web design

DaBrian Marketing Brings On Web Developer Intern

October 11, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

We’re happy to bring Vince Yankowsky onto our DaBrian Marketing team as our Fall 2016 Web Developer Intern. Vince grew up in Sinking Spring and attended Wilson High School. He is finishing his last semester of college at Penn State Berks Campus majoring in Information Systems Technology (IST). He will assist our website development team on creating, developing, and designing future websites.

We are a close-knit team at DaBrian Marketing, so our first goal with our new members is to make them feel more comfortable and get-to-know them a little better! We started Vince off with a little QA survey.

What are his interests?

Vince enjoys reading and writing. He prefers fiction fantasy novels because he feels like he is actually inside of the book. He also enjoys spending time on Facebook and watching sports like football and baseball. Like many of us here at DaBrian, he is also an Eagles fan! (Brownie points for Vince!)

Has he had any other jobs while in college?

He is a very hard worker. Not only will he be interning at DaBrian Marketing, but he is a cashier at Walmart for the past 3 years and a packer at Palmer for 2 years.

Does he have any pets?

He does not have a pet.

If he were to get a tattoo, what would he get and why?

It’d be on tri-force symbol on the wrist from the Zelda.

What’s his favorite movie ever?

He has a lot of favorite movies! To name a few: Star Wars (especially the new one), the Harry Potter series, The Matrix (he thinks there should have been a sequel), Pirates of the Caribbean, and some horror movies like Final Destination.

What’s his biggest pet peeve?

When someone he works with is slacking and he has to do more work to catch up. (He won’t have this issue at DaBrian!)

What’s his philosophy in life?

Vince follows the Boy Scout’s oath – “Do a good turn daily.” Do what needs to be done.

If he could be any character ever created, who would he be?

A Superhero or a warrior.

What’s your favorite ice cream?

Graham Slam Ice Cream from Turkey Hill.

If you had time to travel, where would you go and why?

Vince couldn’t decide. He mentioned possibly France or Mexico. He really would like to travel the world and experience new cultures, so he can compare it to the United State of America.

We’re excited to bring another Reading-native onto our DaBrian team. We’re slowly expanding and have a few new other employees who you will get to know soon, too! For more information about employment opportunities and joining our team, visit our Employment or About Us page.

DaBrian Marketing Redesigns Mimmo’s Restaurant and Pizzeria’s Website

October 4, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

Reading, PA- DaBrian Marketing Group, a full-service digital marketing agency , launched a new website for Mimmo’s Restaurant and Pizzeria located on Morgantown Road in Reading, PA. Like the newly renovated restaurant, the website has been updated with a new design and style that showcases the beautiful dining areas and highlights the cuisine that makes Mimmo’s the go-to restaurant for families, couples and events.

The new website allows users to quickly browse Mimmo’s extensive menu, find directions to the restaurant or check the hours of operation through desktop and mobile devices. Each page has been rewritten through DaBrian Marketing’s content marketing service which has captured the Mimmo’s atmosphere and story through words. Users may also learn more about Mimmo’s banquet and catering services and choose to fill out an application for services directly from the website. This makes scheduling a family dinner, corporate meeting or class reunion easier than ever.

The dine-in and take-out menus are also available. Diners may browse the hearty array of appetizers, dinners such as steak, seafood and pizza meals, and kids or specials options that are all prepared with fresh ingredients. The menu choices also include the selection of signature cocktails, draft beers, gluten-free items and desserts, including homemade cannolis.

Dozens of pictures taken by Dennis Wojtowicz capture the restaurant’s exterior, interior and ambiance to provide a visual tour of Mimmo’s. Guests will see the front dining room which is designed for casual dining, conversations and family meals, as well as the quiet, intimate area with couples in mind. They can also view the banquet room where up to 130 people can comfortably gather for family dinners, wedding and baby showers, corporate meetings or drinks after work. The peaceful outdoor setting features a grand waterfall can also be seen on the new website.

A staple of Berks County since April 1997, Mimmo’s Restaurant provides guests with an authentic Italian experience. Mimmo and Lucy, the restaurant’s owners, originally opened the restaurant with the intention of providing excellent cuisine and sharing their family history. In 2015, they decided to renovate and expand the space to provide a rustic Italian feel while sharing the story of their family through murals and decor. For the past 20 years, Mimmo’s has welcomed diners to reconnect and relax over dinner and drinks. The owners, restaurant and staff have grown to be part of the community and eagerly welcome guests to learn more at mimmos.org. For information on website design and content marketing, call DaBrian Marketing Group at (610) 743-5602, or by email at sales@dabrianmarketing.com.

About DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC

Founded in 2008, DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC is a full-service digital marketing agency, focused on providing original and strategic digital marketing solutions for businesses, that want to create digital awareness, increase return on investment (ROI), and identify insights that not only will help achieve goals but will also help to increase your business’s efficiencies.
DaBrian Marketing Group’s services include email marketing, search engine optimization, website design, web analytics, social media marketing and more. Company headquarters are centrally located at 500 Penn Street, Suite 201, Reading, Pennsylvania 19602. For more information about DMG, visit dabrianmarketing.com or call 610.743.5602.

