Marketing 101: A Comprehensive Guide for Business Owners

101: A Step-by-Step Guide for Business Owners

Introduction to Marketing 101

Marketing plays a crucial role in the success of any business. It is the process of promoting and selling products or services to customers. Mastering marketing fundamentals has become even more critical in today’s digital age. This guide will provide business owners with a step-by-step approach to understanding and implementing effective marketing strategies. By the end of this article, you will have a solid foundation in marketing principles and be equipped with the knowledge to take your business to new heights.

Understanding the Basics of Digital Marketing

In the digital era, understanding the basics of digital marketing is essential for any business owner. Digital marketing refers to the use of digital channels such as websites, search engines, social media, email, and mobile apps to reach and engage with potential customers. It offers many opportunities to target specific audiences, measure results, and optimize campaigns for maximum impact. To see success in digital marketing, you’ll want to have a good understanding of the various components and strategies involved.

Benefits of Digital Marketing for Businesses

Digital marketing offers numerous benefits for businesses of all sizes. 

Firstly, it provides a cost-effective way to reach a large audience compared to traditional marketing methods. With digital marketing, you can target specific demographics and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns in real time. 

Secondly, it allows for personalized and targeted marketing messages, which can result in higher conversion rates. 

Additionally, digital marketing provides an opportunity to engage with customers through social media and build brand loyalty. Digital marketing can help businesses increase visibility, generate leads, and drive sales.

Exploring Different Types of Digital Marketing

Digital marketing encompasses a wide range of tactics and strategies. It is essential to explore these different types to find the ones that align with your business goals and target audience. 

Some common types of digital marketing include search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, and paid advertising. 

SEO focuses on improving a website’s visibility in search engine results, while content marketing involves creating and sharing valuable content to attract and engage customers. 

Social media marketing leverages social media platforms to build brand awareness and engage customers. 

Email marketing is an effective way to nurture leads and drive conversions. 

Paid advertising involves placing ads on various digital platforms to reach a wider audience.

Industry titans are great at utilizing all of the mentioned digital marketing channels and utilizing the strengths and weaknesses of each to craft a winning strategy for their brand.

Building an Effective Digital Marketing Strategy

Building an effective digital marketing strategy is one of the most critical steps to see positive results from your digital marketing efforts. 

You can view your marketing strategy similar to Maps on your phone, showing you how to reach your destination and what to expect.

The alternative is what most business owners do now: not use navigation and aimlessly drive, hoping they get to their destination. Those days are long behind us, and it’s time to catch up with the times.

A digital marketing strategy outlines your goals, target audience, key messages, and the tactics you will use to achieve your objectives. 

It is crucial to conduct thorough market research to understand your target audience and their preferences. These initial steps will help you tailor your marketing messages and choose the most effective channels to reach them. 

Performing extensive market research and identifying your target audience will also teach you how to position your brand in the marketplace against your competitors properly.

Your strategy should also include a budget and a timeline for implementation. Regularly monitoring and evaluating your strategy will allow you to make necessary adjustments and optimize your marketing campaigns for better results.

The Role of Email Marketing in Your Strategy

Email marketing continues to be a powerful tool in the digital marketing landscape. It allows businesses to communicate with their customers and nurture leads directly. 

Email marketing can also build relationships, promote products or services, share valuable content, and drive conversions.

Building a quality email list is essential to fully leveraging the power of email marketing, which is why incentivizing visitors to subscribe is a great strategy.

Segmenting your email list based on customer preferences and behavior will allow for more personalized and targeted campaigns. Once you know your customer, you can craft compelling subject lines and engaging content to increase open and click-through rates. 

Like any marketing channel, you’ll want to regularly analyze the performance of your email campaigns and make adjustments to optimize your results.

The Power of Content Marketing in Driving Results

Content marketing is a strategic approach focusing on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience. 

It is a long-term strategy aiming to build customer trust and credibility and one of the best strategies to incorporate to help with your SEO and organic efforts. 

Content marketing can take many forms, including blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and podcasts. 

The key to successful content marketing is understanding your target audience and creating content that addresses their pain points and interests. 

By consistently delivering valuable content, you can position your brand as an industry authority and drive organic traffic to your website. 

An easy way to get more eyes on your content is to promote it through social media, email marketing, and other channels to maximize its reach and impact.

Leveraging SEO Marketing for Increased Visibility

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages. 

When done correctly, SEO can significantly increase your website’s visibility and drive organic traffic. 

We have witnessed the power of SEO for our agency, AVINTIV, and all the SEO clients we’ve worked with.

We helped a plastics manufacturing company triple its business in under 24 months and generated a 4,000% ROI.

We also helped a cannabis brand grow to 9 figures through SEO and content marketing, which resulted in 5,400% growth over five years.

Now, these are not typical returns, but we wanted to share the importance of SEO and how impactful it can be to add it to your marketing strategy.

Once you know who your target audience and customers are, you’re able to dive into what their needs, pain points, and goals are.

Once you have your target audience data, you can leverage the power of SEO by conducting keyword research to identify the terms and phrases your audience is searching for.

Then, you can start incorporating these keywords into your website’s content, meta tags, and URLs. On-page SEO is one of the most crucial components of SEO, simply because it’s easy enough for anyone to be dangerous with it. But, just like anything, there is a specific science on performing proper on-page SEO, and each industry is different.

Another critical component of SEO is technical SEO and ensuring that your website’s loading speed is as quick as can be while also giving a great UI/UX experience to the website visitor.

Once the above has been completed, your off-page SEO is the next big item to tackle. Building high-quality backlinks from reputable websites can also boost your SEO efforts and domain authority score. 

Regularly monitor your website’s performance using analytics tools and make necessary adjustments to improve your SEO strategy.

Leveraging Social Media Marketing for Brand Awareness

Social media marketing is a powerful tool for building brand awareness and engaging with your target audience. 

With billions of active users on various social media platforms, businesses have the opportunity to reach a large audience and build meaningful connections. 

To leverage social media marketing effectively, start by identifying the most relevant platforms for your target audience. 

Create a compelling social media profile and consistently share valuable content that resonates with your audience. 

Engaging with your followers and promptly responding to comments and messages will give you an edge over your competition. 

Social media advertising is a great way to reach your target audience and drive traffic to your website. Facebook and Instagram ads are one of the quickest ways to increase your revenue drastically.

Regularly analyze your social media performance and adjust your strategy to optimize your results.

How to Choose the Right Digital Marketing Agency

Choosing the right digital marketing agency can make a significant difference in the success of your marketing efforts. 

When selecting an agency, consider their expertise and experience in providing the services you’re looking to invest in. 

You want to work with a digital marketing agency that has been in the trenches with its clients and has years of experience not only providing agency services but also building and growing brands in a variety of industries. 

Working with a marketing agency whose leadership team understands business exceptionally well is a much-added bonus that we recommend looking for.

Look for portfolios, case studies, and client testimonials to gauge their track record.

We wouldn’t recommend working with a niche marketing agency, as we have seen countless niche agencies using the same cookie-cutter templates for every client. Be very cautious of this.

Also, consider their communication style and responsiveness, as effective communication is crucial in any agency-client relationship. 

Finally, discuss pricing and contracts to ensure they align with your budget and objectives. Working with an agency that shows value versus just providing a product or service is an agency that can become a great partner.

By choosing the right digital marketing agency, you can access specialized skills, resources, and industry insights to help you achieve your marketing goals.

Tracking and Analyzing Your Marketing Efforts

Tracking and analyzing your marketing efforts is essential to measure the success of your campaigns and make data-driven decisions by utilizing web analytics tools to monitor key metrics such as website traffic, conversion rates, and engagement. 

Make sure to set up conversion tracking to understand which channels are driving the most conversions. 

Regularly review your marketing analytics to identify trends, strengths, and areas for improvement. 

A/B testing can help you optimize your campaigns by comparing different versions of your marketing materials and measuring their performance. 

By regularly tracking and analyzing your marketing efforts, you can identify what works and what doesn’t, allowing you to refine your strategies for better results.

Conclusion

Mastering marketing is crucial for any business owner who wants to thrive in today’s competitive landscape. 

By understanding the basics of digital marketing, exploring different types of digital marketing, building an effective digital marketing strategy, and leveraging key tactics such as email marketing, content marketing, SEO marketing, and social media marketing, business owners can drive results and achieve their marketing goals. 

Choosing the right digital marketing agency and tracking and analyzing marketing efforts are also essential steps in the journey to marketing mastery. 

Following the step-by-step guide outlined in this article, business owners like you can take their marketing efforts to new heights and achieve long-term success.

With over 12+ years of experience successfully building and growing 400+ brands, we possess the expertise and know-how to unlock a flood of growth for your brand. If you’re looking to grow to all new heights and be forced to increase your goals, feel free to reach out to one of our strategists. We’d love to see how we can help you achieve more growth. 

After all, brands choose to partner with AVINTIV when they want to do one thing: GROW!

Medical Practices Should Utilize Google’s New Search Feature For Virtual Healthcare

Due to the high risk of spreading COVID-19, many businesses, and healthcare providers have reduced or stopped seeing patients in person altogether. Social distancing is extremely smart right now, but what happens to patients that truly need to see a doctor or medical professional? People still need a way to continue to get medical care and treatment, especially from the safety and comfort of their own homes, which is why virtual healthcare is the new norm.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have seen the needs for telehealth, telemedicine, and virtual healthcare massively skyrocket for people around the world. March 2020 alone had a 50% increase in telehealth visits due to the coronavirus pandemic. Analysts are also expecting that medical care visits will be over 200 million this year, which is way up from their original expectation of 36 million visits for all of 2002.

Virtual Healthcare, telehealth

Now is the time to offer telemedicine for your practice as many people are still in need of medical treatments. We are going to be going over Google’s new search feature for virtual healthcare and how you can do the same.

Google Connecting People to Virtual Doctors

Google has decided to help people connect with their health care providers much more easily. Google’s main priority is to provide people with access to high-quality and authoritative information for their healthcare needs.

Google is currently rolling out new features in Google Search and Google Maps that will make it easier for people to connect to virtual doctors much easier. This feature will apply for any size medical practice that can offer telehealth services.

This new search feature will decrease the amount of stress and time when looking for help online. You won’t have to click on a medical provider’s name and then go to their website to see if they offer virtual healthcare options. Searching Google can be a daunting task, let alone for someone who needs medical attention. 

Google My Business Profile Displaying Virtual Healthcare Options

This new virtual care feature is for healthcare providers like doctors, hospitals, and mental health professionals. Someone searching for medical assistance might see a “get virtual healthcare” link on their search results or maps. The person searching will be able to click on their link where it will bring them to the healthcare providers’ website for more information. You will see later on what we recommend doing for that landing page.

Virtual Healthcare, Telemedicine, Source of Health

Due to every state having its own rules and regulations about what is currently open or closed, we’d recommend updating your information in your Google My Business profile. Google is automatically putting a link directly to healthcare providers’ COVID-19 information page on Google Search and Google Maps, so make sure to update yours. If you haven’t done so already, we recommend reading Google’s best practices on how healthcare providers should update their websites with the latest COVID-19 information. 

Landing Page For Your Telemedicine Options

If you want to do this correctly, we would highly recommend building out a telemedicine or telehealth landing page that is built specifically for virtual healthcare. The last thing you want to do is have someone click your virtual healthcare link, but your website says nothing about virtual healthcare options. Here is an example of a telemedicine landing page that we just built for a local Scottsdale, AZ medical provider.

Virtual Healthcare, Telemedicine, Source of Health

Make sure that your telemedicine landing page is straightforward and clear to understand. The whole goal of this page is to ensure confidence in the visitor that they know who you are, what you offer, and how they can make an appointment.

Treat the page as if the visitor has never heard of telehealth or telemedicine. We recommend listing out, “What is Telemedicine?” and then explaining the specifics on why telemedicine or virtual healthcare is important and what the benefits are. Remember, virtual healthcare is brand new to a lot of people that haven’t experienced it yet.

Next, list out the virtual healthcare services that you offer, so the visitor understands what you do provide and what you don’t provide. The last thing you’ll want is having to turn down a person who truly needs medical attention for services that you don’t provide.

Last but not least, list out how to become a new patient, what they should expect, and a call to action to either call now or book an appointment.

Virtual Healthcare Options in Search Results

This new virtual healthcare feature is beginning as a pilot for search results in the U.S.

Google gave an example of someone searching for “immediate care,” and the search results showed available virtual care options and related information about the visit. Some of this information would be on out-of-pocket costs charged for a visit (for those that don’t have health insurance). This will be an easy way for people to directly connect with a virtual healthcare provider without ever having to leave their homes. Virtual visits should take place on the healthcare provider’s platform of choice.

Someone searching for healthcare will be able to directly see in the results what virtual healthcare options are available and what the out-of-pocket costs are for a visit.

In Conclusion

The world is changing every day at a rate that most of us aren’t used to. Being in the medical and healthcare industry, now is your chance to step it up a notch and provide that extra level of care for patients that need virtual healthcare. If you need any help with optimizing your website for COVID-19, setting up your Google My Business profile for virtual healthcare options, or building telemedicine landing pages, contact us today. We are ready to help our community just as much as you are.

Why Local SEO Is Important for Your Marketing Strategy

March and April 2020 have been a whirlwind of uncertainty, confusion, fear, confidence, and a mixture of everything in-between. Every person and business in the world has been affected by COVID-19. It’s how we allow COVID-19 to affect our business that dictates our future journey. We’re writing an article on why local SEO is important for your 2020 marketing strategy because we chose to be the positive light helping businesses get through this difficult time.

You have a choice as a business owner. You can fold your arms, play the victim, and wonder why this has happened to your business and you. Or, you can take a step back, breathe, and plan how you’re not just going to survive, but figure out how your business can thrive. What can you do right now to bounce back 10x stronger than before?

We work with a variety of different industries, both online and local businesses, and thankfully they’re all doing well. We’ve helped every one of our clients pivot their business during these uncertain times, and it’s paying off for them. We’ve also had an influx of companies reach out to us to rebuild their branding, websites, and SEO as before COVID-19, they didn’t have the time to start these types of projects.

We have great sympathy for the entire world right now, especially business owners as this is not an easy time. If you haven’t already optimized your business for COVID-19, start with this article on What Your Business Should be Doing to Fight the Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19).

Businesses Affected by COVID-19

Businesses all over have been drastically affected by COVID-19. Right now is the time for smaller companies to go head to head against their much larger competitor. If you own a local medspa with 3-4 employees and a 3,000sq ft office space, you have an amazing chance of surviving COVID-19 as you may not have the same challenges as the medspa with 20 employees, 10,000 sq ft office space and a $30,000 per month marketing expense.

We can speak on this topic as we have medical clients in that space right now who are planning on even financially helping or buying the other medspas that can’t weather the storm as it’s a smart play right now.

Now, before we go too far off track, we wanted to give you an example of businesses that are getting hurt from being closed, yet still keeping a positive outlook on life and doing whatever they can to grow their business during COVID-19.

Local SEO and Why It’s Important During and After COVID-19

We are going to go over why local SEO is so important now more than ever for businesses in the following industries: salons, spas, health and wellness, plastic surgery, medical, restaurants, massage, and cleaning services. It’s April 14th, 2020, as we write this article, and the State of Arizona, along with the rest of the country, is in complete lockdown.

Right now, most cities and shopping centers look like ghost towns, and that’s okay. Do you know how busy it’s going to be when everyone can leave the house and resume their normal lifestyle? We’re afraid most businesses won’t even know how to deal with the increase in demand for their restaurant, salon, spa, or shopping center.

Think about it. Everyone has been cooped up at home for two to three months with their spouse, pets, kids, etc. They want out, and they want to get back to their normal life of eating out, going to the gym, watching a movie, etc.

This exact reason is why local SEO is so essential for your business. You should want your business popping up on the first page of Google and #1 in the local 3-pack Google map when searching for your type of business. We are going to go over what local SEO is and five reasons why local SEO is important for your business right now.

What is Local SEO?

Local SEO (search engine optimization) is a way to optimize your business and its website to be visible and populate for location-based searches on Google. Local SEO is a strategy that can be incorporated into your marketing campaign to drive more organic traffic to your website, to give the user directions, and for the ability to call your phone number to visit you or set an appointment.

When a user is searching for specific keywords with the city, state, zip code, or near me searches added, your business should populate. Local search optimization is one of the best marketing tactics and strategies to grow your local business.

Below is an example of searches 

  • Restaurants near me
  • Bars near me
  • Scottsdale Medspas
  • Medical clinics in Phoenix

Avintiv Media has our proprietary process on how we get our local clients ranking on the first page of Google and in the 3-pack map. Some standard strategies can include content creation, on-page optimization, and off-page optimization with an emphasis on local directory listings.

5 Reasons Why Local SEO Is Important and Should be Your Main Marketing Focus for 2020

 

1. When COVID-19 is over, traveling, eating out, and shopping will be busier than ever.

One of the biggest misconceptions when wanting to grow your business is building your marketing around current events. That is slightly true but mostly false. True SEO campaigns and strategies take 60-90 days before Google fully processes all of the changes and starts sending you more organic traffic. If you started local SEO today, you would start to see results around June 14th, 2020. June 14th, 2020, which would be weeks after the U.S. has lifted its lockdown policies, and people would slowly going back out and looking at places to eat and shop.

Not only that, I can attest to this, but most of us do not look like our best selves right now, whether it’s from nails or hair not being done or gyms being closed down. Gyms, medspas, hair salons, and any type of medical or health enhancement company are going to be booming with customers wanting to enhance their look. Is your medspa going to pop up #1 on Google when a user searches, or will your competitor take that spot?

A lot of your competitors are probably doing worse than you due to their company being larger with much more expenses. They are more than likely taking their foot off the gas, which is the perfect time to catch up to them before they even notice. We love working with the Davids of the world as we take down the Goliaths of the world. We genuinely want everyone to win, so we say that half kidding, but the other half being dead serious.

2. Local SEO stats you should know.

We can sit here and tell you why local SEO is so important for your business right now and in the near future, but we’d much rather you see real research and data. 

These stats can be found on our recent blog 5 Need to Know SEO Tips for Dentists and Periodontists for 2020.

3. Getting Your Business Listed on the Google 3-Pack Map

You, along with everyone else, have searched for something on Google and have clicked a business listed in Google’s 3-pack map. Most people never even go past the 3-pack map since Google launched it. 

Ironically, Moz completed a study where over 44% of the people who performed a local search, then clicked on the 3-pack listing. Only 8% of those people chose to press “load more” to see the rest of the results. Do you want to be a part of the 8% group of businesses?

The Google 3-pack map has made it extremely easy for people to find a business’s website, address, or phone number with just a few clicks. If you’re using a new smartphone, which is highly likely, your phone will give you turn-by-turn directions to that business within seconds.

Below is an example of one of our clients, who is a local dentist and periodontist. We’ve been grateful to have been working with them for almost two years now. We rebuilt their brand, website, and completed local SEO with ongoing SEO support. Within just a few short months, her business was on page one of Google and the Google 3-pack map for competitive keywords within her industry.

Local SEO, SEO, Dental SEO, Search results

4. Tourists and people that are traveling are going to use Google to find businesses near them.

Although it’s hard to imagine people traveling right now with everything going on with COVID-19, there will be a time in the near future when the world resumes back to how it was. When tourists travel to different places, they search Google for what’s around them. Odds are if you haven’t invested in optimizing your business for local SEO, they will not be finding your business.

As you can see in the image below, search engines (SEO) is the number one online used source for travel planning by leisure travelers and the second source for business travelers.

Make sure that you have a nicely designed website that will give your visitors a phenomenal experience; otherwise, Google won’t want to rank you towards the top.

