FAQ

Most businesses and nonprofits can benefit from digital marketing for increased visibility, understanding of their mission/products/services, and sales/revenue/donations.

Digital marketing offers a powerful and cost-effective way to increase brand visibility and reach potential customers online. With the right digital marketing strategy, businesses can leverage powerful tactics such as organic search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, email marketing, social media campaigns, content marketing, video campaigns, and more.

Our clients have seen results including increased sales, increased Google searches, increased followers (who stick around), lowered costs for customer acquisition, increased website visitors and increased repeat visitors, increased employee productivity (from creating marketing workflows and systems they can participate in), and increased business reviews on places like Google Business and TripAdvisor.

When you are ready to sit down and think about your internet marketing plan, think about the following:
1.) Goals for your website (we call them 'calls to action' in the biz. Some examples include: getting more newsletter subscribers, more online cart sales, more people filling out your contact form, etc.)
2.) Money you have to spend (Many companies spend around 10% of their budget on marketing, but every company is different. You will have to spend some money so think of an amount you can spare to start - even $500/month can help.
3.) Time and talent you and your staff have to give consistently to marketing efforts.

You might realize you have $1000/month you could spend on marketing (to hopefully make money with that amount!) and a staff member who has about 10 hours a week who is excellent at taking photos and posting to Instagram.

After you know what you want to accomplish and what you're working with, do a little research about what other businesses are doing. These could be businesses in your field (ex: other massage therapists) or your geographic area (ex: companies in Bar Harbor, Maine). This can give you ideas for what you could do or show areas where your website can make a unique contribution.

It may be helpful to have a marketing consultancy (like ours) help with strategy and use resources within your organization to execute it. For example, you might find an email marketing software you like because you want to send monthly marketing emails, but you have no idea how to set it up. You could engage us to set up an email collection, import the email addresses you do have, and train your staff member on how to do the marketing email distribution.

We suggest starting small. If you have a website you are proud of, try implementing one thing, like a Tiktok account or a texting list. As you get comfortable (and can see what is and isn't working), you can add more marketing or take some away.

If there were one thing that worked for everyone, we'd charge you $500 to tell you and be lying on a beach somewhere, fanning ourselves with stacks of cash. While that would be fun, the good news is that there is marketing that can be done for all businesses and budgets we've seen.

Some marketing services are one-off (ex: a one-hour training on Instagram, which we bill at our hourly rate of $200), and some are ongoing (ex: we have a marketing retainer that starts at $1000/month). We have worked with everyone from a solo operator to a $20M company to a national non-profit. Let's discuss what you need and your budget, and we will make you our best recommendations!

We work with people in many ways- both one-off marketing tasks and ongoing ones! Our most popular offering is our $1000/month retainer, which reserves a certain amount of our time at a discounted hourly rate and allows us to be flexible with what the client needs.

We have had larger retainers, including one $9000/month retainer where a large company hired us to do the marketing tasks while they searched for a full-time candidate, and it took them eight months to hire the right person. Still, in the meantime, social media, ads, email marketing, data analysis, video editing, and more were taken care of in the interim.

We have also had some clients for over a decade.

In short, we're here when you need us, short-term, long-term, or intermittently.

Absolutely. I have not met one client that has gotten the same solution from us as another client. The pros of working with a small agency are flexibility (we're not trying to shove you into *our* way of working) and customization (we are not trying to sell you something we built for someone else).

I'd say mentally have $500ish to start (to give us some possibilities), but you certainly don't have to spend that month to month. And in terms of business needs, we've worked in high-regulation situations (ex: financial institutions, insurance, healthcare, real estate, etc.), so if we work together in an ongoing way, we will do our homework and prepare not only for your goals but any rules we need to follow related to your industry.

If the goal is realistic, we can probably get you there or well on your way within six months. For example, one of our clients came to us with over 100,000 Facebook fans. Their goal was to get to 300,000 Facebook fans. Between running ads and inviting people who liked their posts to follow the page, we got them 40,000 people with a $1500 ad spend in the first three months of our $1000/month retainer time (we did other stuff for them, too, in that time as part of our rate). To get to 300,000 faster, we could spend more on ads, run a campaign in the page content, invite post likers to join the page more aggressively, or use other tactics, but the client is comfortable with this pace and is on track to get to his goal in a couple more months.

Some things can be accomplished in less than that. For example, one client wanted "more" website sales over the holidays this year than last year but didn't have much to spend. So we helped them set up a promo code on their e-commerce store and sent a marketing email to their past customers. Their sales increased from under $500 last holiday season to over $2500 this holiday season (263% increase). They paid us a collective $500 for the website work and email list creation/sending to make the extra $2000. If this client had a goal of $10,000, we would have pitched them more marketing work leading up to the holiday season. If they had a goal of $50,000, we would have told them that probably wouldn't happen this holiday season.

We consider ourselves a collaborator with our clients, and we want to help them reach their marketing goals... and if we think those goals need adjusting, we'll say so and why. Reaching goals takes time but seeing progress is as important.

