Digital Strategy in the AI Era: Tactics for Photo Retailers with Max DesMarais

The digital marketing landscape has transformed drastically, forcing photo retailers and imaging businesses to rethink their strategies. In this illuminating conversation with Max DesMarais, Director of Strategy at Vital Design, we explore how small photo businesses can effectively compete against industry giants despite limited marketing budgets.

DesMarais reveals a significant shift that's reshaping the marketing world: organic search visibility is declining as "pay-to-play is becoming more important than ever." With Google's expanded ad space and AI features consuming the search results page, there has been a dramatic drop in organic click-through rates. This doesn't mean small businesses, however, should abandon hope - quite the opposite.

Local photo retailers possess unique advantages that national companies can't match. Through Google's local customization, smaller businesses can achieve higher visibility in their specific markets. DesMarais emphasizes overlooked yet powerful tactics like optimizing Google Business Profiles and leveraging relationships with other local businesses through cross-promotion and interlinking - signals that establish legitimacy and boost organic rankings.

We dive deep into conversion optimization through A/B testing, with DesMarais suggesting approachable starting points like testing email subject lines and comparing designed emails against plain text versions. His insights on landing pages are particularly valuable: "Almost always a designated landing page is going to outperform," he explains, challenging the common retail instinct to showcase every product at once.

Perhaps most compelling is DesMarais's evidence that video content directly drives transactions. "When we include videos on pages, it's extremely rare for us not to see a bump in conversion," he reports. Beyond improving conversion rates, videos enhance organic rankings and open additional discovery channels through platforms l

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Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, gary Pegeau. The Dead Pixel Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing, and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau. Today we're joined by Max DesMarais, who's the Director of Strategy at Vital Design. He's coming to us from Salt Lake City, Utah. Hi Max, how are you today?

Max DesMarais: 0:31

I'm doing pretty well

Gary Pageau: 0:33

Hey, Max, tell us a little bit about Vital Design and the whole marketing world. Before we get into the actual content, can you just talk about how you got into the business and what the company does?

Max DesMarais: 0:47

Yeah for sure. So I've been at Vital for the last nine years or so. We're a full service market agency. We basically build brands and brand foundations and websites and we take those websites, brands and foundations and bring them into what we call digital marketing retainers, which is basically driving more traffic, driving more leads, driving more revenue through marketing activities to capture a positive return on investment. And so we basically build brands and market those brands and companies to drive positive return on investment.

Max DesMarais: 1:16

I've been in digital marketing for quite a bit of time. I grew up in New Hampshire, was obsessed with the outdoors, went to the University of New Hampshire and got into digital marketing because I felt like it was the future of marketing, where I felt like I wanted to be in the marketing field. And as a prospective digital marketer trying to enter the digital marketing space, I had felt that my education was lacking on the digital marketing side of things. So I actually started my own website, my Outdoor Base Camp, to merge my passions with digital marketing, to teach myself digital marketing and help me get a job out of college, and so since then I've had this small business on the side. That's helped me use it as a sandbox to learn digital marketing, but also helped me incorporate my passions into my everyday work.

Gary Pageau: 2:06

So if somebody goes to my outdoor base camp, what do they find there?

Max DesMarais: 2:11

They're going to find a whole bunch of trail guides and information on specific adventures, so, for example, like how to hike a specific mountain or fly fish in a specific river. They're going to find tons of gear reviews uh, both like things like the best backpacks or individual reviews on backpacks and things like that.

Max DesMarais: 2:29

And so it's just a litany of resources to help people get outside, as well as just, you know, tips for getting into trail running or getting into fly fishing, whatever it may be. Uh, and I've been, you know, writing articles for years and driving organic traffic and doing affiliate marketing and selling photography, prints and doing all these types of things and also being a did a stint of being a hiking guide and so forth.

Gary Pageau: 2:50

So yeah, so prints,. I mean, I mean, do you have a preferred lab for that?

Max DesMarais: 2:56

it's okay to name them if you have somebody, yeah yeah, so I actually I did the digital marketing thing and drop shipped everything and used a service called Printful.

Gary Pageau: 3:05

Okay.

