who we are
Hi there,
Dolomite Marketing was founded by me, Benedict LeFort (you can call me Ben).
When I graduated with a degree in English Literature from Grinnell College, I was told that my degree was “good for everything”. I took that idea and ran with it.
After graduating, I earned a CTEFL degree (Certificate in Teaching English as a Foreign Language) that helped me land a job in Santiago, Chile. Besides learning Spanish to the point where I was able to edit a bilingual book, I spent 3+ years teaching adults the ins and outs of regular past tense verb pronunciations, mysterious idioms, and the joy of singing Sinatra’s “Fly Me To The Moon” (among other things).
Then I returned to my beloved home turf, the Upper Midwest.
(That’s where the “dolomite” in Dolomite Marketing comes from. I was raised in the western suburbs of Chicago, where the dolomite limestone bedrock gave rise to the native prairies. And now I’m in Southeastern Wisconsin, where my home in Milwaukee’s Bay View neighborhood rests upon a bluff of dolomite.)
Back in Chicago from South America, I worked as a reporter for a bilingual Spanish/English neighborhood newspaper as well as an educational publishing company. I learned the finer points of copywriting, editing and project management, got to explore the city’s fascinating Latino communities, and volunteered to teach creative writing workshops at a public library.
A job managing communications, marketing and volunteers for a nonprofit that delivered food to over 8,000 families every month brought me to Milwaukee. During my 7 years there, I touched every aspect of their communications and marketing. I built strategic marketing plans (they didn’t have any when I started), learned about GRPs enough to buy print and TV and radio spots the smart way, coordinated outdoor advertising campaigns, produced fundraising materials and annual reports, and modernized the organization’s online marketing by launching their presence in social media, email marketing, and paid search as well as fine tuning their website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
As it turned out, I really liked SEO. I moved to Milwaukee’s premier agency specializing in search engine marketing (SEM) where for 3+ years I focused on keyword research, content writing and optimization, technical SEO, local SEO, and link building.
I eventually helped lead the SEO department, formalized and optimized internal processes, and contributed to sales efforts. Beyond working for a number of clients in a diverse array of industries, I got to rub shoulders with very smart people every day and learned more about leadership than I ever thought imaginable.
In 2015 I started up this independent consulting business, marrying up my passion for nonprofits, social impact ventures and small- to medium-sized businesses with my strengths in strategic thinking, project management, exacting attention to detail, clear communication, and a collaborative work style.
Since then, I have served dozens of clients of all sizes in a wide array of industry verticals. I even “took a year off consulting” to found a separate SEO agency that is still going strong today.
So here I am, ready to put my shoulder to the wheel.
Onward!
Ben
PS – Here’s my LinkedIn if you’d like all the details…
values
generosity
Deep in our souls, we believe in doing well by doing good.
We believe in generosity to our clients and to the larger world. We won’t hold back on sharing our expertise, experience, and energy with you because we want to help your business or organization grow and do more good in the world.
smart, ethical integrity
Simply put: we deliver.
The medium length version: we do what we’ll say what we do (and we mean that).
The alternate version: We do the right thing by our customer, ourselves, and the world. We don’t work with businesses whose only focus is money, money and more money. And BTW, we don’t work with SEO clients whose only focus is rankings (we prefer traffic that converts into dollars, donations, volunteers, etc., and we think you will, too.)
The long version, a.k.a., what we aren’t: Unfortunately the world of online (and offline) marketing is populated by a lot of snake oil salesmen (and saleswomen), black hats, and frankly, people who don’t deliver high quality results. We are the exact opposite of all of that.
We wear white hats for everything we do. We don’t take shortcuts or recommend marketing strategies that don’t deliver proven, long-term ROI. We love the 80-20 rule: we focus on the 20% of changes that will drive 80% of your business, not the other way around.
This is especially true of our approach to SEO: we follow the search engine guidelines, and we focus on what will make a difference for your organization or business.
If you want search engines to consistently drive customers, donors and supporters to your website for the long haul, SEO has to be a long-term strategy. It takes significant work to build a solid SEO foundation, then it takes consistent long-term effort to stay ahead of the competition and keep up to date with ever-changing algorithms. It makes no sense to try to trick Google – they’re smarter than the average bear!
(So if you’re looking for black hat, short-lived spammy tactics and all you care about is rankings, please keep looking elsewhere.)
transparency & education
Most of our clients are not experts in integrated marketing, or SEO, or copywriting, or keyword research, or link building, or analytics. Through our work, it’s our goal to educate our clients about these sometimes technical and often obfuscated marketing specialties.
The end goal of our process is to give your internal team the direction, technical understanding, and best practice knowledge to advance your organization’s mission. This is how we become true partners in your mission.
And we don’t believe in “secret sauce”.
Many SEOs and marketing agencies have black boxes. If you have a question, they turn to their magic marketing/SEO black box, then give you a high level answer without sharing the reasoning behind it (oh, and they probably charge you for every minute they spend writing that email). This is not the Dolomite Marketing way.
We believe in transparency. We’ll tell you why we’ve made the recommendations and spend as much time as it takes to explain them. We know it’s important to your team not only to know what to do, but why they are being asked to spend their valuable time doing it.
We’ve always found that is the best way to not only achieve the goals of our work together, but to build up the capabilities of our clients’ internal teams in the process.
data-driven creativity
The creative process is key to marketing, and we love creating content that is beautiful, smart and meaningful. The great thing is that these days we can marry that impulse with the necessity of ensuring every marketing dollar that you spend is providing a solid return on investment.
The magic element in that marriage is data. We love digging deep into the data and discovering the insights that will not only provide clear direction from a marketing standpoint, but that will help you advance the mission of your organization or business.
let’s get in touch
Fill out this form, give us a call or send an email and we’ll get right back to you.