Longbow is a Boutique Marketing Agency | Branding, Creative, and Web

Tag: internet

Unlock Your Business Potential Online with Digital Marketing
Does your site drives less customers and leads than it used to?
A website is essential for any business looking to grow sales, but simply having a website is not enough. If you site isn’t performing, then what you’re missing is digital marketing.
Search engines are the new yellow pages. Does big tech have their thumb on the scale, when it comes to your business getting found online? The answer is yes, but it’s surprisingly easy to rank in search engines. But, you have to compete!
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Digital advertising has come of age in every market and it’s changing the business landscape. The reason for this is simple: All search is local. Understanding this and how it impacts your sales is a key to changing the equation in your favor.
Most professional service firms still do business the old fashioned way, and while networking, chambers, and word of mouth referrals still works, they will not get you found on Google.
If all search is local, then how do big national firms outrank me?
It’s because they advertise. Their websites are optimized, their content marketing never stops. Their Social Media is extensive and they pay for the privilege of coming up first in search. And it happens with such regularity that you’re pushed to the second, third, and fourth pages in search returns—if you rank at all.
But fear not, all hope is NOT lost. You just have to play the game. When it comes to local search, when you compete, the big guys can’t beat you. Yet, most small businesses don’t even try, and wonder why they lost market share.
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Consider these truths
Content is King
In 1996, Bill Gates coined the phrase. We think original content is king. This quote is very often used to that unique, high-quality, interesting and relevant content contributes significantly to the success of companies on the Internet. Content marketing and SEO are essential to being found in search.
Online advertising works
There reason Google dominates search and online advertising is because it works. Google and You Tube Ads are not cheap, but they are effective. Most small businesses can’t justify a few thousand dollars a month in ad spend, but the ones that do understand that it’s essential.
The learning curve is what hurts. It’s expensive and when you try and do it yourself, well, you learn why it’s a profession.
Social Media has always been “Pay-to-Play”
Facebook was never really designed as a place to share your lives with friends and family. Social platforms exist to determine which ad to serve you, period. Understanding this, helps us to use each channel, better, and more effectively.
If you are not spending on social media, you’re missing out on reaching thousands of potential customers. And the 600 lb. gorillas in your market are. That’s how they win in our local area. Their content and ad spend is used to take over your local market.
When you compete, you see that advertising works and all the services we provide have meaning and ROI.
Now, add AI to the Mix
But wait, it gets worse… or better, depending on your perspective.
Factor in AI to the equation and see how the threat increases. What does Artificial Intelligence in marketing today mean for us?
We compete against every nation in the world, to land each website and digital marketing client. Not long ago, it was nearly impossible for a web company outside of the US to provide value for a local, small business. And that’s because they just don’t know how to speak to, or market your services. The culture divide is too wide and we see that every time we’re stuck on the phone with customer support from another country.

But now, with the help of AI, out of area competition can speak in your language. They can sound local and look local. The big guys are making it easier and lowering their costs to reach our local audience. And again, they’re winning—until you compete.
Whole industries are transforming or trying to. As a marketing guy, I see huge agencies buying up small firms like mine, for market access, but they underestimate the agency model. I’ve been building the web, professionally, since 1992. At every stage, I’ve had to compete with new tech, innovation, and foreign firms seeking a share of our local markets. But none of this can compete with a local professional who knows their market.
It’s the same for search. The prescription for you is to begin to compete online and it starts with your website, the thing you own.
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Conclusion: Pretty websites aren’t enough
At Longbow Strategic Group, we understand that a visually appealing website is just the beginning. While anyone can build a pretty website, the real challenge is to make it work as a powerful tool for your business. That’s why we go beyond aesthetics to design, build, and promote websites that not only look great but also deliver results.
Our experienced designers and developers specialize in creating modern, user-friendly websites that are tailored to your unique business needs. Whether you’re a small startup or a large enterprise, we work closely with you to understand your goals, target audience, and brand identity to create a website that reflects your vision and drives results.
As you work with us, you keep local dollars in our market. We do not outsource, but many do.
One of the key pillars of our approach is performance. In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, users expect websites to load quickly and seamlessly across all devices. Slow loading times can significantly impact user experience and drive potential customers away. With our expertise in website optimization techniques, we ensure that your website loads lightning-fast, keeping visitors engaged and reducing bounce rates.
Web Promotion Services
Building a website is only the first step, promoting it effectively is even more important.
With our comprehensive digital marketing services, we help you grow your business, increase your online visibility, drive targeted traffic to your website, and ultimately, convert visitors into loyal customers.