Max DesMarais: 3:06

Which basically allowed me to easily spin up tons of products on my WooCommerce site. Basically, it allowed me to test much easier what type of product is working, and I know if someone purchases, it's auto fulfilled, and so I could do like canvas prints or specific prints or even t-shirts and things like that all from one place pretty quickly, and so that was something that was, you know, not the most profitable thing when you do it that way, but allows you to do a lot of pivoting and testing early yeah, yeah, actually I've had printful on the podcast before, so I'm very the audience is very familiar with printful.

Gary Pageau: 3:39

I think it'd be exciting for them to hear somebody, a user, actually from their perspective, right. So let's talk a little bit about that A-B testing piece, because I think that's something that at least in our industry there's not a lot of action on right. Can you talk about what A-B testing is and when you'd want to use it, like for services or for just appeals, or for gears or for gear launches or what some of the things you that would be ideal for that?

Max DesMarais: 4:07

yeah, totally so. Uh, ab testing and inherently is testing two variations of one thing against one another to see which performs best. You'll often hear people refer to it as ab testing when they might actually be doing what's more called multivariate testing, because a true ab test is testing one specific thing against one other specific thing and in the case of small businesses that's often really hard to do without lots of volume Meaning. You can run a test against one another, but unless you have a substantial amount of volume or very big differences in results, it's hard to get statistical significance and say like this version actually outperformed this one versus the other one. So A-B testing is basically testing two things.

Max DesMarais: 4:50

I think every small business owner or organization should be doing some type of A-B testing, and where I would say small businesses should focus on is less of the A-B test and more of the. I'm going to test one thing against an entirely different variation of a similar thing and change a whole bunch of things so that we can get large differences in performance. That allows us to get more statistical relevance, and you can do this in tons of different ways. So, for example, you know, on the advertising side of things, if you wanted to test two entirely different products against the same keywords on Google. You could do that. You would send them to two entirely different landing pages and see how one converts versus the other, and there's millions of different tests that you can run as a small business owner or individual.

Gary Pageau: 5:34

So when you say A-B testing I know there's a lot of the email platforms like MailChimp and whatnot have that built in. Is that okay, just to use what they've got, or is there a special tool that people should be considering?

Max DesMarais: 5:48

Yeah, it just depends what you're trying to do. So, for email, I think it's a great tool for everyone, and tons of people use tools like MailChimp and you should be using their built-in A-B testing. So, for example, any email you send. A great way to leverage that AB testing is to test subject lines. So, um, you don't even necessarily have to do the what MailChimp kind of pushes you to do, which is like test 20% of your audience and then send the rest to the winner. What you can do is just totally split it 50, 50, and then every single week or every single month when you're sending something, you can glean lessons from that. This performed better than this one on this week, and this one performed better than this one on this week. And you can just take kind of anecdotal evidence out of these A-B tests that you're running and just teach yourself what's working, what's not working. It's a great use case for doing that.

Max DesMarais: 6:37

And then the other side of things is like if you want to redesign your email template or change the structure, there can be lots to be gained there. So, for example, a-b testing your very designed, beautiful version, your email that's got tons of images and looks gorgeous, versus your plain text email, which is basically a block of text and maybe some links in it. I think, particularly in the space of photography, you'd be surprised how underperforming what overly designed emails can be, for various reasons, one reason being you get stuck in spam filters with tons of images or the email actually loads slower than it would like a plain text version, and the other being, you know, sometimes under designed seems more personal like a plain text email. So there's those types of things that are great AB tests on the email side of things.

Max DesMarais: 7:25

If you're running ads, I think there's those types of things that are great A-B tests on the email side of things. If you're running ads, I think there's a huge opportunity to be running tests via either A-B testing platforms or just via your ad accounts. Like I said, test a landing page against another landing page or keywords versus other keywords. There's huge opportunities to continuously improve through testing.

Gary Pageau: 7:43

There's a lot of talk about funnels and things right, where you want to drive people to a specific landing page. Should you do that with everything or just the major stuff, right? If you're doing a big promotional let's say, for example, for back to school something you'd want a landing page for that, but would you use it for your everyday half price print day or something like that?

