VALDOSTA — Nexxtep has officially made Ascend Inbound Marketing a separate division of its company. 

While the mother company Nexxtep provides technical support for small to medium sized businesses, Ascend focuses on inbound marketing as opposed to traditional marketing techniques. 

Traditional marketing techniques would be push marketing, said Agency Director Anne Shenton. Push marketing is when a company pushes a product onto the consumer, like cold calling. 

“Inbound marketing’s idea is to attract people who would naturally be your customer,” said Shenton. 

Ascend achieves the goal through blog posts, offers, contest, videos and social media, she explained. 

Blog posts are made to have content that affects how highly rated the blog post is on search engine ranking.

“A lot of it things dictate search engine ranking,” said Shenton. 

How credible the client’s website is via linking to other sites and having other sites link back to the client’s site, headings, title of the page, images, words in the URL bar, key words and if the page is optimized for mobile devices all affect search engine rankings, she said. Ascend writes the blogs and will often link coupons to the client in the blog. 

Offers work through discounts and email marketing. 

The discounts are often offered to customers who subscribe to the client’s email or are offered via social media webpages and blogs, said Shenton. 

Email marketing is accomplished though a nurturing campaign or by sending a series of emails, she said. 

The nurturing campaign is when a customer visits a client’s website and he or she receives emails based on what the he or she viewed and clicked on, said Creative Director Steven Carter. 

When a customer is entered into a series of emails he or she receives an email every few days from the business to help keep the business in the customer’s top of mind, said Shenton. 

The top of mind is particularly useful for service industries where customer’s are shopping around, she said. It helps keep the client’s business on the customer’s mind when they are thinking about purchasing a service. 

Contests are made up by Ascend and are sent to the client for approval, she said. The client may tweak the idea and send it back to us. It is more of a collaborative effort. 

We keep our videos capped at two minutes, said Shenton. Instagram videos can only be 60 seconds. 

When a customer is scrolling through Facebook they have one hundred different things vying for his or her attention, said Carter. The videos need to be short enough so that the customer is willing to spend the time to watch it.

The types of videos include recipe videos, instructional videos, videos featuring items of products, quick tips or an interview with some one in the company, said Carter. The type of video is really contingent on the type of business the client has. 

For social media Ascend will make whatever social media page the client wants, Shenton said. Ascend also helps provide content for the page and helps maintain it per their contract with the client. 

“We publish X amount of posts per week according to what we agreed to do,” she said. “But if the client wants to post more on their own that is great too.”

“You try to keep [the page] fun and engaging,” she said. Most of the posts should be interactive with customers base and non-promotional. 

“If you aren’t careful [social media] can have adverse affects,” Carter said. Posting offensive of poorly thought out content can alienate customers. 

Ascend also offers a report for clients so he or she can see how effective the inbound marketing techniques are. 

Ascend partners with Hubspot, a marketing tool that helps collect data, to make the reports, Shenton said. The reports include how many of the emails are opened, the number of purchases made by customers and which services are bringing in traffic. 

The reports also include attribution reporting, Carter said. Attribution reports show demographics on who is buying or is interested in the client’s product. This report can help clients know if it best to publish new content at 6 p.m. or at 11 p.m. to reach the target demographic most effectively. 

“We like to think we are the marketing team for businesses that do not have one,” said Carter

Along with inbound marketing Ascend also builds websites and helps maintain them similarly to how it builds and maintains social media pages, but website creation is where the business started. 

“It’s something that has quietly grown,” Shenton said. “Customers started asking Nexxtep if it would build them websites.”

“We either had to outsource or tell them no,” said Chief Technology Officer Stuart Avera. 

Shenton felt like more could be done when Nexxtep did build the requested websites.

“I felt like clients were not getting the most out of their websites,” Shenton said. “I felt like we could really put their websites to work.”

“All of the websites we build are mobile friendly,” said Carter.

With Ascend and Nexxtep having so much involvement in their client’s business Avera made it clear they keep all of their client’s data private. 

“We work for companies that are competitive by nature,” Avera said. “At our core we don’t share information between businesses, so that each can maintain its competitive edge.”

Ascend Inbound Marketing is located at 3256 N. Valdosta Road. Its offices are located in the same building as Nexxtep. Its office hours are 8 a.m.- 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.

It can be reached at 855-399-2288, www.ascendinbound.com, by email at climb@ascendinbound.com or at www.facebook.com/ascendinbound. 

Jason Smith is a reporter at The Valdosta Daily Times. He can be contacted at 229-244-3400 ext.1256.