Michelle Smith

CEO – Lead Strategist

What's it like to be both fearless and thoughtful? Ask Michelle Smith, one of the first women to build their own Search Engine Marketing agencies.

Michelle created Idyllwild Advertising in 2007 - the year of the very first iPhone - and even then Michelle already had a clear vision for what digital marketing would become and what could be accomplished by the right company, with top talent and a unique business philosophy.

Michelle's success has come from combining digital marketing smarts with a passion for building relationships between brands and their customers. As Idyllwild CEO, Michelle now leads a multi-million dollar Idyllwild agency and a team of content specialists, developers, and programmers recognized for delivering innovative, effective projects to remarkable companies.

What do you need to be a highly successful woman CEO in the digital marketing world and also a mom, an artist, and a gardening fanatic who loves to make jewelry and explore the mountains with her Australian Shepherds? Be fearless and thoughtful.

Michelle Smith Interview

If you really care about clients and exceptional performance, if you truly love and "get" marketing then digital promises endless opportunity. That's the way I saw it when I started Idyllwild in 2007. Still do. At that time digital marketing was basically in its infancy - hard to imagine but that's the same year the first iPhone was introduced. Now we all live in a digital world. It's a world that is constantly changing and that has radically transformed marketing. Successfully guiding my clients and keeping them as leaders on this journey is a mixture of learning, teaching, coaching and plain hard work, but so rewarding and so much fun.

Without experts on board folks will get left behind; and unfortunately, lose opportunity and profitability. To keep up, you either need killer internal teams or an agency with super talented, organized, dedicated specialists; and in some exceptional cases, both. The digital marketing challenge for any business today is how to navigate through the ocean of digital companies out there. I'm sure most of these digital companies have the very best intentions. I'm also sure there are just a handful that can deliver on them. At Idyllwild we are very good at staying ahead of change but we keep the same values today as we did when we started. We get to know our clients, their business objectives, and we cut through the noise and clutter – we're guided by 'real' performance metrics. Nothing we do is on "auto-pilot" because success doesn't work that way.

When you find a creative, capable, accessible, digital agency who understands your business, keep them! If they are truly making your goals a priority it's an agency that will earn your trust every single day. It's the solution to success in the face of so many channels, so many changes. Buy an off-the-shelf solution and let's hope you get what you paid for. But that solution can be out of date almost as soon as you take it out of the box. Business owners need someone, or some team, just as committed, and just as accountable, to the success of their business as they are.

From day one we have nurtured our unique business philosophy. Sometimes we have even passed up on a short-term profit to do so, but I wouldn't change a thing. I'm sincerely happy when my clients are happy. We've built, we've adapted, we've met with success and early on, we made a mistake or two. All of this means we've become better. We attract top talent to our teams and amazing clients to our portfolio. We take a different approach to "digital agency." For any business to succeed an effective digital presence is essential but it can do even more. It often also serves as the foundation on which we'll help a business build every aspect of their marketing efforts, completely syncing the entire brand – I love to see them wrapped neatly together...with a great big bow.