Max DesMarais: 8:08

It's a good question and I would say almost always a designated landing page is going to outperform. Where you're going to send people. To the extent in which it's going to outperform depends pretty drastically on the quality of your original page that you're going to send people to, on the quality of your original page that you're going to send people to.

Max DesMarais: 8:26

So it's hard to answer that question, but I would say, if you have the time and you're willing to put in the effort, a dedicated landing page is almost always worth it because you can incorporate making sure that one it's conversion rate optimal Optimize, meaning like you're doing all the best practices to get people to take the action you want them to take and you're not spreading their attention across. You know your main menu and like these other four things that they might do. There's a lot of value in that. And then also the intent If you're sending people to a general page when they search for something specific, you tend to get worse performance performance, and so I think almost always you should be trying to leverage a landing page, which I would just quantify as a dedicated page to whatever you're trying to advertise or push people to, but there's always that sort of urge to.

Gary Pageau: 9:14

I want people to see everything and if I got them there to see the camera bags or the backpacks, I want them to see the water bottles and the lenses and the filters. How do you restrain that, I guess?

Max DesMarais: 9:30

Yeah, I mean it's a very interesting thing because I think, as a digital marketer who's seen these types of tests over and over and over again across lots of different industries, it's pretty incredible how reducing choice improves your ability to get people to take the action you want them to take.

Max DesMarais: 9:48

I would rather get someone to take the action I want them to take, and at a higher percentage, and then teach them about all the other awesome things that I offer, because you're going to generally see better conversion rates that way. So I'll take it as an example If they're searching for a camera bag, I want them to buy that camera bag, and if they take action whether it be buying that camera bag I can use that as a great opportunity to teach them all about the other things that I offer. And if they don't take that action, I can use tools like remarketing to follow them around and either try to get them to make that purchase or then educate them about all the other great stuff that we do. So I'm on the lines of it's almost always better to teach them about what they're looking for specifically rather than show them off everything else that you do.

Gary Pageau: 10:36

But it is because it's funny, because I see a lot of websites in the industry, especially the print sites, and they literally bombard people with every possible combination of product that they have because they feel it's because they've got I mean, with outsourcing and dropshipping and everything else, you've got basically a universe of products you can sell. But you do kind of. You know, there's analysis, paralysis that happens from the consumer side, because if you put on the consumer hat they're inundated with messages all the time.

Max DesMarais: 11:09

Yeah, you have to meet the consumers where they're at too. I think that's an important element of this, like there's consumers that don't know what they want, and if they're in that stage, you need to help guide them into what is actually going to fulfill their need, and that might be where you need to be further expanding your page. However, if you have someone that's searching for something specific, they've already identified their specific need. You want to service that specific need, and I think it's important to recognize that whenever you're doing marketing, particularly digital marketing, there's always this need to understand that your buyers are going to be in very different stages all the time, and you need to think about what stage they're in at that specific time. This comes into play with paid search advertising, as an example. All the time, the keywords that you're going after will either indicate they're ready to buy this one thing right now, or they're much higher up in the buyer's funnel and we have to do more education. Or they're interested in five or six different products, or they're in a comparison mode.

Max DesMarais: 12:04

So, it's just really important to think about where your buyer is at that particular moment.

Gary Pageau: 12:08

So let's talk a little bit about paid advertising, cause that sort of world is is is changing pretty rapidly, right you got you don't just focus on Google, cause they're kind of the big dog, but you know, obviously there's Bing and other platforms too, but and there's a lot happening there in the paid ad space because AI is coming in and it's stealing a lot of traffic from Google. What do you think that's going to? How that's going to impact the paid advertising piece?

Max DesMarais: 12:38

Yeah, I mean, it's been a crazy landscape the past particular year probably the craziest in the history of time and what we're noticing in general is that pay to play is becoming actually more important than ever. You're losing organic ability to show up for queries. So, for example we'll just use Google as the example here when people are searching for something online, they're far less likely to click on an organic result than they were 24 months ago. So if a thousand people are searching for something specific and it used to be 70% of those people would click on an organic search result. It's now more like 30, 40, or 50% of those people.

