Blog Articles from Fawkes Digital Marketing

Imagine a low-cost showroom giving every customer and potential customer 24x7 access that educates and provides a consistent message generating revenue for you. That is what a well-designed business website will do for you.

As a web design company owner, I am biased toward career information being on the website. I feel that having your career page helps qualify your employees more than any other channel. If you are hiring for a critical position (e.g., CEO/CFO/Sales), I believe using an assessment test to qualify those positions further is key to long-term success.

This past labor day weekend, I searched the internet for a specific niche industry and came across a site with malware on it, as noted by the blog image. I started thinking of all the small businesses that aren't updated and could run into this and present the worst possible first impression. So we came up with a solution.

Website hosting only is just asking for your business to fail and not grow. As business owners, we all want our businesses to grow, thrive, and reach our expectations. Website hosting alone is a "Field of Dreams" where you build it and "Hope they come."

We hope you would never hire an employee, show them the ropes, and leave them all independently without continually mentoring and training them. Your website is an employee and often the first thing a new customer will see. Continual maintenance, or website employee training, allows you to keep everything humming along as efficiently as possible. Since WordPress has come out, it is averaging more than 27 updates per year and over 60 in the past five years. Plugins or add-ons are not even in this total and produce higher updates, often daily.

UTM codes stand for Urchin Tracking Monitor. The name comes from Urchin Tracker which was a web analytics software that served as the base for Google Analytics. These are often used with Google Ads (formally Google AdWords). Marketing in the old days you spent hundreds, even thousands, of dollars on newspaper ads. These ads you often didn’t know the results. Either due to you or your employees not asking how you heard of us or truly thinking the newspaper was making results (e.g. you guessed). Today with technology you often will spend less but demand to know whether the results are working for you. First, you should’ve been asking that question under old school methods but there really was no 100% way of knowing. With UTM codes you can have some pretty accurate methods of how people are reaching you. They also can be used beyond just paid ads if used correctly. We’re going to not only dig into what UTM codes are but how you can use them and how to create them (easily).

Social media is a great way to start building your brand message and getting heard online. Although we don't see it as the best place, it is a place you need to be. You may wonder why we feel it's not the best place. It's simple. Your competitors are also on the same social media channel. Having control over your business with no competitors is the ideal place to get your message heard. That is your website. This doesn't mean we should ignore a great channel to get your voice heard. To that end, you need to have your information set up correctly to provide your audience the best message.

I got upset today when someone stated that our prices are "too low" and why they went elsewhere. The thoughts that rang through my head were that you don't know our company or the cost of doing business -- every business structures their prices based on the cost of business plus the profits they want to achieve. Some are higher while some are lower. Let's dig into why our costs are the way they are.

A benefit of the internet is you can do whatever you want with it. We're going to answer why you should drop the "over creativeness" on your website, use industry best practices, and adjust your website continuously to fit these best practices.