Apex Digital Media

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

We're a handmade Oriental rug store. We do wholesale and retail. We've been open for 17 years. We're based in Los Angeles.

What is your position?

I'm one of the owners.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Apex Digital Media?

I was trying to create a website, and I wanted to get some SEO [search engine optimization] done. I also had them create another website for me, for my other business, which I had recently created.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

Apex Digital Media was primarily responsible for web design and SEO. They helped us with all the different types of social media as well. They opened an account for us on Etsy, and they helped us with Facebook.  They're trying to put us on Amazon, and a few other things. For the website that we're doing, we still need to figure out a few things. We're still making some changes with the name of the website.

How did you come to work with Apex Digital Media?

Dustin [Peterson, founder of Apex Digital Media] used to work for this company who I signed up with, but that company didn't do anything for me for the money that I had paid. I found out that he actually quit that place because of their business practices, and then he contacted me and said he would like to make it right by helping me with the website. Apex started working, and I saw how dedicated and honest they were, so I hired them to work on that website.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I still work with them on that. I paid a certain amount for building a website, which was a great cost. For the work that he's doing as far as SEO and other things are concerned, we're paying a monthly retainer. I actually want to talk with them to get a better rate because I want to continue working with them. It's less than $10,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

The work is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

As far as sales results, I haven't seen an increase yet. That's because we haven't fully made the website functional.  But, ultimately, that is the goal of having them work on it. As I said, the work is still ongoing. So far, they are making good progress.

What distinguishes Apex Digital Media from other providers?

They are nice guys. The design is something that still needs to be worked on but, so far, it's not bad. Apex Digital Media's customer service is great because they're a small company and they're young and eager to help. It's nice to have somebody you can trust that comes in and is able to do things with minimum explanation.

Is there anything Apex Digital Media could have improved or done differently?

I think it would be nice for them to have a place where you can go and see them in a working environment. It would give me more confidence if they had more staff. But, that's part of the growing process.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

My company is called BioMechanix Personal Training. I have a health and wellness company. At the time that I started working with Apex, I had a storefront gym. I had a 1,200 square foot fitness studio that I was promoting. Now, I run a health and fitness company that offers personal training online.

What is your position?

I am the owner.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Apex Digital Media?

I had no web presence, and I had no idea about optimization. I didn't know how to optimize my Yelp page or my website. I didn't know how to get the right content up to get me up on Google. I didn't have a fantastic location, but I really relied on my web presence, which initially I didn't have.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in detail.

I had a very simple website. They redesigned the whole website for me. I didn't really have much of a budget, either, but they optimized the whole website. They did some advertising on Google. They were very good at handling my PPC [pay-per-click] campaigns. The bulk of the work was mostly web design, and all my SEO [search engine optimization]. They also were responsible for synchronizing my social media accounts.

How did you come to work with Apex Digital Media?

I met them through a mutual friend that reached out to me, and I felt like I built a personal relationship with them. Every other company that cold contacted me, I felt like they were just trying to pitch me.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

They were great. I would pay them at first $250 a month, and they would do a little extra work. They said it would take time for the results to come through and increase my rank on Google. As I got more clients in from the web, I would increase my pay towards them. They were willing to work with me. I ended up paying them $500 a month.

What is the status of this engagement?

I started with them last September [2014]. The project was completed, but only because I shut down my business because of a back injury. I couldn't continue running the gym. But, I am continuing to work with them on my website for blogging. I had an issue with my previous business partner where he did not want to give me the domain, so they acted as the middlemen. They consulted everything. They got the domain from their servers to me so I can have control of everything. 

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any metrics or results from this engagement?

The work they did was so successful that I'm still getting calls for my gym, even though it's closed now. I started an outdoor boot camp, so now I'm getting clients from that. I'm still first on Google for the search term "personal trainer" in my local area. I'm still getting residual money from the work Apex did for me, and I'm not even working with them one on one anymore.

What distinguishes Apex Digital Media from other providers?

I liked working with Apex Digital Media because I built a personal relationship with them. They really educated me on how it works so it wasn't just blind. They educated me and shared a lot of knowledge on how the process works. When I had an issue or messed something up, they were very patient with me. They corrected it and showed me what I did wrong. I moved out of the situation with a lot more experience and I felt comfortable knowing how to do things because of them.

Is there anything Apex Digital Media could have improved or done differently?

Nothing. The one issue I usually have with people is that they don't communicate enough, and they actually almost over communicated. I love those guys. I have nothing bad to say about them.

BACKGROUND

Please describe your organization.

The company name is useAIble. The AI is capitalized because we’re an artificial intelligence company that specializes in making things more usable. We have our own proprietary machine learning engine that out-performs anything else that’s publicly available.

What is your position?