 

Local SEO, SEO, Travel and vacation search results

5. Local SEO has the highest conversion rates out of all local advertising channels.

This reason is probably one of the most important because as a fellow business owner, we all understand ROI and revenue is much more important than analytics in a monthly report. There are many parts of SEO, but the two most significant elements are: getting your website more organic traffic and then having that organic traffic convert into paying customers.

There was a recent study done that showed an astounding 78% conversion of offline sales through local SEO, with almost 90% of those purchases being a physical store or location. Out of those local searches, 76% of the offline sales happened the same day, and 63% within just a few hours. I don’t know about you, but those are some pretty fantastic conversion rates.

When people are searching on Google through their mobile devices, chances are they are ready to buy something or come to your business within the next 24 hours. 

In Conclusion

With the addition of Local SEO, you’ll also be one of those businesses that can proudly say we not only survived COVID-19, but we also set our business up for future success and it’s now doing better than ever. Are you going to be that person? If so, schedule a FREE SEO audit with us today to see how well your local SEO is performing.

Top Tips For Being Productive While Working From Home

By now, working from home is no shock to the whole world. As we write this article, we’re going on 33 days of working from home. Although we’re a digital marketing agency and can pivot fairly quickly, it’s a culture change and shock to a lot of people that aren’t ready for it. Not to mention, a lot of people have a problem when forced to do something, even if it’s for the best. Thankfully, our entire team transitioned to 100% remote with ease as we helped each other through the mental change.

After seeing and hearing about a lot of companies and people struggling with the 100% remote transition, we figured we’d provide some value and give you the top tips that have helped our agency pivot 100% working from home with ease.

Top Tips For Being Productive While Working From Home

Before we dive into the top tips for being productive while working from home, we’d like to touch on a few things. Everything in life, whether good or bad, is analyzed and processed by your mind, your emotions, and how you feel about situations. You can follow all of our tips, but if you’re doing it while the news is on or you’re scrolling through social media looking for COVID-19 updates, you might as well throw these tips right out the window. You must eliminate all stress from your life and put blinders on during this new world we’re living in. Try to focus on the positives that have come from this. We know it’s hard to be positive during a tragic time, but it is very much possible as we’re writing this article from a very positive and happy place.

Make sure your house is clean and stays clean.

I know we sound like your mom in the 3rd grade to make sure you clean your room before you can play with your friends, but we’re serious. If you haven’t read the book “Make Your Bed,” we’ll start with your first task. From the moment you wake up, you must start the day with a sense of not only accomplishment but a clean and healthy start. It puts your mindset on attention to detail mindset for the day. A clean home will create a positive and stress-free environment for you and your work. This current situation might be much harder for those of you reading this that have a few kids running around at home but ask for help from others.

A lot of people struggle with their schedule while working remotely, which is why we recommend scheduling your cleaning on your Google calendar, where you can see it every day. We’re not kidding. Schedule out your chores and cleaning time on your calendar so you treat it as if you would like any other task in your life. I’ve personally been doing this for years, and it works like a charm. Even if you have a cleaning lady or company that usually comes, odds are, we’re all cleaning our houses right now. A productive day starts with cleanliness and positive energy.

Make sure that you set up a remote office in a room in your home.

This one might seem obvious, but we have to remember that some people live in studio or one-bedroom apartments. This tip also goes to anyone that has an office at home but decides to use the couch instead. No matter how much “flow” you think you have from a comfy chair or comfy couch, you should still set up a designated office in your home. Your office will allow you to sit up straight in a chair and type effectively on your computer. It won’t have you getting comfy like a couch cushion would, which will slowly put you to sleep throughout the day.

You should also treat different rooms in your house for different purposes; otherwise, you’re going to go crazy by being inside your home 24/7. If you work, read, watch tv, and talk to friends on Zoom all from your living room, chances are you’re going to get sick of your living room and feel trapped very soon. Spread your time throughout your entire home. If you have a smaller house or apartment, feel free to get outside while staying socially distant from people.

Communication with your team is crucial.

When working from home, we’re forced to read lines in a text message, email, or Slack channel versus seeing that person and having a conversation face to face. We’ve all had someone misread our text or email before and take the message the opposite way that you intended it to be read. That calls for increased communication with your team during these times.

Our team has two stand-up meetings on Slack and Zoom every week, managers meeting every Friday, and we all work live in slack together from 9 am – 6 pm Monday through Friday. Although our team has been working until 8 pm – 9 pm most nights as a lot of our clients have tight deadlines for COVID-19 projects and not much else to do right now outside of work and binge-watch your favorite Netflix series, Tiger King.

Making a schedule is crucial.

Some of you might live by a schedule, and some of you might hate schedules. Now is the time to get accustomed to a schedule if you want to be productive while working remotely from home. Some of you might be single and alone at home, but some of you might have a significant other and kids at home, so it could also be pretty hectic.

We highly recommend putting everything about your day in your Google Calendar. You can then color code your day. I’ll give you an example. I wake up every morning at 6:30 am and spend the next two hours reading, meditating, and journaling. I mark that blue in my calendar for personal time. I then color code which subjects I’m working on throughout the day: content creation is yellow, SEO is orange, sales is green, creative or branding is pink, and so on. You don’t have to go that granular. You can just start by adding everything to your calendar and breaking it down, so nothing catches you off guard, and you can visualize everything you genuinely plan to get done for the week. The other cool feature of Google Calendars is that you can break down that goal or time slot into bullet points of tasks or goals in the description box.

Google Calendar, Productive, Work From Home

Take a 10-15 minute break every 2-3 hours.

We started implementing this at our agency about a year ago. We saw research that increased productivity after taking a walk. When you’re staring at your computer screen for hours at a time, you need to give your eyes and brain a rest and refresh. Going for a walk is a great way to breathe some fresh air and get away from work.

We noticed that every time our team would walk around our neighborhood in Scottsdale, AZ, they would get a bunch of vitamin D from the sun, and see bright blue skies, birds chirping, and super green trees. How could that not freshen someone’s day up? So, we started pushing our team members to go on walks with each other. Going for a walk will also help you focus on the positives right now and show you how much bigger this universe is than just us and our needs during this time.

Set a timer on your phone every 2-3 hours, and it will remind you to go for a walk. We’d recommend bringing water with you as the odds are you haven’t hydrated enough while working away at your computer.

Use this software to work at home with ease.

Below is a list of some of the software we use at Avintiv Media to be productive while working remotely.

Slack

Slack is the same thing as an advanced chat room for your whole company. It’s a live chat system that allows you to take to your entire company or just one person at a time. Your company is a workspace, and it will enable you to organize communications by creating channels to organize group discussions. You can add text, links, files, and pretty much anything else inside slack that you would want to send to a colleague. Our agency counts on slack a ton, even when we are working at the office, since we have had remote team members all over the country.

Google Calendar

Google Calendar is just as it sounds; it’s a shared calendar linked to your Google Account. Google Calendar allows you to quickly schedule meetings or Zoom meetings while getting reminders about upcoming meetings throughout the day. Google Calendar works excellently with teams of any size. You can view what your other team members are working on or where they have free time for an up-and-coming meeting. This calendar has been a massive lifesaver for us at the agency.

Google Drive

Google Drive is a free online cloud-based storage system that allows you to store and access files online. Odds are, your company either uses Google Drive or Dropbox to organize all of your company files. Google Drive syncs all of your stored files to any of your devices, whether it’s your desktop, laptop, phone, or tablet. You can access all of your files in the cloud.

Zoom

Outside of being one of the best stocks to have invested in for the beginning of 2020, Zoom is one of the top software programs getting everyone through working remotely. Zoom is cloud-based videotelephony, online chat, and business telephone service you can use to video chat clients, team members, friends, or anyone else who has it. Zoom allows you to share your screen or draw on the screen, so it feels like you’re still face-to-face with those you’re meeting. We highly recommend using Zoom for all teams who are working remotely right now. Zoom has been one of the most significant culture pieces that have been holding our teams together. Our team is a big family, and we all know how we feel when we can’t see family for weeks at a time. Zoom allows us all to see each other’s faces, along with our clients, faces, multiple times per week.

ClickUp

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management system that is suitable for all sized businesses or projects. We use ClickUp to manage all of our client’s projects, budgets, timelines, and internal processes. One reason we’ve been able to scale our agency so quickly is due to the level of quality of our work and our streamlined processes. ClickUp has enhanced our processes to deliver an even more phenomenal experience to our clients.

If you’re having trouble organizing projects or collaborating on deliverables with your teammates, then we highly recommend you look at ClickUp. It has saved a lot of our projects from colliding with each other, as a lot of our projects are from different clients with different deliverables and similar timelines. Even if it’s you by yourself, it’s an excellent way for you to stay organized on what needs to be accomplished with your projects.

In Conclusion

We understand that right now is a difficult time for a lot of people in the world. There’s no way of sugar-coating that. It’s not what happens to you that defines you; it’s how you react and handle those situations that define you. There are a lot of positives to look at during this massive refresh the world is doing. A lot of us have taken for granted the little things in life, like leaving our houses or going to a restaurant. Right now, you have the full power to be productive working from home and keeping a positive attitude about life and work. If you need help with your business or want to pivot your business, feel free to contact us, and we can chat.

What Your Business Should be Doing to Fight the Impact of Coronavirus (COVID-19)

 

With everything that’s going on in the world, having to think about you and your family’s safety is terrible enough, but to then have to worry about how your business will survive COVID-19 adds to the stress. Just know, I am writing to you as a fellow entrepreneur and business owner that has clients, team members, and a future to protect as well.

During times of crisis or significant change, no matter what happens, it changes things. Change is out of your hands. It’s how you react to the change that matters. Do you want your business to just “survive” COVID-19, or do you want your business to “thrive?”

Now is the best chance you’ll have to take a step back, take a full deep dive into your business, and audit everything. Audits are usually scary, but look at the world we live in today, everything is a bit scary right now.

Today, we’re going to go over advice on how to manage the impact that Coronavirus, COVID-19, has on your business and how to come out ahead.

