Telling a story and making money with numbers

MOSES LAKE — Numbers tell a story.

That fact is the passion that drives Baltej Gill’s life and work.

“It’s just for me, and this sounds really geeky and nerdy, I like the data and the analytics,” Gill, a digital marketing specialist with Hagadone Digital in Waterloo, Ontario. “I like helping brands excel.”

Gill was a featured speaker at Wednesday’s DigiMark Summit 2.0 conference, sponsored by Hagadone Digital and Grant County Economic Development Council (EDC), and held in the ATEC Building at Big Bend Community College.

The goal was to bring organizations — both businesses and non-profits — from around the region and give them the tools to identify and cultivate customers, according to Allan Peterson, a business advisor with the Small Business Development Center, part of the EDC.

“Static websites don’t work anymore,” