Matt started his career in the tech industry consulting for startups, government sectors, and a handful of Fortune 100 companies. Queen developed a DEEP understanding of business technology over those 15 years. He fell in love with digital marketing, which perfectly married his background in tech with his passion for growing companies. After experiencing a life-changing impact with his newborn son first-hand, he dove head first into the ChiroPractic industry founding ChiroPraise, a St. Louis based full-service marketing agency focused on helping chiropractors grow their practices and spreading the message of chiropractic care around the globe. ChiroPraise grew to 15 employees and just shy of $1M in revenue during its first full calendar year. Queen lives in St. Louis with his wife and three kids.
Please tell us about yourself, where you work and your role at your company.
I’m the Founder and CEO at ChiroPraise.
How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?
I started my career as a software engineer, which included building websites. I was intrigued by the challenge and mystery of what changes I could make that would make my sites rise to the top.
How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years? And, how do you think year 2019 will shape up for SEO industry?
You can see now that SEO is crucial to your overall web strategy. SEO has evolved so much over the last 10 years and is so much more involved than it used to be. In the past, the big guys (companies that are generally searched by name), did not have to do much on the SEO front and didn’t see the point. Now, they have to consider this because Google has evolved to caring more about the user experience and getting the searcher the best information, so just being a big name doesn’t count anymore. It is also interesting to see what practices are now considered ‘black hat’ that were once considered best practices. I think 2019 is going to be the year of voice search. Everyone has some form of AI in their life, either on the phone, in their house, or on their computer. So far there has been some difficulty navigating how to optimise for voice search. I think 2019 is the year that we see significant changes in how we optimize for voice search. It will be interesting to see how things pan out!
What are the services you provide to your clients and what do you think makes your business stand out among your competitors?
We are a full-service marketing agency, but we are niched-down into chiropractic marketing exclusively, which sets us apart in itself. However, we also have a unique blend of digital and traditional that is relatively unique.
As you have mentioned about a unique blend of digital and traditional, could you brief more about this?
I have found that most agencies either go the route of digital or traditional. We like to use a blend to get the best of both worlds! Although currently heavier on the digital side (about 83%) highly utilizing social media strategies and SEO campaigns, we also can leverage mass media through the more traditional channels such as tv, radio, or even billboards (which some of those are even digital these days).
Everybody knows what you have achieved, I would like to talk about your failure stories and how they impacted your professional life. (As we know Rome was not built in a day)
Nobody wants to lose. It was particularly painful for me when a client would quit or leave us for a competitor. When we first started, I would take that VERY personally. It would keep me up at night tying knots in my stomach and would be the first thing on my mind when I woke up. What could we have done better? What should we have done differently? It would eat me up inside. I finally learned that not every client is the perfect fit for us and we got good at targeting our ideal avatar. I also learned that in some cases it was possible to outgrow each other, and that was ok too. At the end of the day, I learned to take on the mantra to stay focused on providing value to our clients. As long as I knew we were providing value and helping our clients grow, I could feel proud about what our team accomplished for them even if they were leaving.