Top 10 Tips For Your Business to Survive Coronavirus (COVID-19)

 

Keep Your Team and Your Clients Safe

No matter what, your priority should be keeping your team and clients safe. I understand that most businesses need to stay open to keep food on the table for their families. Your team and clients are what has gotten you to this point and trust you to do the right thing. Here is a full list from the CDC for Interim Guidance for Businesses and Employers to Plan and Respond to Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19).

 

 

Cut Your Costs

Before you go slashing every cost in your business, take a deep breath, and read this through before making any type of action. I’ll be the first one to admit that when business is going well, we tend to let costs slide or continue to spend money that we wouldn’t have spent the first week we launched our business. Now is the time to make your business as lean as can be.

Below is a list of items that we recommend cutting or working with:

  • Software that you don’t need at the moment
  • Programs that your company sometimes use and sometimes don’t
  • Advertising costs (Unless you have a business that is still positive ROI on your ad spend during this time, I would shift your marketing strategy and build your organic channels up, like SEO and content creation)
  • Rent – Contact your landlord and let them know what type of position you’re experiencing. Ask for an extension or some kind of help to get you past this difficult time. Do you have an online business? Is it time to go remote for 60-90 days and skip the office space?
  • Office expenses – You can momentarily pause or cancel phone, internet, wifi, water, food delivery, etc.
  • Accounting – Are you able to contact your bookkeeper and have them pause services for 60-90 days?
  • Hired contractors that are on retainer (not in-house team) – Are you able to lower your monthly retainer or renegotiate during this time?

These are just some of the examples that you can do to eliminate costs to your business immediately. I wouldn’t recommend cutting costs so low that it changes your flow of current business, though, as we don’t know how long COVID-19 will last. If it only lasts 30 days, you’re going to wish you didn’t cut certain costs. If it lasts longer than 90 days, then you might want to pivot your company a bit more.

A great way to track your company costs for FREE is by using MINT.

 

Go 100% Remote For The Time Being

Allowing employees to work from home is the best possible way to keep your business, your clients, and the entire community safe. We’re all in this together, and it’s our job to stay home to get in front of COVID-19. Avintiv went 100% remote starting March 13th, 2020. Here are the results:

  • Our team has daily standup meetings in Slack and we’ve been even closer to each other during this time.
  • Our team can be comfortable at home while working even more hours due to boredom or not being able to go outside (If you have a great culture, you won’t have to worry about your team being lazy at home and not working).
  • We have daily Zoom meetings, which has been a total lifesaver. Our team and clients are enjoying how much facetime they get with us now since it’s not back to back meetings.
  • Our team has become more healthy from eating at home, drinking more water, and taking care of their bodies more.
  • Grateful – our entire team has become super grateful during this whole COVID-19 experience as you never know how truly good you have something until it’s gone.
  • Work productivity has increased due to our team, not leaving for appointments, the gym, traveling, etc. – Everything they need is in their home, so they are much more focused.
  • We were able to cut office expenses that we paid monthly for since we won’t be using them for another 30 to 60 days.

 

Buy Your Raw Materials or Goods in the United States

I know this won’t apply to everyone. Still, if you’re a company that gets its manufacturing or white-label products or goods in China or outside of the United States, we recommend searching for local manufacturers that will be able to work with you. Costs are usually much higher in the United States than in China but do you should be able to negotiate with them now in this time of need. You might find a wholesaler in the United States that has a lot of inventory of that same item you were getting overseas.

If you’re in manufacturing, clothing, eCommerce, skincare, or anything in-between, look for a company that can supply you locally for the time being.

 

Read These Books ASAP

Some of you have already read these books, but they are incredibly vital for the future success of your company. Since you have extra time on your hands, it’s best to strategize for the future of your company versus just worrying in the present. I would read these in order from top to bottom.

 

Make Sure Your Business Can Be Found Online

Right now, online website traffic moves up and down from week to week. We’ve heard of record-high numbers and then record low numbers. Just think, the majority of the world is at home for the next 30 to 60 days. What are they going to be doing? They’re going to be searching online for things. The majority of the population is already going crazy stuck at home. That means that once the world can go back outside and resume life, they are going to be shopping, eating at restaurants, drinking at bars, traveling, and going about life as it did before COVID-19.

If your business isn’t ranking in the 3-Pack Google Map or on the first page of Google, you’re losing TONS of business to your competitors that are. If you’re a business owner who has faith in their business and wants to double down while others pause, you should be using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. These SEO strategies will allow you to pop up first on Google when consumers are out and about again. Correct white-hat SEO strategies take 30-90 days to implement anyway, so you have nothing but time right now. Below are some examples of how well just a few of our SEO clients are doing against their competition in competitive industries.

 

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Although times are scary for everyone right now, especially entrepreneurs, there is still a way to capitalize on this instead of just taking a huge loss. By getting your business to rank first on Google and in search results, you are providing value to customers who have just gone through what you went through. Then it’s up to you to give that customer a phenomenal experience when they find your business through Google.

Contact us if you’d like a FREE SEO audit or consultation on how to get your business to rank on Google.

 

Customer Experience

Just remember, with the whole world at home, and much more time on their hands, they are paying very close attention to everything right now. How you handle your business in times of crisis says a lot about your business and you as an owner. With that said, make sure you have a calm manner if you are posting on social media or in person. Don’t freak out. I repeat, don’t freak out. Right now, people want to find motivation, comfort and know that everything is going to be okay. Be the light that shines through this dark time.

When it comes to politics and emergencies like this, it is best not to take sides or post any type of fearful content on social media either. It’s best to create content that is positive, funny, and caring. Even if your business has lost customers or can’t be open right now, be the light on social media for your customers and your followers.

Now is not the time to show everyone your political beliefs or how you could run the country so much better. BE POSITIVE ON SOCIAL MEDIA!

Once COVID-19 is behind us, you must remain calm. If customers shop at your business and you’re running around like crazy to make up for lost revenue, then they won’t be coming back anytime soon. Just remember, customers want to support businesses during tough times, and if you give them a phenomenal experience, they will tell so many friends about it.

 

Pivot Your Business to Online Sales

We have been coaching business owners for the last three years to take their business online due to how much quicker an online business can scale. Do you have a business that can be transitioned online?

If you’re a personal trainer or gym, you should be developing at-home workouts and getting them to your customer base as quickly as possible. Utilize technology like Trainerize.

If you’re a local restaurant/bar, take your ordering online immediately by adding functionality on your website for both takeout and ordering online. I would also recommend adding free delivery with no personal interaction with someone.

If you don’t have a website, now is the time to invest in one and get your customers shopping online.

Now is the time to totally think outside the box and ask yourself how you can provide tons of value to people that are stuck at home right now. Maybe you’re a local restaurant and bar, and you want to start a private Facebook Group where the community can still engage with each other.

No matter your type of business model, most of you will be able to pivot and do something online to keep your current customer base.


If you need help with this, contact us and we can assist you in pivoting.

 

Hire a Business Coach or Consultant

If you’ve done everything in your power to get to where you currently are and you’ve tried everything, then reach out to a business coach or consultant. Hiring a business coach or consultant can help you take your business to the next level by paying to save the time of trial and error. Make sure when you hire someone, that they have experience building companies and that they have strategies on how to get you through a crisis such as COVID -19. I’ve personally been a consultant to over 250 businesses over the last ten years, and I can assure you that most of you are not at your full breaking point, you just need help getting over this little hump.

If you’d like a free consultation call, feel free to contact us. Right now, our goal at Avintiv is to help as many businesses get through this troubling time as possible because it’s scary and not comfortable. We’ve been in situations of fear for over a decade and are used to fighting for our client’s lives (clients with competitive industries).

 

If Worst Come to Worsts, Take Out an SBA Loan

SBA Loan, Small business loan, COVID-19 loan

I would usually never recommend a business going into debt unless it was a strategy to leverage debt to grow quicker. In this case, some companies will most definitely need to take out some form of a small business loan to get through these troubling times. Lower your ego and know that it’s okay if you need to take out a loan. There is no time for you to feel sorry for yourself because you have a business to run and grow.

Below are some options for the best options for small business loans during Coronavirus (COVID-19).

 

Conclusion

What we’re going through right now with COVID-19 is scary. There’s no lie in saying that. When you created your LLC or corporation, you made a silent promise to yourself that you would do everything in your power to protect your business at all costs. Nothing has changed. Maybe COVID-19 is a huge wake-up call to a lot of companies out there that haven’t changed much up over the years. All I know is that everything in life happens for a reason and it’s not about what happens to us, it’s about we reacted to the situation and handled it. I don’t know about you, but I took a much deeper dive into my business and noticed there is still much work to be done to hit my full vision. If you need any help or even a little advice, feel free to contact us, and we’ll set up a time to chat with you. Keep your head up and stay positive!

5 Need to Know SEO Tips for Dentists and Periodontists for 2020

If you’re a dentist or periodontist, it’s no secret that there seems to be a new dental office that opens up on every street corner now. Do you know the actual numbers, though?

In 2012, an article by Dental Economics stated, “In the last five years, competition has increased in dentistry. Seventy-five percent of dental practices have experienced production declines since the Great Recession. Many offices are in danger of continuing this trend if they do not come to terms with what it takes to grow a practice in the new dental economy.

In 2015, the United States had 195,722 practicing dentists. That’s the equivalent of having 60.9 dentists per 100,000 population.

Now that you understand the dentistry industry across the board is becoming extremely competitive let’s switch over and go over statistics from the lovely customers in the United States that use local dental services.

Marketing Stats for Dental Practices

Spectrio has provided the below stats.

“77% of patients use online reviews when finding a new healthcare provider.”

It doesn’t matter what type of business you’re in; customers are looking to see reviews from other real customers. It shows social proof on the level of care and quality that your business has to offer. With something as important as finding a new local dentist, you better believe that the potential customer is researching your business and your reviews before making a call.

“75% of customers expect companies to provide a consistent experience across multiple touchpoints.”

In 2020, the majority of the potential customers that are looking to bring their business to you are researching you on multiple platforms. They’re looking at your Google reviews, Yelp reviews, website, and social media handles. They want to make sure that you’re the real deal before they bring you their business. Switching dentists or periodontists isn’t as easy as changing which restaurant you want to eat tonight.