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing (SEM)
- Social Media Management, Boosts, Ads, and Re-targeting
- Email Campaigns and Newsletters
- Traditional Advertising and Direct Mail
What sets Longbow apart is our commitment to delivering measurable results. By analyzing key metrics such as traffic, conversions, and engagement, we analyze and refine what we do for continual promotion.
Digital Marketing is more than your website. Don’t settle for an under-performing website, instead, rebuild with a powerful digital presence that drives real growth. Partner with Longbow and unleash the full potential of your business.
Contact us to learn more about our website design, development, and promotion services.
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February 1, 2025
Promoting the Grant BBQ Festival
Build a successful marketing campaign
In a nutshell, digital marketing is all about recognizing your audience, tuning your brand to meet their interests, and then guiding them to your website and services.
Your website is the crucial piece of the puzzle in marketing, as it is the sole online property that you control. Social media, news outlets, and even your book listings on Amazon are all managed and maintained by another entity, one that, in order to continue their services, must market themselves first and foremost over you and your brand.
Your website is not just a general sales pitch, it’s the intersection where all your marketing efforts should meet; social media efforts should drive viewers to your website—not the other way around.
You own your website, but Facebook owns your account.
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Grant BBQ Festival
The Grant BBQ Fest is an annual cookout and fundraiser created by radio personality and DJ, Timmy Vee, to help raise money and awareness of his charity, Toys For Kids—an-all volunteer organization which works to provide toys and gifts to the children of families in need for Christmas. Every year, hundreds of people flock to the three-day event to participate in the epic grill-out for a good cause.
But this year was different, Timmy decided that, in order to reach more people, he needed a powerful marketing strategy. In the month leading up to the event, Longbow worked to bolster the fundraiser’s outreach through a digital campaign, and the first step was to build a proper website.
A successful website’s purpose is to demonstrate your product or service with clarity, draw people to complete an action, and be the cornerstone of your marketing campaign. For an event, a website needs to provide information about its location, directions and parking, entry fees, timetables, a description of the available activities and entertainment, and of course, have a healthy supply of pictures to showcase the event to the public. And grantbbqfestival.com does exactly that, and is laser-focused on providing the information necessary for attendees. With the website clean and complete, the real work begins—social media.
Visit Grant BBQ Fest‘s Facebook Page.
Every brand has a specific audience you need to target, but how do you start?
“We knew that we would find a big percentage of Timmy’s audience on Facebook, but Grant BBQ Festival hadn’t built up their connections. With only a month to spare, it was a race to modernize. We’d need Timmy’s voice to connect with all the past BBQ-lovers and supporters—and gather both old and new traffic to our new channel.”
By reaching out and connecting to past attendees and sponsors, we rekindled old friendships, and created a network of people ready to receive and share our new Facebook news feed. But the network was far from complete, to ensure that people would hear our message, we reached out to the local press, getting small ads and mentions—broadening our voice. We purchased Facebook advertisements, allowing us to reach the local population, instead of getting lost amidst Facebook’s world-wide network. We sent press releases to local papers, and created graphics promoting the event.
With all the pieces in place, we began the process, using the Facebook page to promote the Cookout, live entertainment, Car Show, Food Market and Crafts, and of course, the BBQ contest. We posted everything—basic informative posts, pictures from past events, and even ran a meme campaign. Our main focus was to not simply raise awareness about the event, but to physically connect potential viewers to those involved. Memes and funny captions are critical in this sense, helping us to connect our audience to the voices of the volunteers, the bands who agreed to play live at the event, and Timmy Vee himself.
It’s important to remember that when using social media to market your brand, your personal reach is limited, and there’s only so much you can do for yourself. But by actively encouraging your target audience to engage with your page and to share your posts, you are jump-starting a powerful marketing engine. Using a plethora of photos is a critical aspect of a social media campaign, as they help you to become prominently featured in your audience’s streams, tag specific people to create a solid foundation of links, and most importantly, showcase the past successes of your event.
Facebook suppresses most traffic, but once enough people engage, when it becomes popular, they instead lift up your posts above the noise. We call it critical mass.
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The Result
This year’s Grant Barbeque Festival had the largest turnout in the event’s history, reaching people all over central Florida. It not only proved the worth of building up a social media campaign from scratch, but laid down the groundwork for following years—The Grant BBQ Fest can only get bigger from here on out.
Regarding the results of the Grant BBQ marketing campaign, Timmy Vee writes,
“In the 17 years of the Festivals history, I have never seen online promotion and Marketing like I saw this year. I was a bit worried, but believed in Longbow after speaking with Eric and his son, Ryan. I didn’t understand everything at first, but I was made a believer. Looking forward to the 18th annual Grant BBQ Festival next year, with very little stress! Trust me when I tell you, it was amazing.”
