Mary Coombs

Mary Coombs
Mary Coombs, a partner at Coombs Marketing, has spent the last 10 years helping small and medium size business grow their brand presence and qualified prospects using Inbound Marketing tools, SEO, SEM, and social media, as well as traditional outbound online tools like Facebook advertising and radio. She has hundreds of hours of social media presence in her client’s name. She creates and acquires relevant content for her clients to share with their target market. Mary helps her clients to segment communications to match prospects’ needs at various stages of the buying cycle. She is an expert at using LinkedIn as a prospecting tool for clients. Mary has recently completed the HubSpot Partner Certification for Coombs Marketing. She co-founded Coombs Productions, Inc in 1986 and developed it into a successful marketing agency, Coombs Marketing, which was recognized on the Fortune 500 list of fastest-growing privately held businesses. While at Coombs, she has earned a number of marketing, branding, web, and business television awards. Her client account relationships included Kodak, Xerox, Bausch & Lomb, Constellation Brands, Duke Energy among others. Mary is an accomplished producer of media events and a team leader in all aspects of special event management and production. She co-created a satellite industry symposium for major corporations using satellite technology to communicate with their customers and employees. Clients include, Toys "R" Us, New York Life, ITVA Foundation, Weight Watchers of America, Xerox, Novell, and Toro. Mary directed the Coombs team through brand execution for Xerox Global Services and Duke Power Business Services and rebranding efforts at Duke Energy Corporate. Mary graduated from St. John Fisher College and lives in the Charlotte, NC area with her family.
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Recent Posts

Social Media - That sells!

by Mary Coombs on June 20,2015

Social selling is targeted social media. It's social media with a VERY clear target and absolutely measurable ROI.

Social media, in general, can be good when there is value to creating and nurturing a persona that wants to "belong" to a community. Some products and services work like that. It's a club that self identifies as "engaged with the brand".

But that's not "of value" for lots of business models. There's just no real ROI without a targeted strategy that integrates "social" as an effective selling or brand building tool with real measures of effectiveness.

I'm not easy to buy from

by Mary Coombs on April 28,2015


The business we do with our customers is, well, very intimate. But before we go there, let's look back for a minute.

Marketing has changed radically over the last decade. There are many different kinds of marketing and advertising agencies and lots of different crafts and disciplines. For many decades, the advertising or marketing communications model dominated. In those models “the agency” would collaborate with the customer to make some discreet project or set of projects. And generally, the agency would be responsible for doing a good job of creating and executing the project. They would be responsible for the project being good, but not for ...

Why onboard new inbound marketing and sales clients?

by Mary Coombs on April 13,2015

So what's the big deal about onboarding a client?

In the 20 years of owning our first agency, we never considered having an onboarding process for new clients.

Typically, the client accepted the proposal and we just got to work. So why is it so important, now that we are an inbound marketing and sales agency, to have a great onboarding process for new clients?

Is your online presence attracting the best talent?

by Mary Coombs on November 30,2014

Watching football on Sunday had me thinking about attracting the best talent to a team.  How does a growing business attract the best talent today, and how can they enhance what they're doing?

If you're trying to attract the top graduates in a field, what do those students want to know about getting a job in your field, or at your company? How do students today learn about anything?  Online of course!

Are you providing the answers to them? The Sales Lion Inbound podcast, Inbound as a Recruiting Tooltalks about using the inbound methodology to recruit top talent to your company.  They suggest a best practice for recruiting includes dedicating a part of your website to "Careers." So what messages would attract the right students to your site? What topics are students interested in?