Originally Published on Newswire

Our New eBook, Your New 5-Step Guide to Ecommerce

August 15, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

The Ecommerce Revolution

Shopping, today, is different for consumers when compared to traditional methods and practices. Where people once had to travel to stores and order from paperback catalogs for nearly every purchase, people currently sit down with a phone or tablet in their hands. Ecommerce – online shopping – has transformed the marketplace for retail companies.

The New Marketplace

The act of researching products online – finding their basic information, availability, and price – is almost a prerequisite to visiting a company’s physical location. Similarly, increasing amounts of people choose to purchase products through online stores in addition to visiting physical stores. This overall trend in consumer behavior is the reason that DaBrian Marketing Group’s new eBook, A 5-Step Guide to Improve the Performance of Your Ecommerce, has been written.

DaBrian Marketing’s Solution to Your Problem

Watch our SEO Consultant, David McDowell explain Ecommerce.

Within your FREE Guide to Ecommerce, our Bing Ads-certified team details the five major objectives that work to maintain an effective online store for your company:

Create a strategy
Use the right Point Of Sale (POS) system.
Study your customers’ journey.
Meet expectations.
Invest in the right channels.

Inside of this FREE eBook, find valuable information about today’s marketplace from reputable sources within the digital marketing industry. Get recommendations for several online shopping platforms that are easy to use and actually make shopping easier for your customers.

To keep customers buying from your company, let them make purchases in the most convenient way: online. Download your FREE Guide to Ecommerce, today.

Why Stock Photography Shouldn’t Represent Your Brand

July 19, 2016 by Mark Mapp Leave a Comment

5 Reasons Not To Use Stock Photography

Throughout my experience as a Web Designer, I have noticed that many businesses struggle when they have to make a decision on whether or not to use stock photography to promote their brand. Although there are several good reasons to utilize stock photography on branded materials (such as limited budget, accessibility, variety, and quality), the negative impact of using them can prove to be much greater. This blog covers the 5 disadvantages or risks of using stock photography when promoting your brand and what alternative solutions are out there to avoid these potential risks.

1. Limited Restrictions

When purchasing non-custom photography, there are always license restrictions to abide by. Always make sure to read and understand all license restrictions associated with your purchase. Some restrictions may include crediting the author while some images may only be licensed for editorial use versus advertising/commercial use. You can view iStock’s License Help or iStock’s Content License Agreement to get an idea of the type of licenses or restrictions associated to stock photography purchases.

2. Non-Exclusive

You must remember that the same website you purchase your photos from may be the same website your competitors are purchasing from. This factor alone makes stock photography usage non-exclusive to your brand. There is always that risk of competitors finding and using the same imagery you purchased.

3. Lack of Creativity

It is almost impossible for a designer to come up with a unique and custom design concept when limited to using stock photography. Remember that these images weren’t taken with your brand or products in mind. Therefore, you may find yourself paging through hundreds of images to find that one that you feel will best represents your brand. Although image options are limitless with stock photography, unique or original concepts are not.

4. Predictability

Images submitted to stock photography websites cover a variety concepts. Since these concepts are limited, image options can seem to be very predictable or clichéd. It’s one thing to have a limitless amount of images to choose from. But, if you have 100 images depicting the same idea or concept, where is the variety in that?

5. Unnatural Compositions

When browsing through stock photography websites, it’s hard not to notice all the unnatural positions or “forced” compositions in most of the images containing people; especially people in business attire. Everything looks staged. This is the best way to make your website look like spam.

What Are The Alternatives?

1. Custom Photography

It is always best to utilize custom photography to represent your brand or to tell your brand story. Purchasing in-house photography equipment or hiring a professional to do the job will prove to be a better branding method than using stock photography.

2. Vectors/Illustration

Instead of using photos, more and more companies are using vectors or illustrations to promote their brand. Take Google for example.

3. Customize Your Stock

If you are going to use stock photography, find different ways to utilize the photo. Whether it is cropping out a certain portion of the image or combining two different images or concepts. These are just a couple of ways to make stock images as unique and original as possible while diminishing the chance of someone using the same image, idea, or concept.

To learn more about different visual branding methods and which one best suits your company, contact us! We’d be more than happy to chat with you.

DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC Re-develops PA Industrial Equipment, Inc.’s Website

July 19, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group Leave a Comment

DaBrian Marketing Group, LLC redesigns and creates a new website for PA Industrial Equipment, Inc.

PA Industrial’s new website emphasizes an improved level of accessibility and internal security as a result of consolidated web hosting services from DaBrian Marketing Group. With the new website, PA Industrial’s team develops online marketing strategies with a degree of transparency that facilitates secure management for the maintenance and growth of the company.

Office Manager, Shelly Arthur gave the following statement: “The team at DaBrian Marketing Group completed our new website weeks earlier than we anticipated. We are pleased to be entering our 40th year of business with one dedicated team managing our website design, hosting and SEO programs.”

