Building a house starts with a solid foundation. Building a website starts with a secure web hosting platform. Just like invisible cracks in your home’s structure could lead to eventual collapse, left unsupported by a host, your website could suffer the same fate. The truth is, sites can’t just look pretty. They need the technical chops to prevent issues that could take you offline. A secure hosted site can also help you handle all that incoming web traffic from youreffective digital marketing campaignsThe trick is to understand which type of hosting environment is best for your business.

What is a web host?

These are providers with secure servers who store your website’s files and databases. When potential customers come browsing, hosts send information their way as they click through your landing pages. Web hosting services charge based on a monthly or annual basis. Each plan specifies a certain amount of data storage that includes information transfers, software, etc. Companies offer different hardware capabilities. Taking the time to understand your company needs and the nuances of each plan is key to succeeding online.

Website Hosting Types

Not only do you have individual plans to choose from, but you also have varying types of website hosting altogether. Below we offer a simplified breakdown of the most common environments to help you understand what your options are.

When one server hosts many sites at once on the same IP address, it’s known as shared hosting. Some of these hosted environments number into the thousands. Pros include affordability, especially if your operation is on the smaller side. However, your site is dependent on all the other websites and apps running well. This means one crashed site could divert resources and negatively impact your own.

Virtual Private Server (VPS)

If you like the idea of having your own server, but prefer someone else manages it, this option with dynamically scalable hardware resources might be for you. With a VPS system, a portion of a larger server’s resources will be allocated to you, insulating your site from the loads of others. You’ll have less processing power and memory than a full cabinet, but you’ll still be covered if your website experiences unexpectedly high traffic.

Dedicated Server

If you want full use of a solely dedicated server, you’ll have access to all the processing power and memory the cabinet can offer. Understand that this means the entire platform, from OS (operating system) to a web server, is yours to manage.
Small businesses without a dedicated IT team usually opt for another hosting environment.

Managed Hosting

Think VPS or dedicated hosting platforms, but with an additional layer of support. They’re configured to maintain your site by conducting updates, managing speeds, and overseeing security on your behalf that are specialized at hosting your specific type of application(s) ie., WordPress.They can be expensive and also limit the types and sizes of files you can add to your site, a double edge sword.

Cloud Hosting

Instead of storing your website data on just one server, it’s duplicated and hosted on numerous servers located in different parts of the world. As internet browsers search for information on your site, the server that’s closest sends the page info. Speed is a huge benefit here. It’s also said to mitigate outages. The downside is that it can be complicated to understand and expensive to employ.

Our Recommendation

The internet is a big place, but one hosting company, WordPress, powers about 29% of it. The reason? Their open source platform offers businesses clean, enticing web architecture and makes it simple for owners or their chosen digital marketing agencies to update their sites as needed. Even though SSL and most hosting providers provide a secure storage solution for your sensitive data, we recommend choosing a WordPress-exclusive hosting environment or Managed WordPress Host. Both specialize in WP websites, integrate seamlessly, and perform better than other options we’ve found.

Need help building your web’s home? Make contact and our team of web development experts will gladly put on their hard hats and get to work.

Should your website have live chat on it? There are many pros to having this feature enabled. So many transactions can be made or broken by being responsive and swift to help your customers with any questions or comments they may have.

As an advertising agency, we get this question a lot. The most common answer to our Dallas clients is, “depends on your business.” Different industries, product types, target markets, and B2B or B2C brands all perform differently across different mediums.

In truth, we also believe a print advertising vs digital marketing mindset is a mistake. And though the demand for digital is high, you ultimately want to advertise where your audience is. Sometimes this constitutes a multi-channel marketing approach. Other times, it’s best to concentrate your efforts on a particular platform.

As we’ll see, both digital and traditional advertising have strong points and weak spots. Let’s unpack some pros and cons of each so you can make informed choices about your business marketing strategy.

Digital Advertising Advantages

Investing in social media advertising or PPC campaigns certainly has its perks. No wonder it’s officially outpaced TV, with digital ad spend soaring to more than $209 billion in 2017. But what makes it so great?

• It’s measurable and malleable. You know who’s viewing your ad and you can make changes based on the data.
• It’s cost-effective. You determine your budget based on who you want to reach. With pay-per-click campaigns, you also don’t pay unless there’s interest.
• It’s wide-reaching. Billions of users access their social media accounts every day. Getting your ad in front of them can help fill your sales funnel.
• It’s targetable. You start by setting parameters on demographics like gender, income, age, interests, hobbies, etc. Ads are then shown to a focused group of your most likely potential customers.
• It can increase conversion rates. Search marketing can help businesses gain more leads and increase conversions as users are specifically typing queries that are aligned with your brand.

Digital Advertising Challenges

If digital advertising is so great, why isn’t everyone doing it? Well, they sort of are. That’s part of the problem. According to Adweek, 88% of businesses use it to advertise their brand. How does this impact digital campaigns?

