Running a business is not easy, and there is a great deal of unglamorous work that has to happen behind the scenes to keep everything else working smoothly. Many business services fall into this category, but there is an exception. Marketing can be as flashy and glamorous as one pleases — in fact, that is the point. Unlike the work that happens in the employee-only section, marketing is made to grab someone’s attention, be it a spinning sign on a street corner, a billboard on the freeway or a social media ad campaign. It’s what gets feet in the door to make sure all the other hard work pays off. This does not just apply to traditional businesses either; nonprofits, government entities and all manner of other organizations need to get their name and their message to the masses.
As important as it is, however, extensive marketing can easily eat up more time in a business owner’s day than there is to spare. That is where marketing agencies come in. Even for organizations that are large enough to boast their own dedicated marketing departments, many agencies have specialties that can open up new possibilities.
“We are what you would call a full-stack agency,” said Aaron Buckley, president and creative director of Hot-Springs-based SixtyOne Celsius. “We do everything from public relations, media buying all the way to graphic design, to web development, video production and copywriting.”
Aaron Buckley
Why, one might ask, would a company hire an agency instead of handling the marketing in-house and potentially saving money?
“I should hire an agency to advertise our services,” Buckley said. “I don’t think that it’s possible to run your business successfully and market it. People try it all the time, and it’s a miracle when it works because marketing is my full-time job. I’m not thinking about customer service and product quality in the same way my clients are. I’m thinking about how I’m going to get people in front of that product. That’s the job of the agency.
“If you’re the owner of a pizza shop, you want to make a good pie. That’s all you want to do. You don’t have time to think about how you’re going to get it in front of people. Businesses need that extra push and that expertise of knowing what kind of message engages someone to buy a ticket, visit a gallery or use this bank over that bank.”
It may come as a surprise, but Buckley noted that several of his clients are nonprofit organizations that do a lot of advertising, and many are not even using donated funds to do so. Google, for example, awards nonprofits with grants of up to $10,000 a month for ads.
“We have a nonprofit client, a museum, and they can advertise all over the United States. It costs them nothing to do that,” Buckley said. “When Google awarded that grant to them, I immediately kicked off an ad campaign, and we started seeing ticket sales from all over the country. Typically, we would see ticket sales from Texas, Tennessee — the obvious states around Arkansas — but after the grant was awarded, we started seeing Colorado, Montana, New York, and they had never seen that before.”
Digital technology has revolutionized the world of advertising in many ways. Social media marketing has been used successfully by many companies, particularly small-business owners, and is a particularly attractive option because its effects are so easy to quantify. If a business puts up an ad on Facebook, the business can track exactly how many clicks it gets and how many visitors it brings to the website. A newspaper, by contrast, could tell you how many readers its circulation reaches, but not how many actually see an ad.
Despite these advantages, more traditional means of advertising still have an important role to play. A business that only markets on social media, Buckley said, puts all of its eggs in one basket and limits their potential audience. No matter how well a photo or video does on Instagram, it is not likely to reach someone who does not have an Instagram account. Meanwhile, an advertising campaign via a local publication or during a college football game can hit additional audiences that might not be affected by efforts on social media.
“There was a lot of pushback [against digital] for a while,” Buckley said, “but I’ve really started to see, in the last couple of years, a lot of businesses believing that digital marketing is the way to go. I’ve had to kind of arm wrestle with some folks and say, ‘This particular magazine is your audience. You should run an ad in there.’ They say, ‘I don’t know. Digital is where it’s at.’ I know that, but don’t cut out any audiences that are out there. Sometimes putting something in print is important.”
Marketing and advertising are often treated as synonyms, and while one could argue that all ads are marketing, not all marketing is made up of ads. There are a variety of other factors that can be easily overlooked but are just as crucial, and that is where specialists are needed.
Ryan Orrell, CEO and founder of Webmonster, is personally familiar with the importance of a good website. Before getting into web design, he sold insurance and paid to have a custom website made. It cost all of the money he had to his name and ran so slowly it barely functioned. Frustrated but without the money to have it rebuilt, he bought a book on web design and studied for years to make a new website himself. It was such a success that he founded Webmonster at the turn of the century and, in the 23 years since, has witnessed both how websites have changed and how they have become ever more essential.