My title is CEO, and I am a part-owner of the company.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What business challenge were you trying to address with Apex Digital Media?

We have developed our own machine learning system. Companies like Google and Facebook don’t publish what they’re doing, so we can’t benchmark against that, but we significantly outperform anything that is publicly available. Right now we’re developing a system that a major retailer will be able to use to help predict which products should be given more or less shelf space. We hired Apex Digital Media to help with our company’s digital marketing strategy.

SOLUTION

Please describe the scope of their involvement in greater detail.

They created our website and introduction video. They have managed our social media presence and our content marketing for Search Engine Optimization [SEO] purposes. You can also say they did a little rebranding. They helped us ramp up our brand and build a website around it. They created the video, laid things out a little bit differently, and helped us set up a blog. The social media coverage has really been the part that’s been the most helpful and impressive.

Machine learning is a small community of very smart people who are excited about this kind of technology. What Apex has been able to do with the Twitter content is, by far, the most valuable. Honestly, I’ve been really impressed that they’ve found great content to tweet. They look for really interesting things in the field of machine learning, and they’ll tweet several times a week. Sometimes it’s our original content, although they usually find really fascinating articles in the field. For example, they found a piece about the government using machine learning to try to predict what ISIS is going to do.

How did you come to work with Apex Digital Media?

I’ll disclose that the founder of Apex is a friend, and that’s why I gave him a shot at it. However, I’ve been in business long enough that if he didn’t perform well, his shot would have been short-lived.

Could you provide a sense of the size of this initiative in financial terms?

I’m going to guess we paid around $5,000 initially for the setup. For $1,000 per month we get the maintenance, the social media, and the blogging services.  I’m thrilled; that’s the best $1,000 I spend every month.

What is the status of this engagement?

Our relationship started late in the first quarter, or early in the second quarter of this year [2015], and we are still working together.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

Could you share any statistics or metrics from this engagement?

Getting followers is one thing, and we only have a hundred followers, which may not sound like a lot, but they’re all data scientists, such as people with PhDs in machine learning. So for us, a hundred really important people are looking at our feed. We’re not going after the public market, and we’re actually not even going after the business market. We’re trying to get our technology established as a credible machine learning engine within this very specific niche community that’s really hard to penetrate.

I now receive emails from all these people, and connect on Twitter with people who also are doing all kinds of interesting things in the field. It’s really helped us become part of the machine learning community. This is great because within the next year, when we make our platform publicly available, we will already have a base of the opinion leaders within the segment who have already been following us. We have a lot of re-tweets and favorites from the influencers in this technology space. We haven’t introduced our engine to that network yet, but when we’re ready to sell the technology, we will already have these key people identified.

When people follow us, I look at what Apex has been doing, and it’s all very impressive. For a group of people who are not experts in machine learning, they’ve done a great job of focusing on things that the machine learning community really finds interesting, wants to read, and wants to engage with. There’s so much going on in the field that every day, there are people using machine learning for all kinds of new uses. Apex essentially has become a news feed for the field of machine learning.

Our followers love that, because they’re busy and don’t necessarily have the time to search out all the interesting articles about what everyone else is doing. We do, through Apex, so we can provide them with an interesting feed in their very specific field. That’s great, because now we can start intermixing tweets like, ‘Hey, we’re releasing our new engine,’ or, ‘our version two came out.’ We have a viable way to introduce that very specific niche market to our platform. It’s a great use of social media, and without these guys, I don’t know how I would have gathered that group of influencers in any other way.

What distinguishes Apex Digital Media from other providers?

I would have never guessed that a group of people who are not machine learning data scientists could consistently be able to dig out really fascinating machine learning related content that they can tweet about and that other people are going to want to read. The things that they select to tweet about are genuinely interesting and surprising. They took the time to understand my goals and my vision of entering this one particular audience.

A lot of companies don’t take the time to understand your business, so I’ve been really delighted. They do other things besides Twitter, they handle Facebook and LinkedIn, but if you were to read the stuff that they’re posting, you wouldn’t know it wasn’t a machine learning expert doing it because their content is really relevant. The willingness to really comprehend our business, what it is we’re trying to do and who we’re trying to attract, has been, quite frankly, more than I anticipated.

Is there anything Apex Digital Media could have improved or done differently?

Nobody’s perfect, but honestly, for the money I’ve spent, I’m thrilled with what I’ve gotten. Anything that I didn’t like, about the website or anything else, they fixed it. Frankly, they’re so efficient that the bottleneck is that I need to come up with more original content for them to put up on the site.

If I were to complain about one thing about my website, it’s that there’s not enough original content about our product, which I’m responsible for. So I’m the weak link in the chain there, and I don’t have anything negative to say about them. Their pricing has been great, their service has been great, and the results have been great.