Gary Pageau: 13:20

And why is that? I mean, is it because Google's pushing them, the links, the paid links? Yeah?

Max DesMarais: 13:25

it because Google's pushing them. The links, the paid link. Yeah, it's two reasons there's. There's the paid advertising.

Max DesMarais: 13:29

Real estate is continuing to grow, meaning when you search something, you're going to see half the time shopping ads at top. Uh, then search ads and then maybe, uh, like a featured snippet type thing, or also the ai overview, so like the ads are taking up almost the entire top fold. Meaning you have to scroll to get to your organic listings so that pay to play is becoming more relevant. And at the same time this is happening, we're seeing those AI overviews in Google all the time, meaning you type anything with the question, for example, you'll see Google's AI overview gives you the chat GBT like response, and compiles things, and that is eating a tremendous amount of clicks on the organic side of things.

Max DesMarais: 14:10

And we're also in this time period where I think it's pretty clear that Google lost revenue by doing that, meaning it's pushing their ads down. Google says we've lost no revenue on AI overview queries that are showing, but what we're going to see is that ads are going to start to be incorporated into those AI overviews as well, so they're not losing the revenue and it's just more reason to see. The pay to play is pretty essential in a lot of these spaces. In order to get those clicks, you probably need to be running paid search ads on Google.

Gary Pageau: 14:42

So just the good old, hey, I'm going to create some great content and drop it out there and SEO optimize my keywords and my description and all that stuff that's being de-emphasized now by Google.

Max DesMarais: 14:55

It's harder to win. First of all, it's a more competitive space and when you do win, generally your opportunity is a bit lower than it was a couple of years ago, meaning you're not going to get as many clicks as you used to.

Max DesMarais: 15:05

So I think it's important for marketers to just understand that that the opportunity maybe has dropped a little bit. In the way that you weigh your marketing efforts needs to, the math that you use might need to change a little bit. You might need to emphasize some of these paid tactics a little bit more than some of these existing organic tactics in certain situations, because the pay to play has taken over in some of those areas.

Gary Pageau: 15:30

So when you're talking about, let's say, someone who is, you know, let's say, an independent camera store, right, and they've got, you know, don't have an infinite budget and they're up against the B&Hs and the Adoramas and the people like that who do have a much bigger budget. And let's say, for example, the co-op from Canon and Nikon isn't quite covering the freight right, so you have a limited budget. What do you suggest? Or some of your tactics? Or do you just say, listen, I may not be able to compete there, so I'm going to do more on another platform. Maybe I do Instagram, maybe I do TikTok or something like that? What are some of the other options? You just kind of? You know, I'm talking about people with a finite budget, right?

Max DesMarais: 16:10

I will say there's a benefit to the local store, the local owner. That is a little bit better than some of these national level organizations. Meaning there is, as I'm sure everyone notices, a lot of local customization happening in the results for Google. So if you're in a specific location and you have your own Google Chrome profile, what Google shows you is going to be different based off of your location and your existing habits.

Erin Manning: 16:36

Right.

Max DesMarais: 16:37

And when it comes to local stores and things like that, there's still a lot of opportunity probably more so than nationally based organizations to show up to your local audience, whether that's town specific, region specific or state specific. Generally speaking, there's a lot of opportunity there still to make sure that you're having the proper pages organically to drive traffic, because you can show up and beat national organizations on the local level. So I would say, like, don't lose sight of that. As a local small business and then on the paid advertising side of things, there's still tons of opportunity for the same reason, like local based organizations can way now and even if they're not local based, like they can still beat out national level organizations by creating really high quality niche campaigns that are just going to beat out some of the things that the national organizations aren't going to do, because these smaller opportunities aren't as important to them or as relevant to them.

Gary Pageau: 17:32

So when you're talking about local now, does that include like optimizing your Google my Business page and things like that? I've talked to a few people over the years who have really said that's sort of an overlooked thing, that people are missing out on that. That's a way to really tell google hey, I'm local, I'm active, go for it yeah, totally.

