advertising Archives - Fortress Consulting Group

When Facebook Falls, Don’t Let Your Business Go With It

October 4th’s Facebook Outage Shows Businesses the Importance of a More Diverse Digital Marketing Strategy

Love it or hate it, Facebook is one of the best places to advertise and grow your business. 3 million businesses advertise on Facebook to an audience of over 2.14 billion people, and a lot of these users are customers who use Facebook to find information, ask questions, and stay connected to businesses. Nearly 67% of Facebook users will visit a local business page at least once a day looking for information. With numbers like that, Facebook has become essential to most businesses, especially small and local brands.

It may be tempting to put all of your eggs into Facebook’s basket, but what happens when Facebook is no longer accessible?

On October 4th, 2021, Facebook (and Facebook-owned Instagram) shut down for almost 7 hours. It might not have been a big deal for you personally, but for the millions of businesses that rely on those social media sites to conduct business, 7 hours can cause a lot of damage.

If it happened once, it can happen again. Is your business able to stay operational without platforms like Facebook and Instagram? If your answer is “no”, or even “maybe”, it may be time to focus some of your marketing efforts elsewhere.

A Facebook Page is NOT a Website

Somebody had to say it: a Facebook page is not a website.

If the most important information about your business is only found on social media, you are missing out on potential customers.

While Facebook—or any major social media platform—has remained a tremendous tool for growing your brand and reaching new customers, you would be shooting your business in the foot by relying on it as your sole internet presence.

Social Media Drives Business, Websites Do Business

Billions of people have a Facebook account, but that doesn’t mean they are using it to make buying decisions. Most people will Google your business looking for a website to back you up. If the only thing they find is a Facebook page, your brand loses both credibility and professionalism.

During an outage like Facebook’s, you’re abandoning the audience you already have and giving them no way to find information about your business. This is why websites for your business are essential. With a website, as long as your customer has internet access, they have access to your business.

This is not to say you should ditch Facebook altogether—you certainly should not. However, any social media should only be a supplement to your digital presence. Facebook will help you to grow an audience, but a website is where you build brand recognition, credibility, and conversions.

Diversify Your Marketing Strategy

A smart investor would never place all their money into a single stock. So why would you conduct business on a single, volatile platform?

Facebook offers a large audience, but it is not a fully comprehensive one. To reach a more diverse and complete audience, it is important to diversify your marketing strategy.

Allocate some of your marketing budget to other platforms such as Google and YouTube. You should also consider email marketing which can help you stay connected to the audience you already have, and gives you a means of communication during Facebook blackouts.

Get Noticed

When you finally get your business’s website up and running—or if you’re looking for ways to improve your existing website—make sure it breaks through the noise. Fortress provides a free marketing audit, which will identify areas of improvement within your website’s SEO, social strategy, Google rankings, and overall marketing performance.

Don’t have a website yet? We can help with that, too. Start a project with us, and let’s work together to set your brand up for success in an ever-changing world.

What is Google’s New Marketing Platform and What can it Do for You?

Earlier this week, Google hosted a live web broadcast announcing their new ad service rebrand. AdWords has become Google Ads, DoubleClick has become Google Analytics 360 and they all fall under Google Marketing Platform. A lot seems to have changed but, being a copywriter, I don’t interact much with the backend of advertising and most of the broadcast went right over my head. I sat down with our Director of Digital Strategy, Eric Lucas, for a simplified breakdown of Google’s new services.

What exactly is the update?

Google’s new “Google Marketing Platform” will act as an umbrella service to house: Google Ads, Google Analytics 360, and Google Ad Manager. This is a one-stop-shop for all the front-end and back-end marketing services that Google already had in place including: the research, setup, measurement and optimization of a campaign. Now, marketers won’t have to integrate the separate features to make them work together, but, instead, Google Marketing Platform will allow them to easily toggle between features and allow the features to “talk to each other.” In addition to the bundling of their services, Google Ads will now have “smart campaigns” which use machine learning to optimize ad headlines and descriptions (which are getting a character boost too).

What does this mean for marketers?

Marketers like Eric will now be able to do their job better and faster. With all of Google’s suite of marketing tools in one place, the research, set up, measurement, and optimization will all be in one place. Google Marketing Platform will cut down on set-up time so that marketers can start delivering reports faster and be able to see how effectively your ad budget is being used. There will be better visibility of where the budget is going and what returns on investment are coming back to you.

What does this mean for brands?