Ryan Orrell
“If anyone believes their front door is made of glass with a lock on it, they’re hiding under a rock,” Orrell said. “Your website is your front door. It’s a statistical fact that about 75 percent of people that go on the internet and see your website will instantly develop an opinion of you. If your website looks [terrible], you’re not going to get anything. So many times, we’ve seen websites that have upwards of a 70 to 80 percent abort rate. That means seven or eight out of 10 people that are coming to that website are leaving. They either aren’t finding the products they need, they aren’t being presented properly, or it just doesn’t look good.
“Even if they’ve done business with you in the past, 91 percent of people will Google you, so it’s important to have a professional-looking website in a number of different areas. It needs to be aesthetically pleasing. It needs to have great graphics. If you’re selling insurance, for example, they go to your website, and you’re charging them a premium of $500 a month, but your website looks like it was built by a kid in a basement somewhere, you’re going to have one heck of a problem, but a highly professional-looking website can inform the consumer. It can showcase products, services, everything you have to offer, in a pleasing way.”
It is also crucial to consider how a website will function on mobile devices, since more than 80 percent of people access websites on their phones or tablets, rather than computers. There is more to the online game than just making sure a website is attractive and functional, however. Just like a product, businesses have to be able to get people in front of their sites, and while that can come from online ads, it is also vital that a website be one of the first results in a search for whatever a business provides.
“Google business profiles are absolutely critical to the long-term success of any small business, yet it’s one of the most overlooked facets,” Orrell said. “It’s a place where you can list your business, and searches bounce off of your Google business profile. You can see over time as you start rising in the rankings until you hit what we call the Google 3-Pack. If you search for something, at the top you’ll see sponsored content. Then the three businesses under that are the 3-Pack. We took on a handyman who was at $5,000 a month in revenue and built them up to $15,000 to $18,000 a month. It’s not that difficult to do; you just have to know how to do it.”
There are a variety of services that allow business owners to build their own websites, and with enough work, they can produce a good-looking website. On the back end, however, many of these websites can be difficult for search engines such as Google to read, making them less likely to appear in a search. A professionally coded website will be built to be easily readable by search engines and rank higher in search results.
“Saving $100 or $200 a month [doing it yourself] is probably costing you thousands of dollars a month,” Orrell said. “That’s what people need to look at at the end of the day. Whether they hire us or someone else, I just want small businesses in the state of Arkansas to succeed on the internet. Arkansas is behind the eight ball on this, and they don’t need to be. We’re on an equal playing field with everybody in the United States. Do it the right way, and you’ll profit.”
There is a great deal more that could be said about grabbing the attention of customers, but customers are not the only people that an organization might be interested in attracting, especially in the case of nonprofits and other organizations that are not traditional businesses. Dan Sawyer, president of ProFusion Marketing in Little Rock, got his start by working for the National Hockey League’s New Jersey Devils and, later, for the Arkansas State Fair. Today, his business helps fairs, sporting events and festivals with marketing and public relations, but its true specialty is sponsorships.
Dan Sawyer
“What I do in my sponsorships are so very important to every event, whether it’s an air show, a balloon festival, a concert series, a professional or minor league sports team, or, obviously, the State Fair,” Sawyer said. “Sponsorships really help generate extra revenue up and above what just your attendance can bring in. It’s also guaranteed money. You never know if your attendance is going to be 400,000 people a year, 500,000 people a year or less than that. A lot of that depends on the weather and how well you market it, so it’s really important to find corporate sponsors because that really is the gravy on top of what your event can generate from ticket sales, food and drink vendors, and things like that.”
Getting those sponsorships is not a matter of trade secrets but of enough hard work and trial and error to find out what an organization or event can offer to attract sponsors. In recent years, especially, Sawyer has seen a growing trend of sponsors no longer being satisfied with just slapping their name on a banner and hanging it up. What they want is active participation and hands-on interaction with the community. At the last Arkansas State Fair, for example, Bank OZK partnered with Visa to have a large tent for Visa customers, where they could relax and have a short break from the heat and noise of the fair, making for an engaged experience between the brand and customer.
Technology has also provided a variety of new mediums for this interaction, whether through social media, influencers or something as simple as QR codes at events allowing attendees to quickly and easily reach the sponsor’s website to learn more.
“A big factor that affected our business was obviously the [COVID-19] pandemic,” Sawyer said, “where there were just no events for the period of a year or so. It has been a lot harder because one of the first things that companies cut in the pandemic were in their advertising budgets, and the only thing that was cut more than that was their sponsorship budgets because there was nothing to sponsor. It was reading and reacting to be prepared for when people came back. What would they want to come back to? It was almost a reset to clean the slate and fix all of the things that you may have done wrong in the past. We’ve reengaged with how people interact at these events.”
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