Max DesMarais: 17:53

I like no brainer things are definitely make sure your google my business profile is optimized, has accurate information and has all the info. Like fill it out as much as you possibly can, add imagery, make sure it's accurate and keep it updated Right, like number one. Like definitely do that Number two on the local front, like use your other local businesses that are around you, maybe not related to you, know your specific industry, but you know hotels, restaurants, things like that. Leverage partnerships and use one another to interlink and talk about one another, because that's going to also tell Google oh, this company is working with other local organizations, they're very clearly legitimate and they're very more connected to this particular locale. So I think two things that are overlooked are Google my Business page and then just leveraging other local organizations and companies to work together. Mention each other on your sites, do some co-marketing. I think there's a lot that can happen there. Oh sure.

Max DesMarais: 18:51

Yeah.

Gary Pageau: 18:53

Well, I mean just because, when we think of like a photography company, right, you got either photographer they can if it's a wedding photographer, they can talk about venues they go to Right or vendors they use or or caterers that they've worked with, you know, there's all kinds of opportunity there and I imagine that's a very natural thing to do and something they should be doing anyway, Right.

Max DesMarais: 19:12

Absolutely, and I would say like, if you're thinking on the digital side, be tactical about it, like get them to put up a blog post or a page on their website that links to you and mentions you, and that's going to go a long way on your organic ranking side of things Because, like Google wants to see those things. It's indicative that you're in that community, you're speaking with other businesses, and it's going to help you a lot on the organic side of things and the trust building side.

Gary Pageau: 19:36

Because that's really. I think one of the things that people tend to overlook is part of Google's promise to their users is we're sending you to legit places, that these are valid. So you know, when people have problems with Google, it's probably because they haven't done enough on their end to appear legitimate to the Google.

Max DesMarais: 19:59

Yeah, totally appear legitimate to the google. Yeah, totally. I think I'll add one more thing before you get is just uh, reviews and testimonials are so important for this type of thing. So, like make sure you have a process to go back to your happy customers and have them leave you some type of review. Google is a great place for that. Leave google reviews, but if you're using some type of third-party review platform, do that as well. Make sure there's something in there, because it's hugely beneficial on multiple fronts. Of course, the organic front, showing that trust building Google is more likely to rank you higher if you have lots of reviews. But it's also hugely important on the conversion front, like the more you have these reviews from other happy customers, the more likely that person that is already on your website is going to make a purchase or engage with you in some way.

Gary Pageau: 20:44

So there's always a talk about you know in marketing, you know how important video is coming, you know how important that is for all that. But you also hear different things also about it gets attention but doesn't necessarily help with transactions. Is that something you're seeing?

Max DesMarais: 21:00

No, I would say gets attention but doesn't necessarily help with transactions. Is that something you're seeing? No, I would say video is helping with transactions a lot. When we put videos on product pages for our clients, for example, we see conversion rates spike pretty substantially. So it can vary, but basically anytime we leverage a video on any page, we almost always see an improvement in conversion rate meaning the people that hit that page convert into our desired action more frequently when a video is on it.

Max DesMarais: 21:26

This is true for early stage leads, so think like an ebook or a white paper or joining a webinar but it's also true for product pages, so an e-commerce purchase or even picking up the phone and speaking to a sales representative. When we include videos on pages, it's extremely rare for us to not see a bump in conversion. And it's the crazy thing. It's almost becoming table stakes to have video and a lot of things across lots of organizations. So the more that you can incorporate video, the better. And then, on top of that, we're also seeing the increased traffic and increased rankings on many types of pages when we incorporate videos.

Max DesMarais: 22:01

so this happens for for blog posts, meaning, like do a video that covers a lot of what's in the blog post that you're talking about, we tend to see that blog post improving rankings. This happens on product pages. When we add videos to product pages, we tend to see those product pages show up in search and the result page is higher because there's a video on there. And then there's a third element of it, which is this depends on the topic of the video. But if there's a video on there and then there's the third element of it, which is this depends on the topic of the video. But if it's a video that you also publish, say on YouTube, you have the opportunity to show up on YouTube for people searching for that particular topic.