So many companies out there can build you a website, but often forget the most important part—promotion. Longbow’s mantra is “Brand, Content, Digital”. We don’t just leave you with a shiny new website to fend for yourself, we initiate marketing campaigns, designed to get your brand on your feet and seen by your target audience.
For more information on Timmy Vee and the Grant BBQ Fest, visit http://grantbbqfestival.com/, and http://toysforkidsbrevard.org/
Visit their Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/grantbbqfest
To see how Longbow can work for you, visit https://www.longbow.net/to Design, Build, and Promote your brand.
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January 1, 2025
Is your WordPress being hacked—right now?
Protect and Manage your sites
Increasing attacks on the much loved Internet CMS requires we take action. Each of us likely has a WordPress site—or helps a client with one. To manage any open source web platform requires maintenance. The rise and rapid escalation of hacks and intrusion on the platform requires that we take measures to keep our sites current and free from intrusion.
There has been an enormous increase in attacks that compromise WordPress, the leading open-source platform, from thousands of attempts to gain access via your login, to malicious code being injected, to losing customer data and confidence.
The scale of these assaults demand better oversight and web management.
If you build sites for clients and do not have a contingency plan to deal with security and maintenance, then your agency is setting yourself up for failure.
Longbow helps you shore up your sites. In the past, we’ve shown live attacks on several sites, discuss the problems we all face and then offer several things that can be done to protect a WordPress website. If you’ve never thought about disaster recovery, “what do I do when my site’s been hijacked,” then this message is a wake-up call.
Eric Needle, Longbow’s founder, has been designing and building the World Wide Web since 1994—and developing sites with WordPress for since 2004. Contact us if you need help securing and protecting your Internet properties.
Manage and Protect your WordPress
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Protect your WordPress
We’ve identified three basic areas to be concerned with, from the Admin side of the platform, to keep your sites functioning. They include tasks you perform for prevention, keeping WordPress and it’s plugins current, and robust backup and recovery. This assumes that your hosting platform is secure—something we should not take for granted.
Prevention
The first critical step is hardening your site to create as little opportunity for hacking or unwanted intrusion. There are several guides and plugins that help you accomplish this and we’ve been running several to test overall effectiveness.
We run several sites that serve as test beds and with WordPress Security on our minds, the role of many of these sites have shifted from SEO and marketing exercise to canaries in the coal mine.
For starters, here is a great primer, and evolving source of info.
codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress
There are several plug-ins, all available from the Admin. One’s we like include Sucuri, WordFence, and iThemes Security. As new tools become available, we suggest you become familiar with this rapidly changing side of the web world.
The basic concept is to manage file permissions, so we don’t leave the door open to attack. Several of the above mentioned plugins include checklists that explain each procedure and it’s value.
Keeping Current
Step two is the continual updating of both the WordPress platform and all the plugins you are running. While this seems a simple task, the frequency of updates has been increasing dramatically. When the core team discovers an exploit, they rush to patch the issue and correct it.
These updates often have to be performed manually—and we always perform a database export (backup) before we click, update. Not to be taken lightly, I’ve had updates break functionality, resulting in more work for our team.
We’ve been building sites with a new focus on plugins. If we can provide the feature without a plugin, we will. Minimize how many you run, as each is a weak link that could provide a way into your site.
SSL Certificates
Experts recommend using SSL certificates on your sites, especially if you use forms, download files, sell stuff—or basically run a WordPress. What do you get for the effort? Security. And you now operate your site, safely able to accept credit cards and sends email. In addition, we get a little lock icon in the address bar and better Google ranking.
Backup and Recovery
Last, but not least, we came to the conclusion that it is not possible to protect from every attack, you need to ask the question “how do we recover after an attack?” The answer, is to backup and restore your site. Setting up backups are critical. Often hacks go undetected for months, so it’s good practice to create many restore points. Being able to restore from a previous backup allows us to quickly set things right.
We have been freaking out over the past several years from these threats to our sites. Our response is to perform these three core actions for every site. Even as I write this we are building a new server system, with a host that is more current than our current one. To deliver web services, we as developers and designers have to take on this added role, else our clients find others who will.
If anyone needs help, just contact us for more information. We provide white labeled hosting to our partners and incredible TLC for our clients.
And if you Ad Fed club is looking for a speaker on this topic, Eric and team are available to speak. Our talk includes watching our test sites suffer brute force attacks in real time. Something all too common.
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August 15, 2018