Krest Marketing was founded in Newport Beach in 2007 by Nathan Shane.
Nathan came up in the early commercial internet, back when a business getting online was a project rather than a given. That stretch taught him something most agencies still get wrong: the hard part was never getting attention. It was what happened in the minutes afterward.
By 2007 he was watching local practices make the same mistake at scale. A dental office would spend real money on search and ads, generate genuine enquiries, and lose most of them to a voicemail box and a form nobody checked until Tuesday. The marketing was working. The business was not growing. Everyone blamed the marketing.
Krest started as the answer to that. We ran the ads and built the sites, and then we stayed on the phone. Nineteen years later that is still the part clients hire us for — and the part they are usually surprised anyone offers.
Krest Marketing is a digital marketing agency based in Newport Beach, California. We run search engine optimization, Google Ads, website design, social media, email marketing, reputation management and video production for practices and local businesses across the United States. The office is in Newport Beach; the work is remote, in any state.
We also run the part most agencies hand back to the client: the follow-up. Every enquiry a campaign produces is answered automatically by text and email, offered appointment times from your live calendar, and chased for the next two weeks if it goes quiet. You and your front desk see all of it in one inbox.
We eventually built our own platform to do this rather than renting someone else’s, which is why it comes with the work instead of being billed on top of it.
Most marketing problems presented to us are not marketing problems. The campaign is generating enquiries. The enquiries are arriving. What is missing is anyone getting to them before the person has moved on and called the next practice on the list.
An enquiry that gets a reply in under a minute is a conversation. The same enquiry four hours later is a voicemail. Nothing about the ad changed.
That is an unglamorous thing to build an agency around, and it is the reason we do work most agencies would rather not — accounts that get disapproved, categories where the copy has to survive a compliance review, practices where a single missed call is a material amount of money. The businesses with the most to lose from slow follow-up are usually the ones operating under the most constraints.
We would rather be the agency that fixes the boring half than the one with the best-looking deck.
Healthcare and behavioral health practices. Law firms, including personal injury. Med spas and cosmetic practices. Dental practices. Home improvement companies, financial services, real estate, professional services, restaurants, franchises and e-commerce brands.
Most of our clients are owner-run businesses somewhere between one location and a handful, in categories where a new client is worth enough that losing one to a slow callback is genuinely expensive.
There are six of us, which means there is no account-management layer between you and the person doing the work.