Max DesMarais: 22:31

And that same thing applies to the social media channels where, like, search engine optimization is no longer just a Google thing. Tiktok is a search engine, instagram is a search engine, amazon is a search engine. Instagram is a search engine, amazon is a search engine, youtube is a search engine. You have to be thinking about your content and multiple medias because of that, and it gives you that opportunity to not only convert people on your website better, but also you have this other channel where people may find you, because they're searching for these types of things in video format.

Gary Pageau: 22:58

I guess where I was going with that was just saying, not necessarily video on product pages, but on more, like you know, doing Instagram hits and things like that.

Erin Manning: 23:05

But as you say, it's even better though.

Gary Pageau: 23:08

I mean there will be some benefit if you say hey, this is our new bag, we got it, you know. Click here for more information that will perform better than a static picture.

Max DesMarais: 23:16

Yeah, almost always. I think the the video based stuff on social media is is really important now, and I think uh, I watch a lot of organizations get stuck in the trap, though, of like searching for views rather than their ideal target.

Gary Pageau: 23:30

Well, that's my point is because when I hear from people who do you know stores, who are like they get into this and they get into a routine and it's almost like they want to be a performer, not a retailer.

Max DesMarais: 23:43

Yeah it's, it's a. It's a difficult thing Cause, like you want to try and maximize your like pages exposure and get that video out there, but when you do so, you're often like maybe potentially even alienating your true ideal customer profile because you're not talking about the things that you want to. And I think there's an important balance there of creating content that is going to hopefully get beyond your ideal target audience but also is appealing to your ideal target audience. And I think it's more important to focus on video creation that's tailored directly to your ideal customer profile than it is to try and go viral.

Gary Pageau: 24:19

Really Okay. So that's interesting because I think that's again goes back to the idea of restraint, right? Is that the idea that you know you're not going to appeal to everybody in every way, so you may use a different tactic to maybe draw in new customers, right? But you're saying video may not necessarily be the best way to reach first time visitors to your platform, you know, through a wacky video.

Max DesMarais: 24:43

Yeah, I don't know, maybe a wacky video.

Max DesMarais: 24:45

I think there's a lot of opportunity for growth.

Max DesMarais: 24:47

I think on video based channels like we're in a time period where we'll take Instagram or TikTok like you don't have to have a massive amount of following to grow those audiences Like we're in a time where they they pay off based off of how engaging the content is that you create to whatever audience they want to show it to. So you, as someone who's starting fresh, if you produce really high quality content that's meant for a specific audience, that follows the best practices, like maintaining engagement, there's a good chance that it's going to get pushed out to the right people and you're going to be able to continue to grow. So I I would not discount video as a very good strategy and I think there's a great opportunity today where these platforms are much less concerned about your following and much more concerned about the quality of content you're producing. I just don't want people to get in the trap of producing content that truly isn't trying to get in front of their target audience. Otherwise you're just not going to get the value out of it.

Gary Pageau: 25:42

You mentioned best practices. What would be for the benefit of the platform, the kind of stuff they're looking for? What would be one or two of the best practices there, the thing that they're looking for, that they want to push right?

Max DesMarais: 25:56

Yeah, I mean, they want engagement, right. They want view time and they want to see that people are watching your stuff to its completion and they want to see that, once they do that, they're also interacting with it and also sharing it with other people to expand the reach. So you have to be thinking about those metrics and if you go into we'll take like Instagram as an example it's going to be like like how, what percentage of people watched past your first three seconds? If that is low, you're destined for failure, right. And so it becomes this game of keeping attention as long as you possibly can and then trying to get people to take specific actions.

Max DesMarais: 26:34

and, uh, best practices are really hard to say there, because there's this like whole viral game that's going on yeah yeah, exactly, yeah all these psychological things you have to do to win yeah but b you have to be thinking about how do we keep people engaged, how do we hook them in and get to the payoff at the end rather than, uh, like easing into it, because people's attention spans are too short, especially on these social media platforms. If you want win, you got to be quick in getting their attention. I mean, it just seems to me like there's a lot.