• Digital marketing content can be quickly scanned and forgotten about.
• Readers are becoming better at tuning out ads.
• Users have increasingly short attention spans.
• Digital banner ads and native content are often associated with spam.
• The more competitive your industry’s keywords, the more you’ll pay.
• You must constantly educate yourself and your staff about algorithm changes and best practices to keep from falling behind the competition.

Traditional Advertising Pluses

Traditional ads in print, radio, and to a lesser degree, television are highly trusted, especially among older demographics. Generally speaking, they also qualify as more memorable than digital media.

• Readers sit with traditional ad mediums longer with more focus than digital.
• Information recall is higher.
• You can localize it to particular communities or neighborhoods.
• Print ads and direct mail campaigns can target leads over the long-term.
• Believability is high.

Traditional Advertising Obstacles

Radio ads, newspaper blurbs, and mailers have their limits depending on your target audience. (Hence the explosion of digital marketing campaigns.)

• It can take a while to gather results or feedback.
• You can’t be sure your messages are aimed at the right audience.
• Readers might be less inclined to take extra steps like calling or visiting your website.
• Changing or updating ads can be difficult and expensive.
• CPM (cost per exposure) rates could be extremely high.

To recap, we feel strongly that successful campaigns are ultimately those that are well-timed, well-planned, and well-executed. Whether they’re disseminated by the internet or a more traditional method depends on the particulars of your business.

Want some help figuring out which media mixes will drive sales? Let’s strategize together.

Who says you can’t teach an old dog (food) new tricks? In fact, that’s exactly what GR creative directors Eddie Hale and Brett Dougall set out to do when designing long-time client Muenster Milling’s new Ancient Grains dog food line. The campaign earned Globe Runner two prestigious Addy Awards, elevating our agency to an award-winning comprehensive Dallas digital marketing agency and SEO consultant.

By the time this year’s AAF celebration at Deep Ellum’s Bomb Factory had wrapped, we were proud winners of a bronze Addy for the bag design and a silver Addy for the entire packaging system.

Globe Runner takes Silver and Bronze at the 2018 Addys Awards in Dallas.

The awards were presented by the American Advertising Federation, an association that represents all facets of the advertising industry and hosts the industry’s largest and most representative competition. Their mission is to recognize and reward the art of advertising among the more than 40,000 entries received each year.

The client, Muenster Milling, a 4th generation family-owned company, prides themselves on delivering holistic, all-natural pet food to their customers. When they set out to evolve their packaging to match their new and improved recipe, they trusted our team to give their new vision some creative flare.

Now, with a fresh face to represent their promise of quality, they’re ready to take on the market and continue as the purveyors of health and pillars of community their brand stands for. Since the official launch in December 2017, they have resonated very well with stores and consumers.

Creative Directors, Eddie Hale, and his right hand, Brett Dougall, said the experience gave them a chance to flex their creative muscles and tell the story behind the brand. With the design process, they were able to capture the Muenster mission through the upgraded packaging. CEO, Eric McGehearty, was proud to accept the award on Globe Runner’s behalf and is excited to continue leading the agency to produce award-winning work for our clients.

Our pride is swelling and we look forward to continue upholding the AAF’s mission to honor advertising excellence.

Stay tuned to see what we take home next year! If you’re ready to fuel up with some of our creative brain power, make contact.

About AAF Dallas:

The Dallas Chapter of the American Advertising Federation, comprised of more than 1,000 dedicated professionals, is the only association that represents all aspects of the advertising industry that we all know and love. AAF Dallas has been around for 110 years, making them the oldest civic organization in Dallas. This association helps agencies like Globe Runner network with everyone in the advertising industry from media to creatives and freelancers to marketers, providing us all an opportunity to continuously learn and grow as the industry evolves.

Say you wanted to travel from New York to Dallas. You wouldn’t hop a plane that didn’t specify a destination in hopes you’d eventually end up in DFW. You’d take considerable effort to ensure you got home as efficiently as possible.

Business branding works similarly.

To keep your company growing toward your long-term goals, your brand needs a focused direction. Lose sight of it or get off course and the delays could be significant.

As one of Dallas’s best creative marketing firms, we understand that enduring success is a voyage in discovering and rediscovering your brand. All aboard!

Rebranding Basics

At its core, branding is more experiential than anything. When thinking about your brand, it’s important to first consider how your customers will relate to the story you’re telling.

As we’ll see, it’s also critical to consider whether your company values make them want to connect. Down the line, you and your creative branding agency can decide the best ways to ensure your target audience is moved by the aesthetics and overall tone of your digital brand.

Finding Your Why

When we set out to consult on a rebrand, we start by peppering our clients with questions. Then, we listen. It’s a process of unearthing the relationship with emotion behind a company to see how that is or is not being reflected in the brand.

The most important question is pinpointing why you’re considering a rebrand at all. It might involve revisiting the mission statement, or there might be a new goal driving the rebranding project. Maybe there’s a problem or unexpected change that has the company pivoting.

