Brentwood Visual News and Tips

Gone are the days where having a website was considered optional for a business. Today it's expected that every business will have a website, and for good reason!

Your website is (or should be) the primary source of information about your business, and it's the only place online that you have full control over. On any other platform, your business is subject to the rules and business practices of the platform you're listed on. This may mean that you're not allowed to publish certain information, content may be limited in length, or you may even have competitor's ads shown on your listing!

As the shock of the COVID-19 Stay at Home Orders (coupled with the forced shutdown of businesses) finally begins to wear off, the focus is shifting to how to reopen.

Businesses owners will be faced with a myriad of decisions as individual States progress through their phased reopening plans. We'd like to offer our recommendations for how to coordinate your reopening through your digital presence.

Everyone wants to drive traffic to their website, and everyone wants that traffic to turn into paying customers. But sitting there waiting for that traffic to appear isn't a great approach.

Most marketing techniques fall into one of two very broad categories. Push marketing involves techniques that get your message out in front of the customer to make an impression on them. Pull marketing is creating content that is sitting there waiting for the customer to come find it. Without a well-designed strategy, we find that most business owners tend to focus on pull marketing. While this is important, without the balancing approach of push marketing you are not likely to see the results you are looking for.

Sometimes a buzzword seems to define an entire industry. In digital marketing, that buzzword seems to be SEO. When I introduce myself to someone and say I'm a digital marketer, the most common response is “Oh, you do SEO!”

Well yes, we do SEO. Oftentimes we’ll have a customer contact us asking for SEO, but when we dig into their needs we discover that SEO isn’t really what they’re looking for, and it’s often not the best solution.

Throughout our website, you’ll see us refer to the “Digital Marketing Funnel”. Anyone who has taken a marketing class or read a good marketing book is familiar with funnels, and there’s nothing magical about ours.

What the funnel provides for us is a roadmap. It gives us a starting point, and a structure that we can come back to when we start to drift. All that glitters is not gold, and there is a lot of glitter out there in the marketing world. Everyone has new ideas on the latest and greatest thing that “every business” needs to be doing. Many of these ideas are exciting and innovative, but if they’re not incorporated with the end goals in mind they can lead us off track.

How much of your business revenue should be spent on digital marketing? This is a question we hear a lot, and the simple answer is that there’s no simple answer. The “magic number” you typically hear is 10%. The Small Business Administration recommends budgeting 7-8% of gross revenues to marketing, assuming revenue below $5 million and profit margins of 10-12%.

The reality is that it’s far more important to look at your own needs and goals to determine where you want to take your business.