Small business owners on Long Island are expecting a grim outlook on holiday sales this upcoming season. This doesn’t stop one high-powered team from aiding local businesses and entrepreneurs with their online marketing and website needs.
Enter Blue Surge Marketing Agency, a Suffolk County-based digital marketing and web design firm with a penchant for performance and analytics.
Using their proficiency at a myriad of online advertising, they’ve been able to help keep businesses top of mind in their customers’ minds. Their firm boasts several accreditations from key industry giants, including being Google Ads certified, HubSpot certified in Social Media, and Email Marketing. As Shopify Partners, Blue Surge aids retailers in bridging the gap between in-person store sales and online orders.
Optimism For Long Island Retailers
Godson Michel, a digital marketing specialist at Blue Surge, believes that there is still an opportunity to get customers to come out to safely support Main Street and make purchases for the holidays, notwithstanding rising cases that threaten to shut down local schools.
“There are so many ways that local businesses can still win, despite the challenges with the ongoing pandemic,” he told Shades of Long Island this week. “The obstacle is the way, and the companies that can be creative and nimble with their online marketing will come out on top this year.”
Godson is no novice to digital marketing through tough times. As a poverty-stricken child of Haitian immigrants, he gained acclaim for his entrepreneurial prowess after launching an online sneaker-reselling hobby while in his parent’s basement in Amityville that eventually grossed over $1 million in sales while still a college student.
He suggests small businesses prepare for the upcoming holiday season by combining brand awareness ads on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube with personalized email campaigns and retargeting ads. Klaviyo, an e-commerce-focused email software tool, predicts that Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) sales this year will surpass $51.1 billion, nearly double what 2019 drove.
Beating COVID Starts with a Phone Call
Blue Surge Marketing Agency has completed nearly 210 free marketing consultations to help business owners, including those from Nassau and Suffolk County, impacted by COVID-19. These comprehensive strategy calls cover a swath of online advertising topics, from how to reach new customers with a limited ad budget, detailing how to increase average order values, and getting veteran business to embrace the virality of new-age social platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The sessions generally range anywhere between 30 minutes to an hour or more.
“The obstacle is the way.”
Godson Michel
Godson states, “This is what we do here at Blue Surge. Before the pandemic, we were doing consultations and website audits but at a much slower clip. I think it took the pandemic to hit for [business] owners to realize they weren’t investing enough into their online channels. Like I mean, poor online conversions, no email capture, slow load pages on their websites.”
He continues, “I have a client in the village of Nassau County that was planning to open a brick-and-mortar location back in February. Apparently, the landlord was taking forever to close out the deal, but then [Governor] Cuomo shut everything down by March. So she ended up having to pivot to online-only. That’s where we stepped in as the marketing agency that was able to help her build a digital presence successfully.”
Skipping Storefronts To Launch Online
With aspiring entrepreneurs deferring from being locked into long term commercial leases and looking at online as a more advantageous scenario, this puts the owners of those buildings — and their investors in a precarious situation. In one high-profile local case, “On Long Island, a separate group assumed the lease to the Nassau Coliseum, after billionaire Mikhail Prokhorov’s Onexim Sports & Entertainment decided to walk away from the project,” reported Bloomberg.
Talk to any business owners across Long Island and the nation. You’ll see the concern on their faces when you mention how high unemployment coupled with the shutdown of nonessential businesses earlier this spring decimated gross revenues across the board. This led to storefront closures. This concern is incredibly genuine amongst the restaurant and retail industry. According to July data by Yelp, the San Francisco-based, popular ratings and reviews website, Yelp restaurants have suffered 26,160 total closures as of July 10, and 60% (15,770) has permanently closed — which is up 23% from June 15.
Still, Godson and the Blue Surge Marketing Agency team persist. They are confident in their abilities. They have a proven track record in assisting startups and companies in the region grow their sales while gaining new, loyal customers in the process.
“At the end of the day, marketing is about delivering the right message to the right person at the right place at the right time. You do that, and you’ll win a customer, every time.”
