Today we’d like to introduce you to Ronald Dod.
Ronald, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I graduated FSU with my masters & bachelors in Marketing in 2012 and moved to Atlanta in 2013. From there I started a marketing company called Grey Umbrella Marketing. At first, I was a glorified marketing consultant or freelancer but then we started getting a lot of business opportunities and soon we were at six full-time employees early 2014-2015. In 2015, I met my future business partner speaking at 2015 Magento Imagine in Las Vegas and decided to merge my company with his company, called Visiture, based in Charleston. We still have both offices in both cities with the main one in Charleston while I work here in Atlanta with our Marketing Manager. We grew 100% in 2016 and are looking to do the same in 2017. We are on pace to do so and have around 25 full-time employees with around 15 contractors we utilize as well.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
If life was a smooth road it would never be fun. I think the fun is in the struggle and the failures make the successes only mean more and make you feel better when you accomplish them. I have had a lot of good luck and mentors/friends so thankfully my road has been a lot smoother than others.
Regarding my business, there are always lots of bumps along the road. From clients owing us tends of thousands of dollars to employees quitting on the spot and us having to fill their positions & workflow immediately. There are so many bumps I can think of but whenever I have been presented problems or issues I always remember that you will make it and everything will be fine. I also remember past bumps along the way, remember how trivial they are to my problems now, and remember I overcame them.
Visiture – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
Visiture is a marketing agency which helps eCommerce businesses get more customers using Google, Bing, and Yahoo. This is called SEM (search engine marketing) in our industry which combines SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click management). We have capabilities to increase their organic rankings (SEO) in search engines and have experts with optimizing the paid advertisements (PPC) in their AdWords accounts. Together we help drive their revenue, acquire more customers, and help them be more successful businesses.
We got into eCommerce mainly by luck. I had a client back in 2014 where we used SEO to increase his revenue by $600,000 a year. Once I realized the impact I was making I realized that client could never fire my agency so I decided to focus on eCommerce. A couple years later and merged we continue to get great results for eCommerce businesses and continue to focus on it.
In our industry, there are many competitors but no one just focused on SEM and eCommerce. They usually do SEM and target eCommerce as a vertical in their many services and verticals they focus on. I believe we are better at SEM and eCommerce because it is all we do. Focusing on a niche and being the best at is one of the best ways for agencies to grow, make their clients happy, and make it easier to scale with your people.
What really makes us stand out beside our focus is our focus on discovery & onboarding. Many agencies try to cut costs and make the contract length as short as possible to win business. The effect is agencies spend less time on discovery with the client and what happens is they do not do as good of a job, the account suffers, and eventually, the client leaves due to poor results. It is a vicious cycle. We focus more time getting to know the client, their industry, their products, and learn with them through a longer engagement. The results are a much higher probability of success getting results for the account.
The thing I am most proud of is the results we get for clients and the people I work with. We have the best people in the industry and get our clients tremendous results. Working together we have saved businesses, saved jobs, and more just because we can help businesses acquire more customers with our skills.
What moment in your career do you look back most fondly on?
We had this one client which was a one-hundred-year-old classic American brand with hundreds of employees. They had an online division and their organic rankings from Google, which brought them the majority of their customers, went away making their business suffer. They were one year away from laying off the whole division and stopping the brand online. Our SEO service was able to turn around the ship for them, get their customer acquisition channel working again, and it saved their business and the jobs of the people that work there.
Contact Info:
- Website: Visiture.com
- Phone: 843.701.8094
- Email: ron@visiture.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/visiture/
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