Proliferation

Oct 16
0

Essentials to a Good Website

By | web development | No Comments

It’s the era of digitization. You buy clothes online, order food through the web, even watch tv in the digital world. There are thousands of websites being launched everyday. Though it’s gotten easier to create them, it can be difficult to stand out. As you create your own, how do you thrive?

Hire an Agency

The simplest answer is that digital marketing agencies specialize in website design. They do this work daily. It’s probably in your best interest to contact a digital marketing agency in Utah, like ours, to see what we can do to build the best website and increase traffic to keep your business booming.

Simple Navigation

Easy to understand and use navigation is crucial when creating a website. If your website is too cryptic, it will be a huge turn off to viewers. Your customers should be able to easily navigate and understand what action they should be taking on the website. There should be familiar pages on your site, including: Shop, Contact Us and About Us. The more user-friendly the website, the more viewers will stay on the website.

Social Media

Digital marketing agencies across the globe work tirelessly to bring the newest and most effective tactics to their social media marketing. If you aren’t doing any sort of marketing on social media, you could be missing out on many viewers. Promote your social media profiles on your website. This is an easy way to get quick follows.

Important Information

Make the most important information easy to find. It’s easy to get carried away with visuals. A picture’s worth 1,000 words, and all websites have caught on to that. It’s all about finding balance. For example, if it’s the website of a restaurant, include important aspects like the address, menu and prices.

Good Hosting

It is important to find good host when creating website. If you don’t have a good host and your main page is loading slowly, it could be a real turn off for viewers — especially since attention spans are shrinking. It may be an expensive investment, but it will be worth it at the end of the day.

Sources:
https://offers.hubspot.com/four-essentials-of-website-design
https://design.tutsplus.com/tutorials/9-essential-principles-for-good-web-design–psd-56

Jul 27
0

Speed vs. Perfection

By | advertising, content marketing, digital marketing, marketing, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

Famous YouTube star and entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk of VaynerMedia states, “Speed is four billion times more important that perfection.” As technology has made our world become increasingly fast and efficient, there is room for debate on what is more important for advertising agencies. Speed or perfection?

As an advertising agency, clients want both. They want their creative to be done fast and perfectly. Unfortunately, this cannot be accomplished in almost any situation.

Speed

Being fast on a day-to-day basis is extremely important. A wise man once said “If you ain’t first, you’re last.” Thank you Talladega Nights and Ricky Bobby for the insightful knowledge. It’s extremely applicable in today’s marketplace where being first is important on many levels.

A perfect example is the New York Times. The famous newspaper is looking to eliminate copywriters to replace them with more journalists. In protest, people stood on the street with typo ridden signs to show that in the news industry, ethics and perfection are more important than speed.

Competition for business is at an all time high, and clients are demanding high speed from their agencies. With the amount of tools available for content marketing and web development, there is no reason for agencies to spend weeks on requests from clients.

Perfection

If you make a mistake large enough, it could be the very next viral meme online. With the speed that the marketplace is demanding, mistakes will be made. Whether clients are more or less forgiving, there is a fine line to be drawn for excusable and inexcusable mistakes. Quality control of content and production is essential to producing a product that has value to the marketplace.

The Balance

While both qualities are important, value and emphasis needs to be place on one or the other. The high-speed market will leave those trying to perfect every little detail in the dust. While making sure all of our work here at Fusion 360 is perfected, speed is the name of the game.

 

Jul 17
0

Advertising and Technology – The Battle for Power

By | advertising, content marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Social Media, Utah, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

In 2017, we are seeing the mass emergence of many different technological platforms such as Virtual Reality (VR), self-driving cars and dominance of non-traditional television platforms such as Netflix and Hulu. With this technology changing how we interact with media, products will emerge and others will fall. Innovation is the name of the game.

Our media consumptions habits are changing daily and large tech companies such as Facebook and Google are having larger pressures from large businesses to deliver higher quality ad-serving platforms. On the opposite side, advertising and marketing agencies are competing for business and trying to drive growth of their clients through SEO and content marketing.

To further prove the shift to digital platforms, digital ad spending overtook TV for the first time ever in 2016; experts say this is due to the Summer Olympics and the Presidential election. Globally, TV is still leading in ad spending. While many in the advertising arena would like to debate which one is more effective, the shift to digital is real and advertisers need to recognize this.