We know that marketing has effects on sales. One study of 600 businesses in the 1980s (1980-1985) saw that maintaining or increasing advertising during that recession showed that those companies had grown 275% over companies who didn't advertise. I once heard Gary Vee say in a speech that Mercedes figured out they spent about $1000 in ads to sell a single car... and they were okay with that. And no doubt, you may have experienced as a business owner that after posting a product to social media, you sold that product directly on your website or in your messages. No one doubts marketing helps make sales but the question of how much is what most people are after.

Unlike offline platforms that have to rely on demographics (we have 100,000 people in this metro area listing to My Fake Radio Station 9-5 weekdays) or sentiments (73% of Democrats trust mass media according to a 2020 Gallup poll) to sell advertising, online platforms allow us to measure a lot when it comes to marketing.

Online platforms allow us to track who sees a piece of marketing (email, text, social media post, online ad, etc.) and how they act toward it. Do they click? Do they stick around on the website they clicked to? Do they opt-in for a free offer? Do they buy something? Do they share the message? Do they interact with again?
A lot of this data is aggregated/anonymous so while I know a man between 30-40 years old came to my website, I don't know if it's my friend Bob who did that. Even aggregate data though can give us an idea of what's working and what isn't in a way that's difficult to do with other types of marketing and advertising.

So success in a marketing campaign can be:

  • clicks to a website
  • email/text signups
  • sharing of the campaign
  • brand awareness (ex: the amount of Google searches for the product or company goes up after the campaign)
  • great word of mouth (ex: increased positive reviews)
  • purchases/donations
  • increase in followers/subscribers
  • someone having a good impression and reaching out (affiliate relationship, collaboration, etc.)
  • more I'm not even thinking of

Success looks different for different companies and we totally get that: we just need to find a way to measure it and make it better and better over time.

Online marketing can feel overwhelming, but it doesn't have to be! Our clients already understand the importance of understanding their digital presence - and we help make that easier. Here are just a few examples:

Email marketing

  • who opens the email, and how often
  • when emails get open (day/time)
  • what links in the email get clicked on
  • if the email gets forwarded
  • percentage of people who open the email, don't get the delivery, or mark it as spam

Website:

  • New versus returning visitors
  • Location the person is when visiting the site
  • Length of time on the website and what pages visited
  • Actions that are taken on the website we designate measuring (ex: clicks on particular buttons, filling out of a specific form)
  • How visitors got to the website (organic search, social media, etc.) and what page they entered on
  • Any part of an eCommerce process (number of people visiting a category page, number of people putting something in their cart, number of people starting checkout, number of people completing checkout)
  • Search terms in website search

Social Media/Business Listings:

  • What content is getting the most views
  • What content is getting the most interactions
  • Audience demographics (age, location, gender, etc.)
  • Audience activity on the platform (commenting, sharing, etc.)
  • Reviews and sentiments expressed in them

This data can be tracked over time, so you can see how different parts of your online presence are affected as you do more marketing. There's a lot of data, but we can make custom reports so you can not be overwhelmed trying to see what's important to you.

You have probably noticed that short-format videos are EVERYWHERE. Not only are they being prioritized in the newsfeed of social media websites, but they are a great way to connect with people personally. We have shifted a lot of work to helping clients tell their stories on video, and they've seen great results. We are not Steven Spielberg, but we can make cool short videos for your social feed, website, and more.

Many clients like to make their social media content, but responding to comments and messages can be overwhelming. We do checks of messages and comments during the weekdays, ban spammers, and prevent spam by blocking certain words or phrases that prove to be problems with a particular client in comments. (Ex: if we see a lot of crypto comments and the client has nothing to do with cryptocurrency, we can ban related words/phrases from Facebook and Instagram comments). We can also moderate reviews on websites like Yelp, Google, and TripAdvisor.

Are there parts of the marketing you don't want to do? We can help! You have enough stuff to think about, and that's what marketing agencies are for.

Yes, we typically work with groups like SBDCs, chambers of commerce, downtown associations, business groups, etc., to create training for their members or clients.

We sometimes host our own classes/workshops, too, so join our email list, and we can keep you updated on our class offerings.

In 2007, when Nicole invented a name for her finance blog, she wanted something with a positive, optimistic connotation that reflected the idea of living within one's means. She also wanted a name that could expand beyond personal finance as her blog grew and evolved. And lastly, of course, the name had to be memorable. After brainstorming a list of names and mulling over the decision for a few weeks, Nicole returned to 'Breaking Even,' the first idea she had written down. She figured she was stuck on it and set up the blog with that name in October 2007. Breaking Even is a positive mindset and the goal of every business, especially those just starting out.

We are an online marketing company that works with clients on marketing their businesses, maintaining their online properties, and training them on what we know how to do.

For fifteen years, we've provided digital optimization solutions to a range of clients, both big and small. From boutique antique shops to major non-profits that define our cultural landscape - no project has been too complex for us! And when faced with more significant undertakings needing specialized knowledge, there's never any doubt about who to call on; we have a comprehensive list of preferred partners at the ready.

Results our clients have seen include increased sales, increased Google searches, increased followers (who stick around), lowered costs for customer acquisition, increased website visitors and increased repeat visitors, and increased employee productivity (from creating marketing workflows and systems they can participate in), and increased business reviews on places like Google Business and TripAdvisor.

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