Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

As a marketing business, it is our job to help small businesses excel, and gain positive clientele. The reason people choose us instead of other marketing businesses is because, we strive to make peoples lives easier.

Switching from Sendgrid to Mailgun was one of the hardest decisions to do but also one of the best decisions for not only ourselves but our clients. The prices are the same but that is where the similarities end. In this article I am going to list why we switched which is obviously going to be biased as we did switch and why we switched.

Whether you need to find an address, business hours, specials, reservations, or want answers to other FAQ’s, ManyChat is the way to go. Chatbots can be exactly what many businesses need. The only issue is that not a lot of people know what they are. The purpose of having a chatbot is to reduce human interaction when it is deemed unnecessary. A chatbot removes repetitive things and answers questions that don’t need a real person to give an answer to. This provides business owners more time to focus on other areas of management for their company while still providing answers to basic questions that their customers or clients may have. There is a difference between Chatbots and AI.

Many businesses don’t have much of a marketing platform because they think that since they are successful, they don’t need to market. That is actually not true. The best time to market your business is during busy times. The object is to keep business flowing. If your market yourself during busy times, there is good probability that it will produce constant customer flow. If you don’t market your company, you might get a period of time where business gets slow. This is normally the time when people think they should market, so they can bring in customers. However, if you market while you are experiencing good business, those customers will bring in other customers and it helps your business grow and profit.

A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner's intended message. A logo should be able to be printed at any size and, in most cases, be effective without color. A great logo essentially boils down to two things: great concept and great execution.

As Facebook makes its move toward groups having a higher presence we have upgraded our social media management to include a Facebook Group as part of our social experience. Facebook Groups though having high importance on Facebook is definitely not for all companies.

When it comes to taking on client needs social media, like the search engines, is constantly changing and evolving. These changes sometimes we love and sometimes we hate. This is one that we're kind of in the gray area. What does this mean for you on building engagement and brand awareness for your business? Glad you asked! There's a ton that this will do to actually help you grow your business, you will be able to build your brand awareness through your website and showcase your awesome company culture through the use of Facebook groups.

I constantly read from experts that get upset over the phrase “Content is King”. Is the phrase over used – yes, to a degree. That doesn’t make the phrase any less true. Your life and your business has a story and that story should be told. We remember stories not only because they are easier to remember than facts but because they resonate with us.

We are living in a time where computers are becoming more engrained into our lives. Some machines are starting to become aware of their surroundings. For many this can be a scary time while others it is truly an exciting time. Change is already taking place and the question is are you, and your business, ready for this change. We all have seen movies like the Terminator where the machine not only takes over the world but destroys all of humanity. This is far from the truth (today) of what is happening, and we are all a determined group of individuals to prevent it from getting out of hand (so we all hope). Machines are here to help reduce the repetitive nature of our lives. It is up to us to determine how we utilize these machines to better mankind as well as augment we mere humans.

It is the ones that push the limits around them that get noticed. There's nothing wrong with being different. In fact, we find those that are different are the ones that change the world for the better and most remembered. This is why we've changed our name to Business YETI from JM2 Webdesigners & Marketing. There are many reasons for this but the biggest is we are not like any other marketing company out there. We are focused on return on investment (ROI) and showing it to you. We never pushed people to realize that half of our revenue comes from paid advertising for our clients on Google, Bing, LinkedIn, and social media. This goes along with our idea we should be a silent partner helping our clients grow.

Online sales are continuously increasing. We know this as we buy more online, those we talk to are buying more online, and eCommerce has become a large focus of what we do as an organization. The problem with all of this is people are still being tricked into bad situations even on sites they expect to be reputable. We are going to cover our most popular tips that will help you buy online safer.

We know that sometimes dishing up thousands for a new website is not an option, especially when you are starting your business. You want your business to be found and you want it to be custom made to promote your business. What you don’t want is to pay for a website that will put you out of business. You want your website to generate business and help you grow without nickel and diming you around every corner.

We create videos for our clients, edit videos they’ve created or had created for them, and we use their videos straight as provided. We often find ourselves using a custom video player or use the YouTube video with the branding turned off. There are several reasons with the top two being increased search engine optimization or SEO and also to relieve the burden from your web server streaming the video. This not only will make your website faster but provide a better user experience.

A few years ago, when we started working with marketing companies, we talked to them about tactics and what the best items to do were when it came to helping businesses grow and be found online without spending tons of money on paid ads. Most of these companies worked with medium-sized businesses while we focus on small business. This brought in a ton of different ideas and topics that helped all of our businesses grow. One highly talked about topic was review and reputation management for companies. The marketing companies we talked to were going “old school” (e.g. postcards, flyers, or letters) as they had specific business reasons and we were moving to the electronic frontier for our small business customers. Both methods are valid and I can say the marketing companies we work with in Illinois and here in Indiana are now all digital for several reasons but it did take them, and their customers, to realize the old school method was making them look like dinosaurs. I am going to look at three ways old-school marketing companies are (or were) doing review management and why it is hurting your business model if you are doing so.