Apps and Ads

Large companies with billions of dollars in an advertising budget such as McDonald’s are now turning straight to social platforms such as Snapchat to assist in the marketing of their brand to allure teens to apply for jobs.

While this is becoming a trend for major corporations, these prominent social platforms are now having to provide scalable advertising analytics for their dollars spent. Scaling the analytics for advertising campaigns has been a thorn in the hide of Facebook, Google, Snapchat and Twitter.

With the freedom of the internet also comes the one percent that ruin it for the rest of us. In March 2017, major brands such as Honda pulled their advertising from YouTube as their ads were appearing on extremist websites and other content they deemed to be inappropriate to their brand.

While these platforms have nearly all the attention, there is demand from users and advertisers to create systems to filter out hate speech and the new trend of ‘fake news’ through development of algorithms.

Traditional Advertisers

While we are consuming media at an all time high, traditional media spenders need to think long and hard about where they are placing their advertising dollars. Unlike previous generations, Millennials and Generation Z’s have no problem tuning out your annoying 30-second spot on TV.

While traditional television advertising works to reach a broad audience, it does not have the granular analytics that digital platforms do. If an advertising agency is to spend on traditional mediums, the creative must be engaging and provide value to the viewer, or they will be tuned out faster than the latest Nickelback album.

When evaluating where to spend your ad dollars, auditing your ad spend and re-strategizing with an advertising agency like Fusion 360 in Salt Lake City, Utah may be your best option.

 

Jul 12
0

The Downfall of Malls and Rising of Digital Commerce

By | advertising, content marketing, SEO, Social Media, Utah, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

In 2017, various businesses are either rising or crashing. Right now, we are seeing the beginning of the end for malls. Studies have shown that in 2021, 25 percent of malls will be closed. With the emerging rise of e-commerce, Americans are starting to ditch large retailers like Macy’s, JC Penney’s and Sears for digital companies such as Amazon. To understand this downfall, let’s look at the past, present and future of the American consumer.

Digital marketing companies have predicted this downward trend occurring over the past 15 years and are beginning to capitalize on their correct predictions of the fall of the American mall lifestyle. With marketing firms targeting consumers with extremely competitive pricing of products and the inconvenience of driving to a mall and walking, malls will become obsolete. Property management companies must begin to restructure their business model to deliver further value.

Past

To give a bit of a history lesson, let’s step back in time a bit. In 1956, the very first indoor shopping mall called Southdale opened outside Minneapolis. After the exploding popularity of malls, there was a large retail boom in the United States.

In 1960, there were 4,500 malls that made up 14% of retail sales. In 1987, there were 30,000 malls accounting for over 50% of all retail dollars spent. Malls were the emerging destination for commerce, hanging out and community gathering events.

Malls were the place to be and quickly became a staple in the American lifestyle.

Present

Since 2006, no new indoor malls have been built. This is around the time that online commerce began to emerge. Digital marketing companies have taken notice of this and capitalized on the shift of attention from malls to iPhones. Since 2004, the net sales revenue of Amazon has risen from 6.92 billion to nearly 136 billion dollars.

This is now where our eyeballs and dollars have all shifted to. With less hassle and lower prices, the incentive of going to the mall for relaxation or socializing has become a thing of the past.

Future

In the age of embarrassing viral videos of people stomping over each other at Walmart over a discounted TV on Black Friday, the experience of shopping amongst other American consumers is increasingly negative. If malls are not providing a product or event that requires in person attendance, they will fail.

Marketing firms that represent these properties are looking at new avenues of either providing further value to American consumers to re-attract them, or re-purposing these structures to self-storage, doctor’s offices or apartment structures.

 

Sources:
http://www.acrwebsite.org/search/view-conference-proceedings.aspx?Id=7196

https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/

 

Jul 11
0

Less is More, Right?

By | advertising, content marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Social Media, Utah, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

When it comes to advertising or marketing agencies, they come in all different shapes and sizes. Agencies can range anywhere from 10 to 1,000 people, and serve many different functions. As eyeballs continue to shift every single day, companies with large marketing budgets are trying to figure out the best ways to target the right people, spend dollars in the right places and ensure effectiveness in their messaging.

The debate of size in regard to an advertising agency is definitely a conversation to be had. Here are just a few differences to keep in mind when deciding to outsource your content marketing, SEO or video production to an advertising agency.

