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faq
What many companies do when it comes to digital marketing…
Nothing.
That’s what most of our clients had been doing in the digital space when they first came to us. Primarily small businesses in the wholesale, distribution, or manufacturing sectors (though these days we also serve metal recycling and marijuana dispensary design/build firms), our clients had gone to market with brick-and-mortar Chicago warehouses and a sales team. They had spent big on fancy e-commerce websites but didn’t bother to tell anyone about them. They relied heavily on in-person sales and face-to-face relationships.
In some cases, they were putting some effort into digital marketing, but it was an in-house affair. Sometimes a real marketing team was writing web content and bidding on Google ads, and sometimes it was whomever could be pulled onto a project. In every case, digital marketing was just another goal stacked onto many more established business goals, and it did not get the attention it deserved.
And then the COVID-19 pandemic happened
All of a sudden, practically every business in America needed to expand its online marketing capabilities just in order to survive. And that was where Main Event Digital came to the rescue.
Why you should choose Main Event as your full-service digital marketing agency based in Chicago…
The members of the Main Event Digital agency have more than 25 years of experience helping companies with little to no experience in digital marketing become top performers with web and e-commerce sites that drive sales.
Our marketing firm’s projects have included:
Our CEO Mike Mayer has deep e-commerce and internet marketing experience related specifically to the wholesale, distribution, and manufacturing sectors. In addition to Mike, Main Event Digital employs more than a dozen digital marketing experts who come from leading Chicago digital marketing agencies, corporations, and non-profits. Our ranks include more than one professional award-winner. Our projects have generated millions in revenue.
Our Chicago-based digital marketing and web agency has dedicated marketing experts focused on top digital marketing technology, search engine marketing and SEO, web design and development, content, and social media.
The Main Event Digital marketing firm emphasizes cost-efficiency and a willingness to “get in the weeds” with Chicago clients to learn their business and provide great customer service. In the sixth months since our internet marketing and design agency was founded at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Main Event has doubled its business in the Chicago area largely through positive word-of-mouth. The fun has only just begun.
The days when people consulted a phone book to find a type of business are ancient history. Now that practically everyone carries a smartphone, the first place customers will always look to find out more about your business is the Internet. Therefore, your digital strategy can pretty much make or break your chance with literally thousands, even millions, of potential customers. If you forego digital marketing totally, you lose customers who have no other chance to come in contact with your business. You lose the opportunity to grow.
Search engine marketing and search engine optimization drive new customers to your site. Good web design and development and content marketing make people stay on your site. Email marketing nurtures your most interested website visitors and drives sales conversion rates. Affiliate marketing creates buzz about your business among loyal, niche audiences online and via gatekeepers like Amazon. Social media builds your brand, drives customers to your site, and enables you to observe and interact directly with your most loyal fans.
Digital strategy can simply no longer be viewed as “optional” for anyone interested in staying in business.
When most customers are looking for a certain type of business, they enter a few keywords into a search engine like Google or Bing. A huge portion of any digital marketing strategy is focused on getting businesses to appear near the top of a search engine result page (SERP). Usually containing about 10 listings, businesses that appear on that first page will get the most benefit from their digital marketing—because most Internet users rarely read or click on any listings beyond the first page, even when there are thousands of pages of search results.
That is what search engine marketing, also known as “paid search” is all about. In search engine marketing, you pay to have your business listed alongside the top listings on the first page of search engine results.
One of the truly great things about search engine marketing is that the largest company with the biggest budget can’t simply buy all the exposure. Ad space is constantly auctioned off via algorithms that are based on keyword search term, budget, and ad quality. If you choose the right search term to bid on and your ad is high quality, you could get great exposure to customers at the precise moment they are ready to buy. Even better, in many cases you won’t have to pay for your ad unless someone clicks on it—thanks to digital Pay Per Click ads, also known as “PPC.”
While search engine marketing is about paying to be alongside the top results for a given search term, search engine optimization is about being a top result naturally—or as marketing companies like to say, “organically”—without paying for advertising. Studies show that at least 71 percent of the “traffic”—that is, website clicks and visits—go to the first 10 results of a search engine query.
SEO is about employing a complex set of strategies to ensure that your company’s website gets the prime real estate in the first SERP for keywords related to your business whenever possible.
Businesses that use digital marketing report that on average, 40 to 50 percent of website traffic can be attributed to SEO, while another 10 to 30 percent comes from search engine marketing. All together, digital marketing, SEO, PPC, affiliate referrals, and social media are responsible for the majority of your website visitors.
With all the new technologies that appear on a regular basis, email can seem like old news. But the reality is that there are 5.5 billion people with active email accounts, and 3.9 billion people send email every day. Many business-to-business marketers in particular consider email their top form of digital marketing.
Well, imagine that a visitor who searched for your product visited your website. Now imagine that the visitor entered their email address into a form on your website to receive emails from your company. That visitor is pretty interested, aren’t they? That’s a solid sales lead.
Email marketers use multiple strategies to collect the emails of potential leads—including blog posts, contests, and live events—and then develop strategic campaigns to drive sales conversion rates through email. They do this by offering helpful news, exclusive discounts, and other creative tactics. And it works. Surveys report a return of $38 for every $1 spent on email marketing. That’s a breathtaking 3,800% ROI.
“Content” is digital marketing’s term for “creative.” It includes all the vehicles that digital marketing is delivered in—whether we’re talking about video production, animation, podcast, musical jingle, writing, or imagery. Because writing and imagery are faster and easier to create (and consume), the overwhelming majority of content projects are images and writing held together by good mobile or web design.
Great content will keep visitors from bouncing off your site as soon as they visit it. It will also engage your visitors enough to enter their email addresses in website forms described in the previous section. Content is an engine for lead generation and also for converting leads to sales
To please their users, search engines deliberately privilege straight news sources like the New York Times or CNN that have top-notch content and web design—so this is also what businesses need to compete for good search results. This is also why digital marketers recommend that businesses publish blog posts and press releases regularly. Publishing regularly makes you look more like a news site to algorithms. To learn more about how search engines judge your content, check out the MOZ Hierarchy of SEO Needs.
Incidentally, businesses began publishing news and articles as a marketing strategy way before digital was ever a thing. The most famous example of content marketing is probably John Deere, which began publishing its print magazine The Furrow in 1895. The Furrow remains one of the most respected news sources in farming today.
Affiliate marketing is another type of digital marketing that is actually much older than it looks. Know of a popular YouTube channel or blog devoted to a subject that overlaps with your business goals? You can potentially pay the person leading this digital media to promote your product, the same way you would on television or radio.
One exciting difference is because there is so much content published on the Internet, you might be able to find a niche internet personality whose followers really care about your business. For example, if you sell power drills, you may find someone with a YouTube channel devoted solely to this product.
Another difference is that with affiliate marketing, it is possible for your affiliate partner to sell your product directly on their website and generate a commission from you for each sale. This kind of transaction is the reason why affiliate networks exist—their technology tracks digital affiliate sales, clicks and leads. The largest network of this kind is far and away the Amazon Associates program.
Affiliate marketing accounts for 16 percent of all e-commerce sales in the U.S. and Canada, and 80 percent of professional marketing companies have made it a part of their marketing strategies.
Social Media is catching up with email in sheer number of users. In 2020, 3.6 billion people worldwide had social media accounts. Businesses have been very intrigued by social media because people are more likely to buy products that friends and other social connections recommend to them. When businesses publish content about their products and special offers on social media, there is a chance that customers might share their social posts and recommend the business to friends.
News outlets on social media may pick up newsworthy social posts, making social a great public relations tool. Social media also helps businesses to get immediate feedback on their content from their most loyal customers, those who actually follow their social accounts. In addition, social media allows you to “listen” to opinions people express about your brand in order to get insight on your performance. Businesses who share links on social media find that social platforms are responsible for driving about five percent of all traffic to their websites.
Last but not certainly least, paid marketing social media tools, in particular social media ads, are amongst the most cost-effective marketing campaigns, averaging 95 percent ROI.
These are currently the top digital marketing services Main Event Digital offers, but we recognize that website design, software development, and marketing solutions are constantly evolving. New forms of digital marketing services using virtual reality, voice search optimization, smart bidding, and social media shops could become critical to growing your business in the future, especially with the continued impact of the pandemic on global commerce. As Artificial Intelligence improves, we may even see the emergence of a “perfect search engine” that fully understands human questions instead of just counting keywords. At Main Event Digital, we’re committed to staying abreast of the trends and doing whatever it takes to help our clients meet their business goals and complete every project. Whether you’re a local company looking for a down-to-earth Chicago-based digital marketing agency or wholesaler or distributor anywhere in the U.S. looking for a digital agency with expertise in design, development, SEO, PPC, and more, Main Event Digital is there for you. No matter what our clients need, we intend to be their full-service digital marketing agency.
Commercial bathroom supplier Prestige Distribution was looking for digital marketing agencies in Chicago that could redesign their e-commerce site for a better user experience. Main Event rebuilt the site with a new look, higher performance SEO, and user-friendly navigation and product content.
A family-owned kitchen and bath remodeling company, Lotus Home Improvement wanted a Chicago digital marketing agency to migrate their simple HTML site to a CMS site they could update themselves. Main Event Digital optimized their site for mobile and added sales features to convert visitors to buyers.
Midwest Industrial Materials, a multi-location scrap metal recycling company, needed a digital marketing agency in Chicago that could give them a custom website with good SEO. Main Event redeveloped the site on a new theme, built out location-specific pages, and added sales conversion optimization plug-ins.