PA Industrial Equipment, Inc. specializes in the sale, rental, and repair of forklifts and aerial lifts. PA Industrial serves numerous counties within Southeastern Pennsylvania – including Berks, Philadelphia, Lancaster, Lehigh, and Northampton. PA Industrial stresses its dedication to high-quality service in the selling and repairing of machinery that is vitally important to manufacturers within the region.

Visit PA Industrial Equipment, Inc.’s new website to learn more about their high-quality repair and sales services as well as the most recent work by DaBrian Marketing Group’s team.

Web Design Without SEO: If You Build It, Will They Come?

July 11, 2016 by Dabrian Marketing Group 1 Comment

In the film Field of Dreams released in 1989, Kevin Costner is famously told, “If you build it, he will come.” While this may hold true when it comes to attracting Shoeless Joe and the rest of the 1919 Black Sox team to your Baseball field, it does not apply to attracting visitors to your website.
Eh, not so fast there, Ray. Without proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO), not many people are going to come. Designing a website that is aesthetically pleasing is not the be-all and end-all for an effective digital marketing campaign. It’s merely the first step. Without SEO, you have a better chance of Joe Jackson actually wearing shoes than your customers finding your site. Below are five reasons why SEO and Web Design are needed together for your site to perform well.

1. SEO Basics: Tags, Titles, and Descriptions

Sticking with the Field of Dreams theme, let’s say your potential fans that attend your ballpark are equivalent to those using search engines. How are they supposed to find your new park if no one has heard about it or can find it? Tags, Titles, and Descriptions (TTD’s) along with content tell search engines what the pages on your site are about. Below is an example of proper implementation of TTD’s for this blog specifically (blog inception).

The keywords you intend a specific page to rank and draw traffic for should be represented within the TTD’s. For example, this blog’s main points of interest are SEO and Web Design, so those keywords are placed within all aspects of TTD’s and the content naturally (non-spammy). Don’t forget to include any other related sub points (digital marketing, link building, local SEO, and content optimization) wherever you see fit.

2. Content is the Experience

Just as sports venues are judged off of the overall experience they offer, so is your website. The content on your site not only helps people find your site, but it ultimately dictates the user’s experience. Great content means a better chance the user will perform an action beneficial to your business. Whether that means fill out a contact form, share your site via social media, or purchase a product, none of those are likely to happen without the right content for your audience. With that being said, content is not a once-and-done event. In fact, search engines actually prefer sites with fresher and more up-to-date content. That’s why it’s a great idea to start a blog and to write about topics relevant to your audience. Not only with this further establish your business as “in the know” within your industry, but it also allows you to place more of the keywords you wish to rank for on your site.

3. Technical Issues: Take Care of Your Ball Park

When sports teams build new stadiums, they don’t just leave it alone, do they? No, of course not! Constant maintenance is required to ensure everything looks perfect and that it functions properly. This is the same when designing a website. Technical issues are bound to happen. If these aren’t taken care of, it could potentially have a negative impact on your user’s experience. That ultimately translates to a decrease in rankings, leads, and worst of all, sales.

4. Local SEO: Where are you?

What’s the point of having a ball park, or any business for that matter, if no one can find you? This same logic should remain true when dealing with your digital presence. After several algorithm changes, Google’s search results are now heavily personalized. This means they take into account the searcher’s history, social signals, and most of all, locality. If that’s not enough to prove the importance of local, Google’s research on local consumer behavior found that, “50% of consumers who conducted a local search on their smartphone visited a store within a day, and 34% who searched on computer/tablet did the same.” So what can your business do to ensure you capitalize on this opportunity?

Having your business name, address, and phone number consistent on all pages of your website (NAP).
Be listed on major local listing platforms such as Google My Business, Facebook and Bing Places
Use local Business Schema markup.
Use local keywords in your URLs, TTD’s, and content, where appropriate.

Without proper local SEO, your business could be lost within the metaphorical cornfield that is the search engine results.

5. Link Building: Generating Buzz

Link building or link earning is a huge part of SEO. When search engines evaluate your site to determine where you rank for a specific subject, they don’t only look at your TTD’s or content, but also the other sites linking to you. The more reputable industry related pages linking to you, the better your site will perform. To put it in sports terms, links represent fans and leading figures within the sports realm. Here is how to rank them:

Fans: Fans telling other fans about your ballpark represent low level links from either directories or sites with low domain authority.
Local Sports reporters: These represent the middle level links. These are trusted sites in your area, such as the Chamber of Commerce or a local business directory.
Major league coverage: These represent the top level links from industry leaders. For example, a link from MOZ would be huge for a digital marketing agency such as ourselves

So what’s the best approach to earning these links? Well in the past, many people obtained links via “black hat SEO” methods, all of which now result in a penalty according to Google’s link scheme guidelines. Your best (and safest) bet is by creating great, original content and developing authentic relationships with those within your industry. The goal is to naturally earn high quality links.

Conclusion

An effective digital marketing campaign needs both a well designed website, along with proper SEO. So when it comes to digital marketing, If you build it (and continually optimize it), they will come.

For more information about SEO, Web Design, and the other Digital Marketing Services we have to offer, contact us or leave us a comment below!

By: David McDowell