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Top 7 Reasons to Hire a Digital Marketing Firm

It’s 2018, and digital marketing is more important than ever. Digital marketing is marketing taken to the digital world. Digital marketers analyze data and trends to connect with target audiences. They determine goals and develop data proven strategies to reach those goals. Digital marketing agencies can handle everything from logo and brand development to search engine optimization (SEO) and everything in between. You may think you don’t need a digital marketing agency — you can handle everything — and you can, but you don’t have to. In this data-driven, Internet-dominated world, let a digital marketing firm help you achieve your goals. Not convinced yet? We’ve got seven reasons that should help you realize everything that a digital marketing firm can offer you.

digital marketing

1. Broaden your team to help you achieve your goals.
The first thing a digital marketing team will do with a new client is determine their goals. To achieve anything, you first have to know what it is you want to achieve. A digital marketing firm knows how to extract the real goals of an organization and develop strategies to help it reach those goals. Along with developing data-driven strategies to reach your goals, a digital marketing firm is able to focus on those Internet-driven goals solely. Since it is focused on helping your achieve your online goals, it can focus on those alone and avoid being distracted by other day-to-day business tasks.

2. Outsource some work so you can focus on what you really need to do to better your business.
One of the biggest benefits to hiring a digital marketing firm to handle extraneous tasks like SEO and blog management means that you have more time to do what you really need to do to take your business to the next level. Since you’ve hired an expert to get your website up and running or hired someone to manage your SEO (or both), you can put your efforts toward making better products or providing better services to your consumers. Your attention is no longer taken from what makes your company stand out when you’ve got a team of professionals to help you with the promotion of those products/services.

3. Have a team of experts design your content.
Sure, you know what you like when it comes to design, but you’re not really sure how to make it happen online. That’s where a digital marketing team comes in. It’s important that your vision is projected in your logo, web design, and collateral design, but you don’t need to spend hours pulling your hair out looking at a web platform or learning Adobe Illustrator when you can hire someone to do it for you. Not only is it going to save you some frustration, but it’s probably going to be completed in a more timely manner because you’ve outsourced the work to someone who knows how to do it (there’s no learning curve). As long you communicate what you want things to look like, the digital marketing firm you hire can take it from there.

4. Find everything you need in one place.
Hiring a digital marketing firms means you’ve knocked a handful of jobs out with one hire. That’s right — one. All digital marketing firms are different, but at Cabedge, we can do everything from logo design to SEO to website development to hosting. We’re basically a one-stop-shop for anything digital that your company/organization might need. Digital marketing firms have a team of experts that can do it all, which saves you time and money in the long run.

5. Have someone dedicated to bettering your public image.
Not only does hiring a digital marketing firm mean that you have a team of people working on a handful of tasks, but it means you’ve got a team of people that are working to better your public image while they do them. While digital marketing isn’t public relations, it kind of does a little bit of the job a PR firm would by making sure you have good SEO, by pushing content like blog posts to engage your audience, and by ensuring you have good branding across platforms to help consumers recognize your brand. It’s all the little things you could do, but you don’t have to.

6. Improve your SEO tenfold.
One of the most important things to master in this Internet-driven world we live in today is SEO. SEO isn’t necessarily hard to learn, but it can be time-consuming to master. That’s why hiring a digital marketing firm is that much more important. Let them take over the day-to-day management of getting your website ranked higher by search engines with SEO, and managing your website information. Digital marketing firms are mostly anonymous on the Internet, and no one needs to know you’re not doing everything yourself. You’ll get more done in less time, and you’ll have experts doing it for you.

7. Add an additional perspective and new ideas to the team.
Often an overlooked benefit to hiring a digital marketing firm is getting other people on your team to provide insight. As an often unbiased third-party, digital marketing firms can provide key industry insight into website development and management. They can also serve as another vote when making decisions that concern digital marketing (like social media, branding, and website content). It’s never a bad thing to have a bigger team behind you and your decisions.

Did we convince you? If you’re looking for a digital marketing agency to help you out with branding, website development, SEO, and more, contact Cabedge. Cabedge is located in Nashville, TN, but it can help clients across the country.

How Gestalt Principles Can Be Incorporated in Web Design

Gestalt psychology stems from German psychologists and scientists of the 1920s who believed that the mind worked subconsciously to make sense of an otherwise chaotic world. There are many principles of grouping in Gestalt psychology that have been used to explain how the mind perceives images, and some of the most prominent principles can be applied to design techniques used regularly in print and web design. Today, we are going to go over seven Gestalt principles that can help improve design.

Law of Proximity
The Law of Proximity states that people group elements together that are close to each other in space. This can be seen in the header or footer space of a website — all of those elements are close together in proximity either in a line or under certain headings, which lets users know they are to be perceived as one unit. You can also see the Law of Proximity exemplified in the example photo above. The boats are clumped together in sets of columns. When looking at the picture, people automatically associate the four columns of boats as two groups.

Law of Similarity
The Law of Similarity states that people group similar elements together. Whether it’s shape, size, color, or texture, these characteristics can lead to people grouping things together in their minds. It’s like looking at a pizza with a handful of toppings and grouping the mushrooms together, the pepperoni together, and the pineapple chunks together. In the image above, people will tend to group the windows together based on the color swatch in the top bar. Therefore, the windows would be grouped by the Law of Similarity in the following groups: yellow, pink, blue, light blue.

Law of Closure
If images aren’t closed, our minds can and will close them for us. For instance, when parts of an image are missing, like a flower petal is out of frame, people still know the image is a flower and can imagine the other petal. With the Law of Closure, people can combine disjointed lines into complete shapes. This is a good design principle to keep in mind when designing logos or website backgrounds. The Law of Closure can be seen in action in the image above because people that look at the image of the moon can instinctively close the shape to imagine the moon whole.

Law of Symmetry
The mind likes symmetry, which we talked about in an earlier blog post dedicated to basic design principles. The Law of Symmetry operates under that notion. It is pleasing to the mind to be able to divide objects into an even number of symmetrical parts. People tend to look for symmetry in design or images even if it may not truly be there. In the above image, the symmetry is pretty apparent in the even space between the windows and the square shape of the windows themselves.

Law of Common Fate
The Law of Common Fate claims that if there is movement, real or digitally constructed, in an image or design, people tend to group similar movements together. People tend to group elements that move in the same direction together. For instance, in the image above of cars moving on the highway, people infer that the white stream and the red stream are moving in opposite directions.

Law of Pragnanz (or Good Figure)
The Law of Pragnanz states that people tend to perceive images as a whole rather than breaking them up into their individual parts. It’s like seeing the steps of how someone draws a cat. Technically, the head could be a circle, the nose could be an upside-down heart, and the ears could be triangles. The Law of Pragnanz at plays means that cat is perceived as a cat rather than the individual elements. We perceive things in the simplest way possible. This can also be seen when looking at the Olympic rings  — people tend to perceive it simply as the logo and not as five separate circles.

Law of Figure/Ground
Disliking uncertainty, people tend to look for solid, stable items in an image or design first. People tend to see the foreground of an image before they see the background. For example, in the above image, a viewer’s eye would be first drawn to the leaves and then to the ground they are strewn upon.

There are many other Gestalt principles that can be applied to design, but these are a good place to start. If you’re looking for more design tips or inspiration, make sure to follow along on the Cabedge blog. If you’re looking for assistance in designing a website, reach out to Cabedge today for a personal consultation.