Contact With the ‘Head Honcho’

If you were to hire an agency that employs 500+ people, what are the odds you will be dealing directly with the CEO? Slim to none. If you are to work at an agency with under 50 people, the odds are much higher that you will work with the shot caller. When managing millions of marketing dollars, there needs to be streamlined communications to ensure tasks are completed effectively. The path of least resistance is the best route to travel.

The Workplace

With many companies that we see today, the ‘growing pains’ can sometimes be too much to handle. With a smaller agency, the vision and mission are able to be maintained with much less effort. Keeping an equal workplace mindset is crucial to the quality of the work produced for its clients. A loss in workplace continuity can cause headaches for everyone.

Attention to Your Work

At a larger agency, work can fall by the wayside very easily; a smaller agency overvalues its clients as each one is extremely vital to the company. Your marketing dollars are the lifeblood of your company, and the last thing needed is for your company to fall lower on the priority list because of your budget.

Agencies are ensuring the success of your marketing dollars on an everyday basis. As these agencies are analyzing the daily shifts in attention, marketing dollars need to be spent as efficiently as possible. When choosing an agency for your business, consider that bigger doesn’t mean better and agencies are not ‘one size fits all.’

Sources:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/deeppatel/2017/05/30/gen-z-hates-tv-and-what-that-means-for-traditional-advertising/#4934587a32ed

Jun 12
0

Where are our Eyeballs Heading?

By | digital marketing, marketing, SEO, web development | No Comments

Written by Ascari Pena

 

The dictionary defines attention as “notice taken of someone or something”. Today, our attention has been divided into multiple ‘somethings’. With the evolution of technology, consumers have an enormous number of places that their eyeballs can focus. In 2016, media consumption in the United States amounts to over 12 hours of our day. Digital media, television and radio still dominate our time, with digital platforms leading the way at nearly six hours of our day. Marketing firms debate every single day as to where they should be spending their advertising dollars and efforts to speak to their targeted demographics. As attention is becoming extremely segmented, where is the advertising dollar best spent?

Video

Last year, Nicola Mendelsohn, the Vice President for Facebook in Europe stated that Facebook would be “all video” by 2021. Living in a world where everything is needed to be “Twitter length” or less (140 characters), consumers are demanding more video content to catch their attention. Consumers have become video centric and have found difficulty is consuming text content that is longer than a few sentences.

Non-traditional Television and Cutting the Cord

As cable peaked in the early 2000’s with over 68.5 million subscriptions, cord cutting has become an unavoidable trend for marketers to notice. While having 5,000 channels used to be the cool thing to have, now having access to commercial free and stream lined services such as Netflix and Hulu is the way to go. Twice.com reports that 25% of TV homes do not pay for traditional television. Millennials do not see the value in these services and simply cannot afford it with the rising costs of living and student debt being a large cost burden. Large advertisers, marketing agencies and digital marketing companies are taking full notice of this millennial spear-headed consumption trend and reprioritizing where they place their spending.

Digital

To add to the cord cutting, an estimated four in 10 Americans now get their news online. Whether it be through mobile or accessing a preferred news source website, Americans are ditching the traditional ways of sitting down for the evening news. As nearly 80% of Americans have a smartphone, phones have become the new television screen in 2017. Digital consumption trends show that these technologies are aging up into those that are in their 50s, 60s and 70s, driving forward the need for web development, video production and SEO perfection.

Sources:

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/09/14/facts-about-the-changing-digital-news-landscape/

http://fortune.com/2016/06/14/facebook-video-live/

http://www.marketingcharts.com/traditional/us-adults-daily-major-media-consumption-estimates-2011-2017-59995/

 

May 20
0

How to Make Your Video Ads More Successful

By | advertising, content marketing, digital marketing, SEO, Utah, web development | No Comments

 

If research and statistics are right, then you’re probably not going to read this entire article.

If people are looking for in-depth insight on any given subject, people now more than ever will turn to videos to get information. Marketing agencies that are worth their salt know that people turn more to videos for content than anywhere else. But how do you make your online video ads stand out in a crowded field of cat videos, how do you make your multimedia presence stand out?

Here are some of our personal tips:

Tip #1 Produce “How to” Videos

In 2015, “how to” video searches grew by 30 percent, which means that people are in a hurry to figure out stuff, and they need someone to walk them through how to do something step by step. “How to” videos are only increasing in popularity, and the more unique your “how to” topic is, the more views you’re likely to get.

So, for example, “How to change a flat tire” won’t get that many hits, being as there are literally thousands of those videos already. But a “how to fix a foosball table” video will get much more of an audience for you, even if that audience is smaller than the “fix a tire” group.