I grew up in the small historic town of Chesterton Indiana. I have been fortunate to see great communities all around the world. Every move I have ever made has shown me a vast array of great communities. Some are struggling and some are vibrant and growing. What I find is the communities that are truly growing all have one thing in common. They have a strong community and even with the big box stores, they buy from local businesses that support their community. I now live in Valparaiso Indiana with my wife and family but get to Chesterton often as it’s just a short drive. I know deep down it’s this support of choosing a local small business before a big box store that makes these communities great and I truly feel good about it.

Although I am calling this small business growth hurdles it actually applies to any business small or large. It is about keeping to your core strengths and not letting them go. This is something every business needs to stay aware of. Being I have never run a large business my knowledge there doesn’t apply beyond working at some of the best large companies in the world. My focus here is on common mistakes business owners make and that can cripple, if not kill, your business. I am going to cover six of the items that I have not only come across but done myself in the past five years. I have overcome each of these and each has taught me several valuable lessons and made us stronger.

We are hearing this more and more from companies talking with us. They ranked high once and now they are dropping and their competitors are ranking higher. These can be local or national companies organically (e.g. free) ranking higher than they and they think it’s because these corporations are outranking them because they are spending money. The answer is yes but not in the way they are thinking. They are ranking not because they are paying the search engines to rank to get those organic listings. They could be paying for ads but that doesn’t measure into the organic listings. They are paying their employees or a digital marketing company to make them rank that way. Let’s take a look and see what a business owner can do to fix this problem.

Our company is going through the biggest change of any growing business. I know there are many ways of phrasing it but I am calling it the “Business Owner Role Transition” and to me, it is the pivotal point for any small business owner that is growing. Many will feel caught in a trap right before or during this part. Many will sell their business when the end reward is just in front of them. They aren’t quitters but quit anyway as they don’t feel they can do it and they really can with that extra needed “push”. Many will not talk to others in the same spot and lock themselves into silos rather than reaching out and talking with those people – not friends, other businesses that you may consider competitors. I also see it as the hardest point in my 30 years of working.

Adobe Muse was created on May 7, 2012, with more than fifteen releases since then. Adobe Muse is a website builder that allows designers to create fixed, fluid, and adaptive websites without having to write any code. The keyword here is “designers”. Adobe Muse was created obviously by Adobe to solve and simplify the web for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices prior to most people even thinking of tablet and mobile devices. Adobe was beyond ahead of the curve with their proprietary solution. It was fast and still is. Muse utilized custom widgets from an online store to make it simple for graphic designers to create websites (e.g. no nerd required).

eCommerce is all about sales. There’s no other way to say it other than “Show me the money”. With that being said when you are doing eCommerce in Northwest Indiana, Chicago, or a small and growing town like Chesterton you need to focus on the conversion of your visitors to buy from you. In this article, we will look at several techniques used when creating descriptions for your products to draw people into purchasing your products.

It’s a new month and the month that kicks off for many business owners the holiday marketing season. Marketing is never-ending. Marketing does routinely pick up at certain times. It is also time we started to think about the end of the year which means shopping, snow, colder weather, and people talking nice and pushing us out of the way for that most valuable holiday find. We don’t like the thought of the cold, but we are all in the service business.

I truly love how in tune the JM2 team is when it comes to marketing and helping companies grow on social media. Yesterday afternoon when I got back into the office late Kyle was wanted to talk about some concerns he has not only with our clients but with social media/digital marketing. At first, it was related to all things in Northwest Indiana but turned to nationally and then internationally. This is what you call a progressive team player that is thinking not only how to help and assist others in being successful. His concern was about how people are completely screwing up their social media which goes well beyond social media. This is social media, digital marketing, and websites altogether. With what he talked about I know he will be writing several articles on it, but I started thinking of several items that can help your brand achieve success when doing social media.

For those that don’t hustle seven days a week, I truly commend you. I wish my life was like that but my mind is not wired no matter how much I try. For the longest time I tried but all it did was put me into a depression working the Monday to Friday life. I hated Monday’s and was living for Friday’s. This didn’t make for a positive work/life balance nor did it make me happy. I thought it did but looking back I was truly miserable.

eCommerce is slowing becoming a major component of what we offer and businesses are starting to realize there are ways to monetize the internet. As an example, we used to do an eCommerce site every four to six months. Today we are averaging two to three full-featured eCommerce sites every month. Businesses want to invest money and grow their business while spending as little as possible. eCommerce is a great way of doing that with the integration in social media, search engines, and working for you 24x7. Today we are going to talk about some of the core items you need to look into before you setup your successful eCommerce solution and drive online sales for your business.