Your online experience has to match across the board. Now is the time to tighten up all aspects of your brand, or your competition who do that well will continue to grow.

“70% of customers say technology makes it easier for them to take their business elsewhere.”

As we’ve mentioned above, with the amount of competition and level of technology we all have at our fingertips, finding a new dentist has never been easier for a potential customer. They aren’t just looking at your business; they’re researching 2-3 dentists and periodontists at the same time to find the right fit for what they’re looking for.

 

What is SEO?

For those of you who are reading this blog and don’t know or understand what SEO is, fear not, we’ll explain it.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of website traffic by increasing the visibility of your website through organic search engine results.

For instance, anytime you type something into Google, the SERPs (search engine results pages) are showing you the closest information that you were looking for. Although there are a lot of variables on how Google shows its results, the majority of the search results on page one or two of Google have heavily optimized their SEO to be seen over their competition.

Example: You’re a Scottsdale, AZ, dentist, and your website pops up on page 40 when someone types in “Scottsdale Dentist” into Google. You decided to hire an agency to improve your SEO, and after a few months, your business now pops up on the first page of Google for “Scottsdale Dentist.” You can see how much value that would be for you. Thousands of people in Scottsdale will now know what your business is and where you’re located, which will increase website traffic and grow your top-line revenue.

 

Why is SEO important for dentists and periodontists in 2020?

Back in the day, customers would look in the yellow pages to look up local dentists. I’m sure you remember those days. Now, Google and SEO are the new yellow pages. If your business isn’t adequately listed or you haven’t optimized your SEO for dentists, it’s highly likely that not many new customers are finding your business online.

Referral businesses are not scalable. There will be a time when the referrals stop coming in.

When you optimize your website with SEO for dentists, and your website is popping up on the first page of Google, you’re essentially getting free traffic. If your site is optimized correctly, then a percentage of that traffic will convert into paying customers.

Local SEO Stats, you should know: 

Over the last 20 years, our SEO team has been accumulating the knowledge and knowhow to develop SEO campaigns that have disrupted entire industries and grown clients over 2000%.

In this article, we’ll be going over five need to know tips on SEO for dentists and periodontists for 2020. 

 

1. Determining the right keywords

Before beginning SEO, you want to research and learn the right keywords for your business to rank for. We would start by listing the services that you offer and follow that by the general location (city, state, local) search terms. A couple of examples would look like: Teeth Whitening, Crowns, Braces, fillings, local Scottsdale dentist, etc.

You want to make sure that you’re focusing on keywords that have the intention of working with a dentist. For instance, “at-home teeth whitening” is still teeth whitening, but that person doesn’t plan on going to a dentist. You would want to use the phrase “dentist teeth whitening near me.” You have to remember that Google’s primary goal is to provide solutions that match what the user is searching for; otherwise, it doesn’t give the user the best experience. Picking the right keywords is extremely important.

Ideally, you’ll want to have a mixture of keywords that have high search volume but also long-tail keywords that will be easier to rank for. If you try to search for “dentist” when there are 823,000 search volume, that will be much more difficult.

 

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, keywords, Google Search Marketing

 

If you don’t know how to do proper keyword research, you can always contact us for assistance. Every successful SEO campaign should have very in-depth keyword research and planning done behind the scenes. The research dives into your brand, your competition, your customers, and carefully decide keywords and key phrases that people are searching for based on the research. The research will be able to tell what your competitors are ranking for and how much traffic is going to their sites based on each keyword. Successful campaigns will ensure that the research is utilized in both the on-page and off-page campaigns to ensure that your website will be on page one of Google for many of your selected keywords.

2. Having a well-built website with user experience in mind

One of the most important aspects of running a successful company in 2020 is having an up-to-date website with the basics that every consumer expects you to have. If you’re a dentist or periodontist with a 5+-year-old website that hasn’t been updated, you are losing thousands of dollars every single week.

Unique Website Design

In 2020, you need to stand out from all of the other dentist or periodontist websites that are out there. You have a one in one hundred chance of having each new potential customer choosing you. If your website doesn’t have a unique design or stand out, you won’t be among their top three choices.

With how many choices are out there right now, your website design, structure, colors, and layout need to match the flow and experience that your potential customers are looking for. If it doesn’t meet their needs, they’re right onto the next competitor of yours.

 

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Web Design Agency, responsive website, Scottsdale web design agency, Phoenix Web Design Agency

 

Avintiv Media has been named top Web Design Agency in the United States for the past two years in a row, and that comes from us understanding what customers are looking for on a website.

 

Responsive Design & Development

In 2018, over 58% of site visits were from mobile phones. If that alone doesn’t show you the need to have a mobile-friendly (responsive design), we go into more detail why its a necessity for 2020.

Google stated that 61% of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing, and 40% visit a competitor’s site instead. That’s a pretty significant number.

Back in July 2019, Google switched its search engine to mobile-first indexing. Mobile-first indexing means Google predominantly uses the mobile version of the content for indexing and ranking. If your website isn’t developed for mobile, then you can expect to take a hit with your rankings while your mobile-friendly competitors start moving up the rankings.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Web Design Agency, responsive website, Scottsdale web design agency, Phoenix Web Design Agency

If you’d like to find out how mobile-friendly your website is or isn’t, contact us today.

 

Website Speed, Performance, and Usability

The world we live in has become more and more impatient. We are all used to being able to access everything with a button press of a phone now. You can order a car, food, and anything else you’d like from your mobile phone.

If your website speed doesn’t meet the standards of what a potential customer is looking for, then they will leave your site and go to your competitor.

Google started using site speed and performance as a search ranking factor for their algorithm starting back in 2010. That means, if your website is slower than Google would like, they are going to move you lower in the rankings as they feel it will give the person searching a lousy experience. Google is a business, and they aren’t going to show off websites on page one that aren’t optimized properly as it shows the business owner doesn’t care that much.

One of our client’s Google rankings started to drastically climb up towards page one after we made significant updates to the speed of their website. The example below is after just one round of updates.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency, Speed Report

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency, Speed Report

Content, Content, Content – Content is still king

Content on your website is one of the most critical aspects of your website and SEO campaign that you can do. Having the right type of content on your dentist website or periodontist website is crucial. Your website visitors want to learn more about the services that you offer and also know that you’re legit and an authority figure in your industry.

The more optimized pages of content on your website allow you to rank for even more keywords on Google. You can’t rank on page one for “Dentist in Scottsdale” unless you have content on your website or SEO campaigns that matches that description.

The majority of the dentists that we’ve been able to get on page one of Google for over 30+ keywords have over 30 pages on their website.

Each one of your services needs to have its page and go into detail explaining what you offer with that service.

For a great example of one of the service pages, we’ve built for our client, check out Malek Periodontics.

 

3. Enhancing On-Page SEO for Dentist Website

Before today you have probably heard the term SEO before, but a lot of you want to know, “What is on-page SEO?”

On-page SEO is the SEO work that’s done on your website and individual pages to rank higher in search engines, earning more traffic and an increase in revenue.

One of the most significant factors that Google makes as it becomes more sophisticated is relevance. How relevant is your page or content to the search query? Google doesn’t want to give its users a bad experience by showing a page that has nothing to do with what they were wanting.

Think of it like you’re at a restaurant (Google), you order a hamburger (search for local hamburger restaurant), and the server (search engine) delivers a taco (local taco restaurant). Tacos are still delicious, but it’s not what you ordered. Get the point.

Below are the areas that we would focus on for any beginners with on-page SEO.

Meta Tags

One of the most important things to consider for on-page SEO is your meta tags. Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content to Google search engines and crawlers. 

Meta tags provide more relevance syncing between your content and a search query searching for similar content. You will get higher rankings if the relevance of your meta tag matches what the user is searching for, along with their satisfaction.

Meta Titles

One of the most critical meta tags we’ll be discussing is your title tags. Meta Titles have a drastic impact on your search rankings and are visible to the regular user who’s searching Google. The words will appear at the top of each tab in their browser for both organic results and paid ads.

The title tag explains to the user what the page is about before they click on it. Google and other search engines look at the title tag and compare that to the rest of the content on the page.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency

If you’re working inside of WordPress, we highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin. The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to create a custom title tag within each page very quickly. Make sure to keep your title tags descriptive and short. It will show “green” when it’s the correct length.

Think of this as you standing outside next to your competitors with billboards in your hands. What would you say about your webpage versus your competition? Be sure to add in your relevant keywords and location to help with rankings.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions help search engines determine the page’s topic and the audience that will find value. More importantly, the meta descriptions explain what users will find on the page if they click on the link.

When writing meta descriptions, keep in mind quality is still king (or queen). A very well written meta description can generate higher rankings in the search results, along with a higher click-through rate with users.

We recommend keeping your description between 165 and 175 characters long. See an example of one of our local periodontist clients below.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency

Heading Tags

If you want to have any success with on-page SEO, heading tags are a necessity. Your website and every page should include multiple heading tags, ranging from the H1 to the H6. The most important heading tag is the H1.

The H1 heading is usually the page title or name of the page or post. On a category page, your H1 would be the name of that category. On a product page, your H1 would be the name of that product. You can only use one H1 heading per page. Otherwise, you will get docked for SEO.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency, H heading

As you write your page content, you can also use the H2 and H3 headings to introduce different sections of your page or content. An H2 heading is just like a chapter in a book. The section you’re reading now is an H4 heading since a section of a subsection. This will help Google and other search engines be able to read the structure of each page and rank them accordingly.

Internal Linking

Getting your website content to rank correctly is going to need links. Google begins to rank your pages and posts better when they’re linked to somewhere else on the web.

Internal links are also important in connecting your content to give Google a better understanding of how your website is structured. This will also allow link juice to pass through your site better.

Internal linking can get broken up into two categories: internal and external.

