service of more conversions and greater revenue. We specialize in creating psychological triggers and leveraging the power of calendar-based marketing to make content ideas that are sticky, activating key emotions that cause consumers, customers, and key influencers to take action now.

We’ve also learned from the best performing startups from across the Chicagoland area.  We implement principles from agile software development to allows us to work in a series of systematic “sprints” that are aligned perfectly to key drive periods.  With this approach we achieve high productivity that is flexible enough to course correct with confidence at any given time.

The result is a Chicago marketing agency that has the soul of a fast-growing tech startup and the global reach of one of Chicago’s elite businesses. Let’s grab a coney and plot our next major marketing initiative.

Chicago Marketing Agency

A marketing agency marking our mark in Chicago

Quick question: If a marketing agency never existed before, how would we invent it using the tools and technology of today?

The answer is how we do it at TOP. Regardless of which marketing agency discipline we are working in; we believe in the power of great storytelling with rigorous testing. Not a day goes by that our Chicago marketing team isn’t conducting multivariate testing of key stories and messaging (A/B testing across multiple dimensions), analyzing the conversion rates, and then scaling up the “winning” story ideas and key messages to reach key KPIs and achieve higher ROI.  And we’re never satisfied with one answer to that question. It’s always evolving. Our clients love the insights they get into their optimal product story from the results of our multivariate testing and data-driven approach.

To be successful in 21st century digital marketing you have to be channel and platform agnostic. We’re experts across the board and on any given day you’ll find us shooting crisp viral video for a scrappy wearables start-up, rebranding a global CPG brand, hashing out SEO strategy for a local brick-and-mortar B2B business, managing a hot new SaaS company’s LinkedIn presence, or organizing a world-changing CSR campaign.

Just because we work in Chicago, doesn’t mean we spend all day behind a screen. Our experiential marketing and events planning team has hosted everything from viral man-on-the-street style stunts in across the city to million dollar conferences at the McCormick Center — always keeping the customer or consumer experience top of mind.

What makes us different?

FAQ

What is your marketing agency’s approach to day-to-day client management for Chicago brands?

Our account management systems, procedures, and teams are designed around four fundamental principles:  be proactive, responsive, flexible, and transparent.

When put together, these four principles give us the ability to have rapid feedback loops with our Chicago clients.  That’s why our clients call us a rapid-strike agency. For example, When a famous cat brand gave us two weeks notice to create a global activation (because no other agency could work that fast) we reached out to existing sponsors with a great partnership plans, created a series of videos from conception through final production working on a 24/7 production schedule, responded quickly to client feedback, and provided transparency every step of the way. These four principles allowed us to do this.

How does your marketing agency collaborate with other Chicago agencies?

Let's just say we play very well with others. Whether we're the lead agency, part of a team of agencies, or being brought in to fill a gap in other's capabilities, our team oriented approach translates perfectly to working with other creatives and digital marketers. This has helped us build up trust across the Chicago area. We’ve earned a reputation as a flexible partner that can assume new and changing agency roles as circumstances change.

How do you staff your Chicago marketing teams?

Chicago is chock full of talent and we're great at picking out the best of the best, giving them the resources they need for success, and putting them against initiatives that will help them shine. Our resource allocation and management process is a four-step system:  holistic brainstorming, task breakdown, resource alignment, and resource allocation.

Throughout our campaigns, our Chicago team works shoulder-to-shoulder to produce an end-to-end result that crosses disciplinary boundaries.  Since we’re a unique hybrid of local agency with global scale, we combine vertical integration with the ability to make rapid course corrections that simply aren’t possible for more traditional agencies.

How do you respond to emerging news stories and cultural trends in Chicago and beyond?

Mass media and social media are consistently evolving, getting faster and more spontaneous by the day. Our in-house data analytics, creative, and social media teams constantly monitor real-time Google search data, Twitter hashtags, YouTube plays, and news headlines to identify trending conversations and map cross-channel insights. We use these insights to make course corrections to our original marketing plan, all while making sure it ladders back to our established goals and wireframe to ensure core brand messaging remains while creating innovative content fast.