Tip #2 Make Testimonial Videos

In the age of Yelp and Rotten Tomatoes, people are more likely to look at reviews for your brand well before they even come close to buying your product. Marketing agencies have figured this out, so for their clients who sell products or services, they’ll make testimonial videos that prove to consumers that what they’re product or service is better than everyone else’s.

Tip #3 Find the “Sweet Spot” for Video Length

Marketing agencies that produce videos for their clients know that the best video ad length (according to Google) is no longer than three minutes. Within 45 seconds, people will know if they’re interested in the video they’re watching. There are some videos that can be longer than 3 minutes on Youtube that still deliver incredible results, but those exceptions are rare, and your video has to be incredibly engaging to pull something like that off.

Aug 08
0

How to Make Web Design Tell a Story

By | web development, website design | No Comments

The best website designs capture our attention by telling a story. It may sound strange, a website telling a story, but web design is an art form. Like any other art form, design can tell a story. You just have to look closely and interpret what you see. In the modern world, the internet is a vehicle to not only tell stories, but to use stories to get the most out of websites.

So how do you it? How do you make your website the next Mark Twain, Leo Tolstoy or J.K. Rowling? Here are few different ways to help your website tell a story.

website-story

Jul 28
0

What Is Responsive and Adaptive Web Design?

By | web development, website design | No Comments

Website design is ever-evolving, and part of that is because how we view websites is constantly changing. According to the Global Web Index, 80 percent of people in the states view the internet on their phone. Additionally, 47 percent surf the web on their tablet, and 37 percent use their game consoles. Using a PC or laptop is still the most popular way at 91 percent, but new technologies such as smart televisions and smart watches are also becoming new platforms for people to search the internet.

What this means for website design is that you have to come up with design techniques that best benefit the user’s experience with any given website. Two of the more prominent website design choices have been responsive design and adaptive design. They sound like synonyms for one another, but they offer different approaches to how someone should experience a site.

Responsive Design

Responsive websites are flexible and fluid, and they respond to the size of your web browser. So for example, if you have your browser open at full screen on your laptop but then minimize the screen to only half of your desktop, you’ll see the website resize along with your browser.

Adaptive Design

Adaptive chooses static layouts over a responsive website design approach. Adaptive design detects what size your browser is at, and it’ll load the layout it believes is the best fit for your browser size. Traditionally, adaptive design layouts have about six adaptive layouts for the six most common screen widths. So for example, if you have your browser’s width at 320, the adaptive design will load its layout for that screen width; and if you expand that screen width to 1200, the adaptive layout will then load its design for that size. The design will only adapt to a new layout when the browser hits specific widths.

Which Design Should You Use?

You generally have more control over what your website looks like with adaptive design because you’re deciding how users experience your website at any given size. With responsive, the user gets to view the site how they please, but this usually makes more work for your website design strategy because you’ll have to consider every type of layout size a user could put your website through.

Jul 22
0

Differences Between Web Design and Web Development

By | web development, website design | No Comments

Just because web development and website design sound the same, doesn’t mean they are. Think of it like dessert and desert. They sound similar, sure, but they couldn’t be further from each other.

To break it down in its simplest terms, web development deals with coding and making a website that’s accessible to users, and website design deals with the aesthetics and creative design aspects of a website. They’re both important to have and one doesn’t really work without the other.

What a Web Designer Does

From the outside, people might think website design is just picking what colors the site should have and what fonts you should use. They do that, but that’s barely a fraction of the job.

Designers conceptualize what they want the website to look like. Once they go through every painstaking detail that comes with choosing a cohesive and pleasing design, they then start creating a wireframe for the site. A wireframe is essentially a blueprint for the website. It’s a visual guide that gives an example of how the website should look through a skeletal framework.

What a Web Developer Does

Remember how in every other scene in “The Matrix” there was a person frantically typing on a computer? What they were doing was coding, and that’s pretty much what web development is: coding and putting together a website. Once the design has been established and the wireframe is completed, a web developer will turn that concept into reality by coding the website. Developers might use HTML, Javascript or another coding language to make a website come to life.

What They Have in Common

It might not seem like there’s a lot of middle ground between the two positions, but they have some similarities with each other. Just like web development, website design requires you to understand a formula or flow of how a website should look. And just like a web designer, web developers need to be creative sometime with their code, and they need to think outside of the box to create a site that fits a designer’s needs.