Ad campaigns will be much more effective. The new platform will cut down on set up time which and reduce errors that could have occurred before from integrating separate platforms. Measuring and attribution will be easier because the services are better connected. The clarity of results will also improve significantly. For smaller businesses who don’t have a huge ad budget, they may require less long-term professional help. If you don’t have a marketing background, you still might want to consult an agency like Fortress. Business owners will be able to more clearly see what the results are saying about the success of their campaign. The responsive ads that use machine learning will help you to optimize your budget by more quickly assessing which campaigns are working and which ones aren’t. While the platform is more streamlined, if you don’t have a marketing background, you still might want to consult an agency like Fortress.

Will consumers see any change in their ad experience?

The biggest change will be the ability to turn targeted ads on and off. Google will still show you ads, but your data won’t be used to decide which ones you see. Eventually, search ads will become more relevant to you (if you allow targeted ads). Google is allowing marketers to use more characters in the headlines and descriptions which will give you a clearer idea of what the ad will lead you to. This may result in search ads giving you more relevant results than before.

Overall, Google’s marketing rebrand will make life much easier for marketers by integrating all their services into one platform. And, although Google has streamlined the process of paid ad marketing, you should still consult an agency. We’ve taken over several campaigns where the client started it themselves and couldn’t clearly see their results or wasted their budget trying to figure it out. In either scenario, we could quickly overhaul and revamp the campaigns to run more efficiently and maximize their budgets. Google has been the leader in paid digital advertising for a long time and is only getting stronger. Check out the recording of the broadcast here if you want to learn more in-depth about the changes happening in the world of Google Ads.

Customers Talk. So Jump On Referral Marketing

Word of mouth is what helped Airbnb and Dropbox grow quickly into the well-known brands they are today and you should be doing it too.

As a potential client, you may ask your friends about their opinions on a specific product or place, and as an actual customer, you’ll probably give out a recommendation yourself. In the business world this is known as referral marketing, and it’s one of the best forms of marketing when it comes to making sales.What makes it especially successful is its accuracy in targeting specific audiences since people tend to know what their friends like.

Customers will always talk between themselves so it’s important to ask yourself one question when providing different services and products and that is “What do customers want?”. When clients receive a great product or consistently great customer service from your business, they are likely to spread the word about it and that increases your chances to grow your business. Thus, the foundation of building up a company is based on referrals. There are many benefits to referral marketing and they include:

Transferred trust and implied endorsement

The first thing needed is for a buyer to trust a seller. People don’t like risks so when someone refers you to a buyer there is immediate credibility since the person who referred you is someone the buyer already trusts. Your most loyal supporters are more likely to give positive recommendations to their friends so the potential risk for loss is lowered. An added bonus is spreading a good word about your company has a huge potential reach today since people are hyper-connected to others through social media, apps and blogs.

Cost-effective client acquisition

When customers refer you to their friends and family, you’re essentially getting a tailored message to a specific audience. Because people recognize what their friends like or are willing to spend money on, referral marketing has high success rates for target audiences. A HUGE plus is you’re not putting time or a dime into referral marketing like you would have to with cold calling when you’re starting out or SEO when you’re more established so it’s free advertising—cha-ching!

Reduced sale cycle and closing

With referrals, you don’t have to spend as much time selling yourself because the trust between you and your prospective client has already been established. As a result, you can focus your time on creating a customized solution for the potential client.

Incentive to spread the word through benefits

If you can come up with a valuable two-sided referral program that benefits current clients and prospective customers, it will encourage existing clients to share your business with others because there’s an incentive. Benefits make current customers happy while alleviating the risk for new clients, and that has a major impact on your conversion rate.

Referral marketing, especially in the beginning, is the foundation for many companies, and it’s what helps grow businesses into distinguished brands overtime. So whether you’re starting out or better established, jump on the referral marketing bandwagon. Customers who are naturally inclined to recommend your business to their friends are big opportunities for you to increase your sales rate.

Interview With Joel Mathew

Fortress Consulting Group President Joel Mathew always knew he wanted to start a business from a very early age. With a degree in operations management and information systems and years of advertising experience in radio and television with Comcast and CBS, Joel saw the need in the market for an agency that bridged the gap between digital and traditional media. He knew starting a firm with the technical expertise of a web services company and the creativity of an advertising agency would have a great impact on his clients.

What is your background?

