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Ted Lau

Back in 2002, Ted Lau opened his agency Ballistic Arts in the quiet suburbs of Vancouver. Starting in the room above his parents’ garage, Ballistic Arts opened its doors with a core focus on “new digital video technology”. In very short order, services expanded to graphic design and a website design – hardcoding websites in HTML and FrontPage. Over the past few years, Ballistic Arts transformed into a full service digital marketing lead generation agency.

Spanning two decades so far, Ballistic Arts has won several awards and has serviced many industries. Beginning with mom-and-pop shops in the early days to junior mining firms, health care providers, and global real estate developers, Ballistic Arts now focuses on helping B2B Professional Service Firms, B2B Distributors & Manufacturers, and B2B SaaS providers get qualified sales leads with effective digital marketing.

Not afraid to take on economic downturns, Ted co-founded Ballistic Arts shortly after 9/11, steered the agency successfully during the Great Recession, and expanded their clientele across North America during the Covid-19 crisis.

Answering the question why clients engage with Ballistic Arts, Ted’s response describes their refreshing and business-minded approach,

“Companies typically come to us because they’re worried their marketing efforts are just for show and not really affecting the bottom line. Or, they’re frustrated that they’ve tried digital marketing in-house but aren’t seeing any real financial returns for their efforts.

“We provide effective ROI to our clients who want to raise brand awareness and get sales leads for their organizational goals by crafting high-quality engaging content marketing funnels for their business.

“Ballistic Arts acts as our clients’ marketing department with full divisions in lead generation digital marketing, graphic design, video production, and web development.

“Our goal is to:

1. Help companies increase their brand awareness
2. Increase prospect engagement for clients through digital marketing
3. Drive sales leads for clients to achieve their financial goals”

Tell us about yourself?

A bit about me personally – I’m a small business owner who has run a successful award-winning 7-figure marketing agency for 20 years. I’m happily married to my lovely wife and business partner Marisa, and we have a wonderful daughter. We live on the beautiful West Coast.

I also co-host Marketing News Canada, the #1 national podcast for all things marketing, advertising and communications. Guests have included Col. Chris Hadfield, Netflix Co-founder Marc Randolf, Karina Kogan Oura Ring CMO & formerly of Peloton, Mark Harrison from Black Talent Initiative, and Google’s Chief Measurement Office Neil Hoyne.

Our client roster includes North America’s best-known brands: Marriott, Century 21, Tim Hortons, RBC, KPMG, amongst others.

If you could go back in time a year or two, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Stay calm and stay level-headed. It will all work out if you take all the unnecessary energy like worry and fear, and positively channel it into the direction you’re taking the company.

What problem does your business solve?

Too many B2B companies are disenchanted with digital marketing. They don’t think it works or matters for their business, which is a shame as they are leaving so much money on the table.

We help B2B professional services firms, and B2B distributors & manufacturers generate qualified sales leads through compelling creative content marketing and data precision analytics.

What is the inspiration behind your business?

I’d love to invite your readers to check out my recent blog: https://www.ballisticarts.com/blog/20-years-ballistic-arts

This should tell you a bit more about me, how I got started, and what inspires me. But ultimately, I just love being an entrepreneur, and feel even more excited waking up every day than I did a decade ago.

What is your magic sauce?

We combine compelling creative content marketing and data precision analytics to increase our clients’ leads by up to 600%.

What is the plan for the next 5 years? What do you want to achieve?

As mentioned, we are growing our engagement with companies all over North America. I love SoCal, and would love to continue growing our footprint there.

But who knows, things change so fast these days. Maybe we’ll be doing metaverse marketing, or start a foundation helping young business owners or maybe create an accelerator for entrepreneurs! There is so much opportunity and I’m excited to explore them all!

What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

Oh, man… For the first 16 years of the business, we were relatively sheltered from major headwinds. Come year 17, the ship started to come apart at the seams. We experienced all sorts of problems that have befallen many business owners, but ALL WITHIN A 14-15 MONTH PERIOD.

Issues like vastly dwindling cash reserves, employees stealing from us, lawsuits, the taxman coming after us (due to “lottery” reasons says our CPA), partner battles and buy-outs, and 80% staff turnover – all happened in one fell swoop. That was not fun.

But with every crisis, there comes opportunities. For one, I had an opportunity to learn that Feedback is a Gift.

Have a peek at this blog post. https://www.ballisticarts.com/blog/feedback-is-a-gift

How can people get involved?

If you’re a B2B Service Provider, B2B Distributor & Manufacturer, or run a B2B SaaS company, and you’re worried about business sales plateauing or your sales are suffering due to painful economic conditions, we can help you hit your revenue goals. Visit us at www.ballisticarts.com

If you’re a fellow marketer, please check out Marketing News Canada: https://marketingnewscanada.com/news-show

If you’d like to connect, chat about running a business, cooking, whiskey, or marketing, DM me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ballisticarts/