By Josh Kilen, Founder & Strategic Director, Cascade Digital Marketing
We’re proud to announce that Cascade Digital Marketing has been voted Best Marketing Agency (Gold) and Best Web Design (Silver) in the 2025 Best of Pierce County awards, presented by The News Tribune.
This wasn’t a panel of judges or an industry trade group. It was the community. More than 170,000 votes were cast across 5,200+ businesses in 208 categories — making this the largest community recognition program in Pierce County.
What the Best of Pierce County Awards Are
The Best of Pierce County is an annual program presented by The News Tribune, Tacoma’s newspaper of record. Residents across Pierce County — a region of roughly 920,000 people — nominate and vote for their favorite local businesses in categories spanning everything from restaurants and healthcare providers to professional services.
The 2025 program was the second year of the awards. Participation grew 22% over the inaugural year, with thousands of businesses competing for Gold, Silver, and Bronze recognition. Winners are published in a 92-page magazine distributed to 15,000 households and available digitally through The News Tribune.
In the Marketing Agency category, Cascade took Gold. In Web Design, we took Silver. Both categories are competitive — Pierce County has dozens of agencies and freelancers serving the market.
Why This Matters to Our Clients
Awards are nice. But what matters is what they represent.
We didn’t win this by running a voting campaign or buying ad space in the program. We won because the people who work with us — and the people who’ve seen our work — thought enough of it to vote.
That’s the thing about community-voted awards. You can’t game research-backed results. The same principle that drives our client work drove this outcome: do good work, let the results speak, and trust that the right people notice.
For our clients, this is third-party validation of something they already know. When you hire Cascade, you’re working with an agency that Pierce County itself has recognized as the best at what we do.
What We Actually Do Differently
Since we founded Cascade in 2016, we’ve operated on a principle most agencies consider bad business: learn the client’s market before spending the client’s money.
Every engagement starts with research. Market analysis. Competitor audits. Client interviews. Keyword and search demand mapping. We use AI-powered competitive intelligence methods that compress what used to take three weeks into three days — giving our clients access to the kind of research that was previously reserved for firms with six-figure budgets.
That research-first approach is why we only take 3-5 new clients per quarter. You can’t do deep research at scale. You have to choose depth.
Here’s what that depth produces:
- 80+ new appointments per month for a Tacoma law firm
- 7,000+ organic search clicks per month for an estate planning firm across three states
- 10x return on every ad dollar for a premium landscaping company
These aren’t projections. They’re measured outcomes from real client engagements.
The Web Design Recognition
The Silver award for Best Web Design reflects something we’ve invested heavily in over the past two years: building sites that don’t just look good — they rank and convert.
Every website we build starts with the same research that drives our marketing strategy. We don’t use templates. We don’t guess at what your homepage should say. We know what your prospects search for, what language they use, and what convinces them to pick up the phone — because we’ve done the research before we design the first page.
The result is websites that work as lead generation tools, not digital brochures. Our client The Law Firm of Christopher Dumm generates over 7,000 organic search clicks per month from a site built entirely on keyword research and search intent mapping.
What’s Next
We’re not going to pretend an award changes how we operate. The same research-first methodology that earned this recognition is the same methodology we’ll use tomorrow morning.
What it does is confirm that the approach works — not just in campaign dashboards and client revenue reports, but in the eyes of the broader Pierce County community.
If your firm is looking for a marketing partner that Pierce County voted the best in the business, we’d like to hear from you. We take on 3-5 new clients per quarter, and every engagement starts the same way: a conversation about your goals and an honest answer about whether we can help.
Cascade Digital Marketing is a research-driven digital marketing agency based in Tacoma, WA, serving professional service firms nationwide. Learn more about our approach or see our client results.
FAQ
How are Best of Pierce County winners selected?
Winners are chosen by community vote, not by a panel of judges or an industry trade group. The 2025 program counted more than 170,000 votes across 5,200+ businesses in 208 categories, making it the largest community recognition program in Pierce County. It is presented annually by The News Tribune, Tacoma’s newspaper of record.
How many new clients does Cascade Digital Marketing take on?
Cascade takes on only 3 to 5 new clients per quarter. The cap comes from its research-first approach: deep market analysis, competitor audits, and client interviews cannot be done at scale, so the agency chooses depth over volume.
What client results has Cascade’s research-first approach produced?
The post cites three measured outcomes: 80+ new appointments per month for a Tacoma law firm, 7,000+ organic search clicks per month for an estate planning firm across three states, and a 10x return on every ad dollar for a premium landscaping company. These are described as measured outcomes from real client engagements, not projections.
When was Cascade Digital Marketing founded, and what makes its process different?
Cascade was founded in 2016 and operates on the principle of learning a client’s market before spending the client’s money. Every engagement starts with research, and the agency uses AI-powered competitive intelligence methods that compress work that used to take three weeks into three days.