It's critical for digital marketing companies to stay on-trend at all times. We know that to do that we have to be out in the world, experiencing life, and turning those personal experiences into brilliant ideas for our clients. So whether we're catching the Cubs at Wrigley, having a drink at The Library, or restaurant hopping during Restaurant Week, we're soaking up all the sights and smells of this vibrant city and applying it to our work. We even have a Slack channel where we share all the great new ideas we've come up with while living in this amazing town. 

How do you onboard new Chicago marketing clients?

Most of our client work starts with a 21-day onboarding plan that is custom-tailored to the each client and unique to each discipline. We've systematized this approach over time to near perfection.  But we also understand that each Chicago client has its own needs, and we are sensitive to that.  We take stock of our client’s communication preferences and select the best tools from among our wide array of technologies to fit the client’s demands.  We’ll establish meeting schedules, a reporting cadence, and key role assignments.  Our goal is to be proactive and take the necessary action steps without you having to ask.

What is your marketing agency’s approach to day-to-day client management for Chicago brands?

Our account management systems, procedures, and teams are designed around four fundamental principles:  be proactive, responsive, flexible, and transparent.

When put together, these four principles give us the ability to have rapid feedback loops with our Chicago clients.  That’s why our clients call us a rapid-strike agency. For example, When a famous cat brand gave us two weeks notice to create a global activation (because no other agency could work that fast) we reached out to existing sponsors with a great partnership plans, created a series of videos from conception through final production working on a 24/7 production schedule, responded quickly to client feedback, and provided transparency every step of the way. These four principles allowed us to do this.

How does your marketing agency collaborate with other Chicago agencies?

Let's just say we play very well with others. Whether we're the lead agency, part of a team of agencies, or being brought in to fill a gap in other's capabilities, our team oriented approach translates perfectly to working with other creatives and digital marketers. This has helped us build up trust across the Chicago area. We’ve earned a reputation as a flexible partner that can assume new and changing agency roles as circumstances change.

How do you staff your Chicago marketing teams?

Chicago is chock full of talent and we're great at picking out the best of the best, giving them the resources they need for success, and putting them against initiatives that will help them shine. Our resource allocation and management process is a four-step system:  holistic brainstorming, task breakdown, resource alignment, and resource allocation.

Throughout our campaigns, our Chicago team works shoulder-to-shoulder to produce an end-to-end result that crosses disciplinary boundaries.  Since we’re a unique hybrid of local agency with global scale, we combine vertical integration with the ability to make rapid course corrections that simply aren’t possible for more traditional agencies.

How do you respond to emerging news stories and cultural trends in Chicago and beyond?

Mass media and social media are consistently evolving, getting faster and more spontaneous by the day. Our in-house data analytics, creative, and social media teams constantly monitor real-time Google search data, Twitter hashtags, YouTube plays, and news headlines to identify trending conversations and map cross-channel insights. We use these insights to make course corrections to our original marketing plan, all while making sure it ladders back to our established goals and wireframe to ensure core brand messaging remains while creating innovative content fast.

It's critical for digital marketing companies to stay on-trend at all times. We know that to do that we have to be out in the world, experiencing life, and turning those personal experiences into brilliant ideas for our clients. So whether we're catching the Cubs at Wrigley, having a drink at The Library, or restaurant hopping during Restaurant Week, we're soaking up all the sights and smells of this vibrant city and applying it to our work. We even have a Slack channel where we share all the great new ideas we've come up with while living in this amazing town. 

How do you onboard new Chicago marketing clients?

Most of our client work starts with a 21-day onboarding plan that is custom-tailored to the each client and unique to each discipline. We've systematized this approach over time to near perfection.  But we also understand that each Chicago client has its own needs, and we are sensitive to that.  We take stock of our client’s communication preferences and select the best tools from among our wide array of technologies to fit the client’s demands.  We’ll establish meeting schedules, a reporting cadence, and key role assignments.  Our goal is to be proactive and take the necessary action steps without you having to ask.

Let’s talk about your project

Next steps

  1. We’ll ask key questions

    We are hyper-efficient at synthesizing your core needs.

  2. We’ll draft a proposal

    We can harness the expertise of our local + global team.

  3. We’ll present the plan

    We will show you how to turn ideas into scalable action.