Gary Pageau: 27:03

There's a constantly moving menu of visual tricks people are using right Like the whole, like right now I think it's hot that you're starting off camera and then they move the camera in like suddenly and like you're popping in, like you're coming off the thing you know there's like are they going to classes for this? Or who's teaching them this stuff? I mean it's, it's kind of crazy when you look at this stuff yeah, you can watch people.

Max DesMarais: 27:25

Like if you go through famous pages, you'll see the formula that they figured out at some point, like when everyone else does it.

Gary Pageau: 27:32

They got to come up with something new yeah, exactly that's.

Max DesMarais: 27:35

That's. It's a whole constantly changing game, because what keeps people attention eventually gets saturated and switches, and then you have to find a new way to hook people in and the people that continuously win. You'll see them adapt. You'll see their video-based strategies adapt and how they produce that content and it's I will say it's like a really creative based game and it's really hard to win and something that our agency is trying to figure out right now how to win in those it's not nearly as easy as a lot of other things are oh, absolutely.

Gary Pageau: 28:04

I mean because you're dealing with moods and perception and trends and things like that, as opposed to hey, this is a dashboard, we're going to run some ab tests and things like.

Max DesMarais: 28:12

If you take the most famous people, they've clearly figured it out, like mr beast, as an example yeah exactly. Yeah, like they've figured out this way to keep people's attention, and I don't.

Gary Pageau: 28:21

There's a lot of influences I've seen have fallen off too, so Well, that's my point is you've got this sort of you know, rise and fall, almost like you know the fad life cycle thing, right, where it's like hot for a few seconds peaks and then drops off, right. And you know I don't think my audience you know they're running their day-to-day business, right. The payoff isn't there for them to invest in spending three hours a day analyzing trends.

Gary Pageau: 28:47

Maybe that's what they hire someone like you guys for right, but the reality is you know the day-to-day business, somebody who's not doing a Mr Beast or something you know it's a challenge, right.

Max DesMarais: 28:59

Yeah, it's really a challenge, challenging. I think a lot of small businesses are lacking the basics. First, right, they should really be focusing on make sure your website explains what you do clearly. Make sure there's clear call to actions on it. Make sure you have the pages that highlight your products and all of your services right in a clear way and gets in the convert. Make sure your google my business is updated. Make sure you're getting reviews and then make sure that you're producing content that's going to help push them through the funnel and like those basic things 80% of organizations aren't doing consistently Really and yeah, I don't think so. No, I would definitely stand by that Most organizations are not doing that stuff well, and the basic foundation things are where you should start doing that stuff.

Gary Pageau: 29:42

Well, and those, the basic foundation things, are where you should start. So have that down before you even think about going viral, probably, because I mean, actually the worst thing that could happen probably would be if you do come up with something and one of your you know backpacking videos goes viral and you don't have a clear call to action on your website, you don't have a clear funnel, you don't and you, you miss all that opportunity.

Max DesMarais: 30:05

That's. That's exactly right. That's why we call it like the foundation building in our agency of of. Like. We don't want to spend all this money to drive traffic to a poor foundation because we're not going to generate the revenue return investment. So like it's more important for us to make sure the foundation is solid first, before we spend that time to bring all the eyeballs there.

Gary Pageau: 30:24

Some would say that's a vital design.

Max DesMarais: 30:27

Yes, they would.

Gary Pageau: 30:30

So where can people go to learn more about Vital Design and the things you guys offer?

Max DesMarais: 30:34

If you want to find Vital Design, simply do a Google search for Vital Design and you'll find our website right there, which has links to all of our socials, and then, right below our website, you'll find a bunch of links to all of our socials as well, and you'll see that we offer digital marketing services, website design and development and a whole litany of other digital marketing tactics.

Gary Pageau: 30:52

Awesome. Well, listen, Max, it's been great talking to you. I'm sorry that I took you away from hiking the trails to come talk to me, but I'm sure my audience will appreciate it, and thank you so much.

Max DesMarais: 31:02

Thank you so much for having me. It was very fun.

Erin Manning: 31:04

Thank you for listening to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. Read more great stories and sign up for the newsletter at wwwthedeadpixelssocietycom.