Internal links throughout your site and blogs will deliver a better user experience for your visitors and will also enhance your SEO. An example of this can be seen below.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Glendale Dentist, Scottsdale SEO Agency, Phoenix SEO Agency

An internal link is a hyperlink that goes from a word or phrase on your website page to another website page or blog within your website. An external link is a hyperlink that goes from a word or phrase on your website page, which goes to an external website page away from your website. 

You want to make sure that the internal links open in the same web browser tab so the user can see the flow. When doing internal links to external websites, you want to make sure they open up in a new web browser tab, so the user doesn’t leave your site.

When doing internal links, make sure you’re using anchor text (the word or phrase that is being linked) that relates to the URL that it’s pointing to so you don’t get penalized by Google.

Optimize Your Images

When you’re deciding what images to use on your website, make sure they are unique and relevant to that page. Users are much more likely to react to an image before they begin reading a post.

With how popular Instagram and social media, in general, has grown to be, our society is trained to react to images first.

When using images on your site, make sure you’re using the highest quality images possible. Google and other search engines prefer higher resolution images.

You always want to keep page speed in the back of your mind when adding in images. Resize your images below a 150KB file size to ensure that it doesn’t negatively affect your website speed.

When adding in an image, make sure that you always add in the image alt-text. An optimized alt-text gives Google another clue on what your page is about. The alt tag should be used to describe what the image is about, so it’s visible by Google’s crawlers.

If you’d like help with your on-page SEO, contact us today.

4. Enhancing Off-Page SEO for Dentist Website

We’ve already gone over what SEO is and also what on-page SEO is. Your head may or may not be spinning already. Either way, fear not, we’re here to help you.

Off-page SEO (or off-site SEO) refers to actions that happen outside of your website that have an impact on how your website ranks within search engine result pages (SERPs).

If you haven’t started with working on your on-page SEO, make sure you start that before diving into your off-page portion of your SEO campaign.

True off-page SEO is one of the most challenging but essential aspects of your SEO campaign. There are a lot of variables that come into play when perfecting your off-page SEO campaigns. 

You want to make sure you stay clear from companies that promise you “x” amount of links for $200 per month. The majority of those companies perform black-hat SEO and will eventually get your website banned from Google. Don’t take shortcuts when it comes to your SEO.

Building quality backlinks is one of the most important aspects of off-page SEO. Google and other search engines use backlinks to indicate the quality of the content that’s linked. A site with more high-quality backlinks will usually rank much better than the same site with fewer backlinks. 

For today’s article, we’re going to keep our recommendations simple and geared towards dentists and periodontists.

Citations and Directory Listings

Citations and directory listings are the first and easiest step for you to get more links to your website. Citations are mentions of your practice name, address, and phone number (NAP). You first start with having that information listed on your website, mainly on your contact page and also in the footer of your website. 

Citations are a significant factor in how Google ranks businesses in its local listings. The more your business is mentioned online also plays into how high you rank in the listings.

Once you’ve made sure that your citation matches across the board, you can then get it listed in relevant directories.

You will then want to get your business listed in all local directories that apply to your type of business.

Make sure that your actual business name is listed in all of your directory listings, and it’s not a combination of the business name and the dentist’s name. This causes a lot of confusion for customers trying to find your business.

There are a lot of industry-specific directory listings. If you search for “dentist directory listings,” there should be a ton that pops up. Otherwise, you can always hire a company to submit your information to every listing that has to do with your business and industry.

The top three directory listings are General Business Directories, Industry Specific Directories, and Local Directories.

Google My Business

Your Google My Business page will be one of the most important aspects when completing your citations and directories check-list.

Google My Business page is one of the fastest ways of seeing results for SEO. Setting up your account is extremely easy.

  1. Sign up for Google My Business
  2. Enter your business name
  3. Enter the address of your business location
  4. Specify the services your business offers
  5. Choose your business category
  6. Add a contact phone number and URL
  7. Complete your Google My Business verification

Once your Google My Business page has been verified, you can then add photos and add more content to describe your business better.

5. Reviews

Online reviews are critical for many reasons, so don’t bypass this thinking that it’s not a big deal. Over 90% of people searching online look at reviews before visiting the business. That’s a considerable number.

Online reviews are also another way to increase your SEO rankings since Google uses reviews as another way of deciding how to rank your website. If you’re a local business with 10x the amount of 5-star reviews, the chances are that your business is going to be at the top of Google’s local 3-pack.

Dentist SEO, SEO for dentists, Local SEO agency, Avintiv Media, Google My Business, Google Search

As you can see, our SEO client, Malek Periodontics, has 38 reviews with a 4.6-star rating, and they are #1 in the Google 3-pack listings. This has drastically changed the amount of traffic they have gotten.

The more 5 star reviews you get on Google, the more Google will want to show your Google My Business page off in the Google local 3-pack and will result in moving up the rankings in the SERPs.

You should always have a patient leave a review as they’re leaving an appointment or in a follow-up email with a small gift or incentive.

In Conclusion

As you can see, we went over a lot of information regarding SEO tips for dentists and periodontists. We showed you the data on how many people search online, how they decide on what company they buy from, and how you can be seen by more of your ideal customers. If you follow the above tips and strategies, you should get a lot more website traffic and, in turn, a lot more patients coming through your door. If you have any questions or want a quality SEO agency to assist you with all of this, feel free to contact us today.

How Our Cannabis Client Grew 2000% in One Year Through SEO & UI/UX

It’s no secret that the cannabis and CBD industry has been growing at light speed for the last couple of years. Both cannabis and CBD are mainstream where every day people are talking about the health benefits and are curious about learning more about them.

In fact, the cannabis industry is projected to hit $66.3 billion by 2025 and the CBD industry is growing to all new heights as well. The CBD industry is expected to reach $22 billion by 2022.

With those times of numbers with a big fat “B” behind them, you know there are a lot of people trying to rush into a goldmine and make a huge profit.

In this article, we’re going to talk about how our client, 3Win Corp, decided to skip the gold and sell shovels to all the gold miners like back in the 1800s during the gold rush.

Who is 3Win Corp?

3Win Corp is a wholesale CCELL® distributor, in 29 states in the US and 5 foreign countries. The company originated in 2015, growing from 6 employees to 38 employees within the last 12 months, with over 50 in 2019.

Their main clients are dispensaries, research labs, and extraction facilities. 3Win Corp is one of only four distributors worldwide that can sell and distribute CCELL® products, known for being the industry standard.

 

Selling Shovels in the Gold Cannabis Rush

Ever since the cannabis boom, everyone is trying to get in somehow. The majority of business owners and investors try to break into the industry by owning dispensaries, growing cannabis, or launching cannabis products.

Not 3Win Corp. They noticed a need in the market. Marijuana and CBD aren’t going anywhere and they knew that. Instead of offering the actual product itself, they offer the highest-quality accessories.

3Win Corp offers CCELL® products that are known for being the industry standard in vape technology. The vaping market is estimated to reach almost 55 million adults who vape by 2021. That’s a lot of people who need high-quality products to go with their marijuana and CBD products.

The Cannabis Market is Cut-throat Competitive

In 2018 alone, the cannabis industry had over $10 billion in investments that went towards marketing, advertising, and R&D. Some might think that the marijuana industry is a bunch of “hipsters” or people that just like to smoke pot. That couldn’t be further from the truth. Everyone is wanting a piece of this pie.

With that said, it has gotten more and more difficult to grow your cannabis brand over the years. Major investors and funding have got involved, which has made the playing field a bit unfair unless you have some massive firepower behind you.

This is one thing that 3Win Corp has ran into as the majority of its competitors are doing over $100 million per year in revenue and have major funding. They knew that they had to put forth more marketing firepower to saturate the market. They’ve since done just that but first, we’ll go into what they were dealing with.

Poor UI/UX/CX – Lack of Clarity and Consistency

3Win Corp was experiencing slower growth and loss of revenue. They had a website, but it wasn’t converting. Call-to-actions on the site were poorly displayed, and the customer experience was lacking – the site was not leading to an increase in sales. 

The site did not highlight 3Win Corp’s phenomenal product offerings and capabilities. This made it nearly impossible to close deals unless they were in person, resulting in high costs for travel and print collateral. The sales team was frustrated with the sales process, and customers were frustrated with the lack of clarity and accessibility of 3Win Corp’s product offering.

Poor Search Engine Visibility

3Win Corp had little no SEO work done prior to working with Avintiv Media. With how many laws and regulations hinder how the cannabis and CBD industries advertise their brand, SEO and content creation have become the most important tactic in growing these types of brands.

3Win Corp was resting close to the 26th page of Google for every keyword that they wanted to rank for, which put them very far behind their competition.

Extremely Slow Load Times

3Win Corp had a landing page with not much usability or functionality. The older website experienced extremely slow load times which made it harder to grow the business. Due to slow load times, visitors would leave before engaging with the site leading to little to no conversions. 

Slow load times were hurting 3Win’s Google rankings and increased bounce rates exponentially. Google now expects every website that wants to rank to have their website built properly with an amazing customer experience.

Over 47% of users expect a website page to load in two seconds or less. Even worse, over 40% of users won’t wait more than three seconds before leaving the site. Everything is customer-centric and to win in a competitive market, you must focus on the customer and not the competition.

The Solution – How 3Win Corp Grew 2000% in 2018

Custom UI/UX Design and Development

3Win Corp knew they needed a higher converting website and reached out to a couple of agencies, but the others didn’t play the part of what they were looking for. 3Win Corp stated, “When we reached out to Avintiv Media, we knew it was a no brainer with how professional you guys are and the experience you gave.”

3Win Corp, Web Design, Web Development, Award winning web developers, cannabis website, CBD website, Avintiv Media, UI/UX

What Avintiv Media Created:

  • Custom UI/UX Design & Development
  • Customer experience-centric UI/UX
  • Brand awareness and consistency built into the user interface and experience
  • Mobile-first and device responsive design
  • Conversion focused on engaging CTA’s built with clarity and consistency
  • Easy navigability, mobile-friendly and clean functionality
  • Built each page with on-page SEO enhancements
  • Website currently gets over a 92% rating with Google

“We get so many compliments on our website and brand, which gives more confidence to the employees and people that work with 3Win Corp.”

