It’s a funny story leading to my role in starting Fannit and it starts several years ago. We grew up in a household where my dad was (and still is) an entrepreneur. My brother and I experienced first hand the frustrations he had with particular areas – marketing being one of them.

Several years later, after my brother and I finished studying at college, we came back home with the goal of helping take over our Dad’s business. This was around 2007-08. Of course, you may remember that the economy tanked at that time. My dad’s business was no expectation, and so my brother and I found ourselves trying to figure out what we were going to do for the longterm. We ended up working in a couple of different industries over the next few years including manufacturing, sales, and eventually print marketing (for my brother). One day, around June of 2009, he gave me a call and asked if I wanted to start an internet marketing company with him. His print marketing clients had experienced a lot of frustration with that area and he felt we could help. I said, “Yes,” and now over 10 years down the road we’re able to look back and see the plan God had for us even in the middle of something so difficult in losing the family business. By the way, we were able to help our father reopen his doors and grow bigger than he’d ever been before, which makes us feel good.

From our experience over the years, we felt like a lot of companies hid, or that there were a lot of smoke and mirrors to internet marketing. It wasn’t clear to business owners and marketing managers what work was being done or how it was helping. We wanted to change all of that, so transparency, honesty, and high impact services became the focus of our company. We incorporate project management systems into our processes with clients and monthly reports which include bottom line reporting on sales and leads generated from the campaigns we’re managing specifically. All this ultimately, was for the purpose of helping support entrepreneurs and businesses in our communities so we can help build our communities.

I think “honesty” is really the secret sauce for us. I’ve always believed the only way to get better is by looking at the truth and acting on it. That can make for tough conversations, but, ultimately, everyone is better for it – our team, and our clients.

When we analyze opportunities, we actually create a blueprint for where we want to go long term and systematically incorporate low hanging fruit we can take advantage of along the way. We also build for permanence for our clients. This is especially important for SEO and we’ve had a lot of companies come to us who experienced fallout from blackhat seo tactics and needed to rebuild from the bottom up in their internet marketing.

I think chatbot marketing is going to be increasingly important for managing social media communities, sales opportunities, and customer support – especially for ecommerce.

I also think that we’ll see Google’s content guidelines continue to push for content that’s useful and not just a rehash of what’s already there.

I also think that companies will really need to focus on being an omni channel to grow and dominate their markets.