The Skai 5: Five Questions with Seer Interactive Founder Wil Reynolds

Our first agency to achieve Professional Partner status on multiple platforms—certified on both Skai Search and Skai Social—is Seer Interactive.

Over 800 independent agencies work with Skai to power digital advertising programs for their clients. While many of our client practitioners take the extra step to get certified on their Skai channel platform, some agencies—such as Seer Interactive—take the additional steps of achieving Professional Partner status. This status means that they are in the top tier of Skai expertise with multiple practitioners certified.

Seer Interactive is a digital marketing agency with offices in Philadelphia and San Diego. When Seer was founded in 2002 by Wil Reynolds, it was a one-person search firm. Fast forward 18 years later in 2020, Seer has nearly 200 team members distributed remotely and across two office locations in Philadelphia and San Diego and 6 service lines including SEO, Paid Media (PPC and Paid Social), Analytics, Creative, and Conversion Rate Optimization. 

In today’s post, we chat with Wil Reynolds about the agency he founded (who is also the agency’s VP of Innovation) to learn more about Seer Interactive and what makes it one of Inc’s 2020 Best Places to Work. 

Five Questions with Seer Interactive Founder Wil Reynolds

How did Seer Interactive get started and why the name “Seer”?

Before Seer, I was working for a digital company, and one day, I asked my boss if I’d be able to spend my lunch volunteering for Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia—and to my surprise, they said no!

I was requesting that I leave during lunch, but make up the extra hour on the back half of the day, when my employer said no, I then realized that I wanted to cultivate a company who values giving back as much as they value the day-to-day work. 

From that moment, Seer was born. 

As for the name “Seer”, it’s based on the foundation of two of its meanings:

• Mystical—which was relevant because back in the early 2000s marketing on the Internet was in its infancy. Most people thought of it as something otherworldly. 
• Visionary—although I’d be the last person to actually call myself a “visionary”, the term resonated with me because of my enjoyment in envisioning “what could be” and staying ahead of that innovation. 

Shout out to AgileCat for helping us come up with the company’s name!

Who are some of your clients and what kind of brands are a good fit for Seer?

For Seer, it’s not about brands, it’s about the people who are steering those brands. 

We like to work with people who want to use data to make decisions and solve challenges, not their gut. We value stakeholders who challenge us to innovate, are willing to try data-backed big ideas that are “outside the box”, and want to work hand in hand with us as a partner—not simply as an execution agency that takes requests. 

\Always striving to be better is a mentality that shows us their priorities are aligned with ours, and working together will produce true impact on their business. 

Some of our partners include:

• Trex Company, the world’s #1 largest manufacturer of wood-alternative decking product
• Carta, an equity management SaaS company
• AMResorts® (AMR), the fastest-growing luxury leisure resort company in North America
• Baptist Health, a healthcare provider with locations across Kentucky and Southern Indiana

If a brand is reading this and looking for an agency, why should they choose Seer? What stands you apart from other agencies? 

Seer’s 200+ business consultants double as SEO, PPC, and Analytics subject matter experts. They combine client’s online and offline data sources with industry trends and audience intelligence on a regular basis. These methodologies drive customer journey optimizations otherwise not possible in siloes. 

I’ve always said, “Seer cares about your budget like it’s our own,” which is unlike most other agencies you’ll find out there. Over the past few years, I’ve worked with our team to take that ethos to the next level and build solutions using big data to save you money and identify inefficiencies at scale. On average, Seer clients onboarding these programs benefit from a ROAS increase of at least 19%—enabling reinvestment into efforts that truly drive growth. 

So, hey, if you’re ready to invest time in a partnership, dive deep into your data, and go beyond the vanity metrics of digital marketing, let’s get chatting. 

How do Skai’s platforms help you better serve your clients?

We don’t believe in a blanket approach when onboarding clients to new tools. 

We use a custom, data-driven strategy for campaign management tools by focusing on features that will add the most value depending on the client and account complexity. We are able to hone in on these features by using our proprietary data warehouse and Skai optimizations across clients and industries. 

Overall, we see Skai benefiting our clients in two main areas: 

1. Performance improvements. By leveraging Skai’s unique Google partnership and its offline data capabilities, we can optimize campaigns across platforms to help reach even the most aggressive of goals for our Clients. 
2. Day-to-day account efficiencies. Account teams at Seer maximize Skai’s automation capabilities for bulk builds, bidding, budget management, etc. in order to focus on what we do best (and what differentiates us most from other agencies!) — driving strategy and solving whatever complex business challenges our Clients’ are facing. 

Seer Interactive does a lot of community service. Can you tell us about that?

Getting back to why Seer was started, I envisioned a company that prioritized contributions to organizations that were making the world a better place, and at Seer, we live into that vision every single day.

We offer unlimited volunteer hours to our team members, allowing them to take time off to make a difference in their communities. For example, we regularly encourage our team to take part in charity events (like sleeping outside to raise money for the homeless) and we’ve logged over 1,500 hours through skills-based volunteering opportunities in the communities we live/work in.

Outside of volunteering, Seer proudly donated over $205,000 to charitable causes in 2019 — putting us on track to reach $1,000,000 in donations since I founded the company in 2002! 

A large part of that has been a result of donating 100% of ticket sales from our annual 1-day digital marketing conference, Seerfest, to charity. 

We’ve raised over $45,000 for charities near and dear to our hearts since the inception of Seerfest in 2018. And this year, I’m looking forward to seeing us beat that number as Seerfest will be streaming worldwide on October 22, 2020, and supporting Coded by Kids (a nonprofit that helps underrepresented youth achieve careers in computer science, technology entrepreneurship, and software development).

Skai’s marketing platforms enhance your agency’s unique approach.

As a market leader for over 14 years, Skai’s suite of tools enables advertisers to drive performance and boost productivity.

But, if you’re like Seer Interactive and focused on a data-driven approach, then you probably agree with Skai’s philosophy of Total Marketing Intelligence. In the next era of Marketing, best-in-class campaign management is going to still be necessary, but it’s going to be the brands that can make the best data-driven decisions that will have a competitive advantage. Skai’s roadmap and innovation are guided by this principle. 

Learn more at Kenshoo.com or reach out to set up a brief demo to see our platforms in action.