SEO Strategy and Implementation

We implemented SEO initiatives, strategies and campaigns focused on Google algorithms and visibility growth. 3Win Corp’s competition has invested heavily in SEO so there was a lot of catching up to do.

3Win Corp, SEO, on-page SEO, off-page SEO, Cannabis SEO, CBD SEO, marijuana SEO, digital marketing, Avintiv Media

What Avintiv Media created:

  • Competitive research & strategy
  • 12 month SEO campaign
  • Rebuilt Google Analytics with campaigns and goals
  • Completed National keyword research
  • Completed over 300 On-Page SEO enhancements
  • Completed over 200 Off-Page SEO enhancements
  • Had a campaign strategy of 50+ primary keywords
  • Had a campaign strategy of 30+ secondary keywords

What Were the Results?

3Win Corp now has a convertible website and ranks on page 1 of Google for many of their targeted keywords. 

3Win has experienced consistent growth and the ability to build out entirely new teams for customer service as a result of steady traffic flow and lead generation. 

3Win Corp has experienced 8x growth in hiring employees since our campaign launch. In 2018, they increased 35% in sales, getting 8+ new leads per day, and their website traffic has gone up 2,000%.

As you can see, 3Win Corp experienced crazy amounts of growth in 2018. We can’t wait to share what we’re up to for 2019-2020 as it’s MUCH BIGGER!

If you’d like to see how Avintiv Media can help your brand become an industry dominator, reach out to us.

Avintiv Media Wins Top Automotive Web Designer Award

Top Automotive Web Designers, Top Web Designers, Web Designers, Avintiv Media, Award winning agency

Located in Scottsdale, AZ, Avintiv Media is an award-winning agency specializing in solving problems for high-end clients. Our team is composed of hustlers, visionaries, creators, and designers that are highly skilled in web design, branding and SEO services. Being a boutique agency allows us to form close-knit relationships between our teams and clients. We are proud to announce our hard work has paid off and we have been named a Top Automotive Web Designers for 2019.

Clutch is a B2B platform dedicated to connecting prospective buyers with the leading firms in a wide variety of locations and industries.  On Clutch, buyers can view verified customer reviews and a carefully crafted rating based on an analysis of industry data. Additionally, Clutch features industry rankings of top firms for buyers to peruse. We are proud to have a 5-star Clutch rating thanks to our client’s participation in the interview process.

Along with our Clutch listing, Avintiv has been featured on Clutch sister sites, The Manifest and Visual Objects. The Manifest team’s research has contributed to creating a business news style reviews platform. Likewise, Visual Objects focuses on the creative work of B2B agencies by posting a portfolio of past work on each profile.

Each and every employee at Avintiv Media is proud to be named a leader among web design firms.

“This award allows us to showcase the hard work and out-of-the-box type thinking that we infuse into every project we work on. So many of our clients have had bad experiences before working with us, so awards like this, allow us to work with so many grateful clients.” -Jon Boles, CEO of Avintiv Media.

If your company is looking for a dedicated and collaborative partner to work with you on your next project, let’s get in touch today!

How to Start and Market Your CBD Brand

With the boom of the cannabis industry over the last couple of years, it’s no surprise that an easier go-to-market solution has emerged and is BOOMING. Cannabidiol (CBD) is the new craze and everyone wants in. Even if you already own a CBD brand, keep reading to learn how to start and market your CBD brand correctly.

Starting and marketing your CBD brand is not as easy of a task as it was two to three years ago. The market is extremely saturated and there are some extremely big players in the game now with unlimited funding. CBD is officially mainstream in the entrepreneur and investor world, which makes everyone want to join the bandwagon.

We’ve been waiting for our 80yr old grandparents to give us a call saying how they are launching a CBD brand. All jokes aside, it seems like everyone is wanting a piece of the pie. How big is the CBD pie?

What is CBD?

Before we dive into how big the CBD market is, we want those of you that don’t know what CBD is. 

CBD is short for Cannabidiol. CBD is one of over 100 known compounds found in the cannabis Sativa plant. This compound is found in both THC-rich strains of marijuana and also hemp. These plants are both classified as cannabis but the difference is that hemp produces only small amounts of THC, which are less than 0.3%. The compound carries much higher amounts as CBD, which is non-psychoactive eliminating the “high” feeling that THC has.

How Big is the CBD Industry?

Before we dive into how to start and market your CBD brand, you need to know how big the industry as a whole is. 

Brightfield states that the market for hemp-derived CBD products was around $591 million for 2018, and speculated to grow to $22-23 billion by 2022. Yes, that is a B for billion!

Below is a chart of the industry’s growth and future sales forecasting.

• 2014 – $108 million industry

• 2017 – $190 million industry

• 2018 – $591 million industry

• 2022 – $22 billion industry

CBD, CBD Growth, CBD Market, CBD Industry, Grow CBD Brand

Is CBD Legal?

Everyone wants to know, “Is CBD legal?” If you’re growing industrial hemp with the sole purpose of extracting high-quality CBD, that sole purpose is currently backed by the federal government. In December 2018, the 2018 farm bill was enacted. Among many of its other provisions, it removed hemp (not cannabis) from the list of prohibited substances. Hemp is now a legal agricultural commodity, and so are the products made from it. 

Some individual states have taken a much different stance on this and have chosen to ban CBD products which is key for anyone who has an eCommerce CBD store. You can always see which states CBD is legal.

CBD is still available to purchase and consume across the majority of the United States and in most places products still appear to be available, although some cities have banned the sale of food containing CBD. “CBD cannot be lawfully added to food or be labeled a dietary supplement,” was stated by the FDA with their public hearing on May 31st, 2019.

How much THC can your CBD have to be Legal?

Hemp and certain forms of CBD are federally legal, but you need to understand what aspects to look for when purchasing a CBD product. Many CBD brands that start decide to work with white-label CBD manufacturers because they don’t have the necessary capital to go to some of the larger manufacturing companies. Do your homework before deciding to work with a white-label manufacturer.

For CBD to be considered legal, the industrial hemp must contain .03% or less of THC. Any more and the plant is classified as marijuana and has many different laws that will drastically affect you and your customers.

There is still much confusion between CBD vs THC, which leaves a lot of questions for the general public. Federal agencies have started enforcing 0.3% or less THC policy much harder, which will keep the public much more well informed and safe.

Start Your CBD Brand

After reading the above information, you now realize how much work you have in front of you. At Avintiv, we are very data and research-driven. Everything we’ve done with building and scaling over 200 successful brands, starts with research and strategy.

This information will help new start-up CBD brands and CBD brands that have hit a plateau. We highly recommend building a brief business plan or investor pitch deck that you can use as a roadmap towards success. 

 

CBD Business Plan

Writing a business plan is a good idea even if you never plan on getting a loan from a bank or bringing on investors. You are able to use this business plan as a road map and allows you to benchmark your progress to see how on or off track you are. We won’t go over all aspects of a business plan today. We will point out the key factors to focus on.

Market Analysis – The market analysis will give you a break down of the CBD market, what segments there are, and what type of consumers your company will be marketing to.

Competitive Analysis – You must research and present a clear comparison of your business to your direct and indirect competitors. You need to know your strengths and weaknesses between your business and the competition.

Products and Services – What type of CBD products will your brand carry? Are you launching CBD oil, edibles, topicals, cosmetics or vapes? What will differentiate you from the competition?

Marketing Plan – Your marketing budget must clearly explain how you’re going to reach your ideal customers to hit your sales forecasts. You must clearly define how it’s going to be done and what your marketing budget is.

Sales Strategy – This portion of your business plan explains how you’re going to be selling your CBD. Are you only selling on your eCommerce website or do you have national CBD wholesalers or retail accounts?

Funding – From personal experience, Avintiv Media is currently growing many CBD brands, and the average monthly marketing budget is $10,000 – $20,000. You need to list out how you are going to fund your CBD brand. Whether that’s personal cash infusion by the owner or going for funding.

Sales Forecasts – You must create a realistic sales benchmark of what your business can do in sales over the next 3-5 years. Break the first year down to monthly sales goals and then do years 2-5 by year. This will help you determine if you’re on or off track from your goals.

 

Grow and Market Your CBD Brand

Growing your CBD brand in 2019-2020 is going to be much harder than it was years ago. The market is flooded with new CBD brands every single day, so what is going to set you apart from the competition? We’re going to go over how we’ve been able to grow our CBD clients.

Branding for Your CBD Brand 

Branding is and will be one of the most important aspects of your CBD brand. This part is often overlooked as many business owners want to rush to market. They care more about Instagram, influencer marketing, and getting sales. Don’t fall victim to this or you won’t stand a chance with how competitive the CBD market is right now.

 

Company Naming

A lot of business owners pick a company name that they like for some reason and it never becomes a massive company because the owner was thinking about themselves versus the customer. When picking a company name, ask yourself these questions:

  1. Can I build a $100 million brand with this type of name?
  2. Will customers know exactly what we do when they hear the name?
  3. Does this name clash or interfere with any other CBD brand? (hire a lawyer for this)
  4. Is this a name that our company can build a community or tribe of customers around?

Logo and Brand Styleguide

Developing a logo and brand style guide is much more in-depth as this but for this article’s purposes, we are going to go in order with how our creative team decides on branding direction for our CBD clients.

  1. What is this brand’s ideal target market (customers)?
  2. What type of color scheme is this market used to?
  3. What are other major brands these customers buy from?
  4. What does our brand want to look like? Create a storyboard of brands, colors, and styles your company represents.
  5. What does our brand not want to look like? Create a storyboard of brands, colors, and styles that your company doesn’t want to represent.
  6. Hire an agency or freelancer to help begin the logo sketch phase
  7. Have them finalize 3 variations of logos to choose from (black and white – no color)
  8. Choose the top logo direction
  9. The agency or freelancer will then take your market research and decide on the 3 top color schemes to go with
  10. They will then present your main logo in 3 different color options to go with
  11. Once that is completed, the agency or freelancer should create your brand style guide so everything you do moving forward matches your branding 100%

You can even see how our creative team did a full rebranding for Avintiv Media and what went into the process.