“I went to school as a computer science major at Northern, and when I took my first programming class, I realized I didn’t want to be stuck behind a desk coding all day. As much as I didn’t want to be a career programmer, I always valued it and this experience proved to be very useful in the early days of FCG when I had to develop some of the first projects myself. Where my passion truly lies is in creating new ideas and strategies for our clients and interacting with them on a daily basis. When I started the company, it was really the advertising and marketing side that carried us the first year. The second year was search engine optimization and other digital services. The third year it was web design and development. In our fourth year of business, it was app design. Every year we’ve gotten stronger in a new area and adapted really well to the needs of the market.”

Who is the Fortress team?

“We’ve had some good growth over the past few years and that’s all due to the team that we have in place. I’m really proud of the people I work with, and I’m inspired daily by their creativity and perseverance through any problem. I really wanted to create a team atmosphere where each person is accountable and valued, and I feel like we’ve done a good job establishing that. I love the competitive nature of sports, and I take that same approach with work where we’re all on a team together striving for a common goal that’s achieved by hard work and passion.”

What are Fortress’ specialties?

“We love the clients that come to us with an idea but aren’t sure how to execute it. One example that I love to showcase that really tells a good story of what we do is one of our real estate clients. This client came to us with an idea for creating an upscale real estate brand in Chicago that would help generate more leads, put him on the map, and help sell more property. We started off creating the company name and doing all of the branding work. From there we built a really beautiful, engaging website where we then did SEO on. Within 4 months, we had him on page 1 in Google and, within the first year and a half, he sold more than 4 million dollars in property through leads coming from his site. This started off as just an idea, evolved into more and more responsibility for us, and ultimately new ways to help grow a business. We love the partnerships that start off as one seemingly simple task and then grow into larger projects that include services on both the advertising / marketing end and also the digital side of our company. Ultimately, our specialty is in building brands for our clients through our diverse areas of expertise.”

How is Fortress funded?

“When I started the business, I challenged myself to not put a dollar of my own money into it and not accept any outside funding. I wanted it to grow on it’s own organically from the very first project. I wanted everything to be generated by the company and stay in the company. That’s why we try to keep our overhead as low as possible—we don’t have too much expense other than office, payroll and marketing, and everything we do goes back into the business.”

What are Fortress’ goals?

“I want Fortress to be known for doing amazing work with amazing people all over the world.”

Where does the name “Fortress” come from?

“The Fortress name came from a verse in the Bible that I like a lot. It’s from Psalms 62:6 and it says ‘God is our rock and our fortress. I will never be shaken.’ This verse means a lot to me in that I’m not doing this alone or for myself. I feel that the Fortress name really represents strength and stability and the values that our company stands on.”

What lessons have you learned from starting your own company?

“It’s hard to just say one, but there is something that stands out. Every day is a learning process and that is an exciting thing about being an entrepreneur and running a company. Even when you feel like you’ve figured something out or you’ve had a good week or month or quarter or year, there’s always some curve ball you’re trying to work through. But the biggest lesson I learned from very early on is to respect and appreciate money. Working for someone else or working for a big corporation and getting paid every two weeks, you just take it for granted. You think it’s this never ending fountain of funds, and you can go out and do whatever you want because you know you’ll get more money in two weeks. Starting a business showed me just how hard it is to make money and not take it for granted. At the same time though, I don’t put making money as the number one goal. The goal is to do great work for our clients and money is just a byproduct of doing great work that you love.”

Any advice for future entrepreneurs?

“I still consider myself new after four years in business, but my advice would be to just do it. Jump into it. Put your all into it and don’t half ass it. Because you will surprise yourself—how resilient you are and what you are capable of. Don’t worry about five years from now or 10 years from now. You don’t have to have it all figured out right now, but you do have to get started.”

Don’t Be Everything to Everyone

Very early on in business there is a struggle to provide anything a client may ask for, even if it lies outside the realm of your expertise. We were no different. We were hungry (and still are, under the right circumstances) for any piece of business that we could get our hands on. You need a call center set up? We can do that. You need your network security tested? We’ve got this. Even though those requests were well outside our core competencies, we still figured that we could get the job done, add a new client to our list, and help—our bottom line.

As our client list grew, and we could show some selectivity with the projects we took on, we learned an extremely valuable lesson: it’s better to do a few things exceptionally well than do several things average. Clients want to work with exceptional people that do exceptional work and have an exceptional knowledge of their craft.

Our experience in advertising and marketing along with our expertise and technical capability in digital media provides us the ability to do exceptional work for our clients. There are plenty of digital media and web service firms that do great work. There are also a plethora of ad agencies hungry for your business. What we found to be exceptional (and our clients can attest to this) is the ability to bridge the gap and go beyond simply launching a website. We actually help create viable and sustainable brands.

Tag: advertising