In any event, get clear on your why before you plot your course. Strategize by asking questions like:

• Is our branding aligned with our current story?
• Who is our customer base and how has it evolved?
• How does our current customer base engage with our brand?
• What’s our employee turnover like?
• Are we using product innovation or new sales channels to help us in the competitive landscape?
• Has a merger or acquisition changed our ownership or shifted our focus?

To rebrand or not to rebrand, that is the question. But answering a few others can’t hurt. In fact, it could keep you from engaging in an unnecessary rebrand altogether. If you do decide to move forward, your why can help you explore which strategies are right for your rebrand.

Value First

We’re huge proponents of value-based marketing. Strong company values are the foundation of a successful business—and effective branding.

It all starts by understanding and rediscovering your company’s unique values. Then it’s about sharing those stated values consistently across all platforms and bringing them to the forefront of your internal and customer-facing communications.

Done right, a digital branding agency will help you imbue the true value of your brand in the redesign of your logo, messaging, core values, mission, etc.

Brand 360 Strategy

Brand strategy is a communicative and collaborative process. The more information you can gather from within and outside your company, the more clear your direction will become. Whether you embark on a rebrand because of a breakdown in company culture or in an effort to reinvigorate the magic you started with, listen more than you talk– at least at first.

We believe brands are rarely “broken,” they just need a more focused direction. If you want some help charting and rediscovering how powerful your brand really is, make contact.

Siri. Alexa. Cortana. Voice search is not only the future of search, it’s the present, too.

Twitter. One of the original social networks and still one of the most used by daily user count. Why is it still so popular after all of these years? It’s the immediacy of the information traveling all over the website. The immediacy of what’s happening now. Now, one of the biggest updates in Twitter’s history has occurred. They have doubled the character count from 140 characters to 280 characters.

Hard to believe that LinkedIn is still technically only a teenager. But time moves quickly in the world of social media. At age 14, the employment-oriented social networking service is mature beyond its years.

Thanks to its most recent growth spurt, it now supports more than 500 million users and promises serious marketing and branding opportunities for businesses. If you thought it was simply a place to park your resume or sniff out your next career move, we’re here to enlighten you.

As we’ll see, the social media network is evolving itself into a content-first platform ripe with customizable marketing solutions. Maybe that’s part of what Microsoft foresaw when it purchased LinkedIn for a cool $26.2 billion in 2016.

Looking to refine your social media marketing strategy in the New Year? See how LinkedIn is coming into its own.

LinkedIn Loves Content Marketing

Everyone from big brands to solopreneurs is looking for a place to publish and promote their original content. Today, LinkedIn users are more interested than ever, reading articles that pop up on their feeds at a voracious rate.

It all started with a little class project. In 2010, students at Stanford University set to work on what is now LinkedIn Pulse. Since 2014, it’s been a publishing platform for members to share their organic content. Now, hundreds of thousands of organic articles are published worldwide every week, solidifying the Pulse portion of LinkedIn as a content-first social media platform.

In a content-first world, B2B marketers know guest blogs are an effective way to reach customers. Sharing professional insights with LinkedIn’s audience of half a billion may prove an inestimable way to generate more traffic to your site. However, it’s just one of the ways LinkedIn is helping prove that content is still king.

LinkedIn Lures with Video

LinkedIn has also recently adopted video capabilities, offering marketers an additional channel to get eyes on their brand.

Since late summer of 2017, LinkedIn has supported native videos, tracking results and comparing their performance against other popular platforms. Surprisingly, the initial limited release has received wide praise from select marketers. We’re told that brands hoping to use LinkedIn as a video publishing platform should be able to take full advantage soon.

LinkedIn’s Business Marketing Solutions

When it comes to pushing out branded content on social media, the rules are clear: you have to pay to play.

Facebook’s recent algorithm change drives this point home. Ahead, posts from FB friends will get boosted while posts from brands will receive a demotion on users’ news feeds.

While LinkedIn views professional connections as more or less equal, the platform still offers a way to pay your way onto the news feeds of your target audience. If you’re looking to promote your business on LinkedIn, paid online advertising and sponsored forms of content could help close the gap, build your lead base and increase conversion rates.

LinkedIn is also making it easy to move beyond your company page and move directly into the LinkedIn messages of your targeted audiences with Sponsored InMail. The idea is that driving referral leads could be as simple as personalizing a note and sending it to your targeted prospects.

The final component of LinkedIn’s Business Marketing Solutions is desktop text ads. Using Simple PPC or CPM, the service promises to help drive quality leads to your landing page.

A Maturing LinkedIn

LinkedIn remains a unique social media platform that serves as an indisputable part of any comprehensive marketing strategy in 2018. We predict continued feature releases as LinkedIn continues to grow and mature.

For now, an increasing focus on written content and video marketing best capture LinkedIn’s signature ability to assist marketers in engaging highly targeted audiences.

Need help capitalizing on LinkedIn’s content-first promises? Link up with our full-service digital marketing agency.