CBD Product Design & Packaging

We won’t go into detail on how to develop your CBD product design or packaging as there are far too many steps to list in this article. Just know that this is by far one of the most important aspects of where your money should be going. If you want to win in the CBD game, it’s going to be the companies that products look better, feel better, and gives the customer a far greater experience.

Here are some examples of recent products we’ve designed in the CBD market.

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Product Design, Packaging, Branding, Avintiv Media

Marketing Your CBD Brand

SEO

Anyone who’s been in the Cannabis or CBD industry knows the trouble everyone has run into with properly being able to advertise or market their brand. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is by far going to be one of the best investments you can make for your marketing plan.

You will want to have an agency that are experts at SEO as the CBD market is a completely different ball game when it comes to SEO versus many other industries.

Things you’ll want to add into your SEO campaign

Read more to find out How much should SEO cost?

Content

Just like SEO, content creation for the CBD industry is extremely important. For one, not everyone knows what CBD is just yet and people are wanting to learn more about CBD before investing in it.

Writing content around your ideal customers and your keywords that were chosen from your SEO strategy will help you choose what articles to write.

If you’re a CBD brand, you should be launching 2-4 blogs per week of at least 750 words. Below are things to make sure you do:

  1. Install Yoast SEO for WordPress
  2. Make sure your blog has an A+ readability score
  3. Add in your keywords throughout the blog
  4. Carefully choose what your Meta Title should be
  5. Carefully choose what your Meta Description should be
  6. Make sure your slug is done correctly 
  7. Make sure you internally link 2-4 times throughout your blog
  8. Make sure you link external sites 1-2 times throughout your blog

Social Media

Social media has been the craze over the last 5-10 years but it has gotten extremely pricey to play on the advertising end of social media. For today’s purposes, we’re going to focus on posting organically on Instagram with 0 paid ads.

Tips for social media content:

  1. Thinking of your ideal customers, decide on what types of pictures or posts they will want to see
  2. Think of the verbiage or messaging your ideal customers will want to see
  3. Create a grid mockup over posts that all flow well with each other from an aesthetic standpoint (See below)
  4. Use a social media scheduler like Hootsuite to preschedule all of your future posts
  5. Make sure to engage with everyone that DM’s you or comments on your posts

Example of Instagram Grid that we did for our client, Goat Grass CBD.

Goat Grass CBD, Instagram Marketing, CBD Marketing, Instagram Grid, Instagram CBD, Avintiv Media

Advertising

As Facebook and Google start to loosen up with CBD advertising, there are still other ways to advertise your CBD brand.

A number of our CBD clients hire Avintiv to run retargeting ads for their online CBD stores. Below is just one of the options that’s available to advertise for the CBD industry.

Avintiv has access to a private display network that uses artificial intelligence to

aggressively optimize for click-through rate and conversion using a number of different

data signals that generate excellent results. On average our CTRs range from 1-3%

and up to as high as 8% (No this is not a typo). We offer this in the form of standard

display advertising, site retargeting or a blend depending on how much traffic the site

has.

We can run as many creatives as you like and can track conversions from the campaign as well.

This is helpful for tracking ROI.

Below are some examples of display advertising creatives that we’ve created.

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Retargeting Ads, Branding, Advertising, CBD Avintiv Media

CBD Branding, CBD Marketing, Goat Grass CBD, Retargeting Ads, Branding, Advertising, CBD Avintiv Media

In Conclusion

As you’ve read through our article, we hope you’ve learned how to start and grow your CBD. As you can see, there is a lot of information that you need to know before launching and growing your CBD brand. The days of quickly getting to market and making a million dollars are long gone.

If you’re interested in seeing how Avintiv Media can assist you with growth, feel free to reach out to us on our contact page.

Introducing Avintiv Media’s New Branding

Hi, I’m Jon Boles. I’m the Founder & CEO at Avintiv Media. I launched Avintiv Media in late 2016 and it has been a wild ride since.

I’m excited to share with you a project that has been very dear to our hearts for over 6 months now. The rebranding and identity of Avintiv Media.


Why did we rebrand?

We’ve spent the last 3 years assisting some of the most amazing clients to break through some of the most competitive industries, becoming industry dominators. We launched in late 2016 as a very small boutique agency and although we still have a boutique marketing agency feel, a number of our clients went from David and turned into Goliath. We aren’t working with many small businesses or sole entrepreneurs anymore.

With that said, our primary reasons to do a full rebrand were:

  1. We needed to reposition our agency.
  2. Our resources and in-house capabilities are far more advanced than when we first launched.
  3. We wanted to deliver an entirely new experience to not only paying clients but every single person that interacts or engages with our brand. Our rebranding is very refreshing, exciting, edgy and energetic – it’s full of life…
  4. It was time for us to showcase our real talents on our own brand since we’ve only focused on our clients for the last 3 years.

1 | Repositioning our agency

Since our launch in late 2016, we have worked with many clients in many different industries. We’ve learned that our sweet spot are clients that have been in business for over 2 years and are doing $1,000,000 – $150,000,000 in gross revenue. We knew that we needed to be the authority in our 7-9 figure niche industries that we service clients in. It wasn’t even a question if rebranding was needed.

2 | Our resources are far more advanced

Like any company that launches without venture-backed money; you start small with a younger team. As time goes on, as a business owner, you learn and evolve noticing that things can be done quicker, better, higher-quality, etc. Our team has evolved about 4 times since 2016 and it’s safe to say that we have the most amazing in-house team of rockstars. In over 10 years of being a seasoned entrepreneur, I’ve personally never worked with such talented people in my life and that’s not me being biased. The capabilities and resources we have now are light years ahead of where we were when we first launched. It just seemed like the right time to use that to our advantage.

3 | Delivering a better experience

Our motto at Avintiv Media is, “how you do anything is how you do everything.” How could we keep building award-winning brands that are destroying their competition but neglect our own brand? We treated ourselves like we were a client and put our team through the entire process of building a brand. Every aspect of the new Avintiv Media is built to deliver a remarkable experience that is unmatched in the agency world!

4 | It was time to showcase our talent

If you’re an agency owner, I know you can relate to putting your clients above all else. Even if that means your own marketing, branding, and goals have to be put on hold. If you don’t own an agency, let me walk you through a day-in-the-life quickly. When you own a digital marketing agency that’s growing very drastically, you tend to put all of those needs before the needs of the agency. If the agency is growing and the systems and processes are working, clients are getting amazing results, then why change things up right? As an agency owner, it sometimes feels like you own 30 companies because, at Avintiv Media, we treat our clients as if we owned the company. Everything is on the line with everything that we do. With that amount of pressure, it doesn’t leave much time to make your brand pretty or special when you’re doing that for so many other businesses each week. It was time that Avintiv Media took a step back and truly showed the talents of who we have working at our agency and what we’re capable of.

The Process

This was the fun part of the process. We actually treated ourselves as if we were a client and went through every step that we do with clients. We audited the experience, the pros, the cons, and how we would want to be treated. We started with a full-day brand workshop with all key stakeholders at Avintiv Media which translated into a 10+ page brand identity and positioning guide.

Our creative team then went into the logo design stage. After days of sketches, drafts, crumpling papers, going to the whiteboard – we finally found a logo/branding that could evolve into a $100 million brand. An iconic brand. Not just a marketing agency.

Once the logo and other assets were chosen, we went into what colors we wanted to use to show where Avintiv Media was headed. We wanted to use very popular but futuristic colors that won’t be going out of style any time soon.

I could go on and on but let’s take a look…


The Avintiv Media logo

Before we introduce our new branding and direction, we wanted to showcase the branding that got us started. Below is the logo that brought this 10-year dream and idea in the clouds to life. It’s the logo that shared many laughs and many cries. Lots of projects were developed under this logo. It’s the original logo that won so many amazing clients over and let them get better sleep at night as we gave them their life back.

So… Before we shed the old, we wanted to reflect on what got us to where we are and say THANK YOU to every team member, past team member, clients, fans, followers, and anyone else that has ever believed in us. Every day at work is a dream come true as we change so many people’s lives for the better.

Introducing our new Avintiv Media logo

We’re beyond thrilled to share with you our new logo and identity and make even more memories under it.

We wanted to create a more bold, confident, and edgy logo and identity. Avintiv Media prides itself on offering customized award-winning solutions for our clients, not cookie-cutter, template, or bandaid style solutions. Quality is at the forefront of everything that we do not only with our client’s brand but also inside our agency. We feel that our new logo and identity captures that perfectly.

With our new brand direction, we wanted to showcase a brand that can be seen as an iconic brand, not just another typical marketing agency. Avintiv Media is heading in the direction of working with some of the largest brands in the world and we needed an iconic identity to fit the part over the next 10 years.

Our iconography

We wanted to ensure our iconography had brand recognition and a similar look and feel. To achieve this we sprinkled in Avintiv’s gradient element into every icon.

We used familiar industry iconography to attach to each service we offer so that users do not have to overthink our iconography.

Each icon holds the same visual weight – we do not want one icon to outshine the other when interacting on a page together.

Our new font

We wanted our new font to be fresh with clean sans serif elements that create clean forms and interesting negative space. We also wanted a face with an extensive collection of weights. We think Nexa is a great compliment to our logotype and strategic brand direction.

Our color palette

Our color palette is bright, bold, and in your face. We use gradients as a graphic and color element to evoke emotion and positivity. Our secondary color palette is used for internal branding of our services and to help clients using multiple services to be able to differentiate all client-facing materials without having to search for a number on an invoice.

Welcome to the all-new Avintiv Media

You’ll notice all of the changes from today on. Currently, our website is the biggest change you should notice if you’re not a current client of ours. You’ll start to notice entirely different marketing and the way we’re positioning ourselves.

This is just the beginning for Avintiv Media. We’re so excited for all of you that are sharing this amazing journey with all of us. We have some very big projects we’re working on with major brands that we cannot wait to share with all of you.

Thank you for your support and for being apart of our journey and for letting us be apart of yours.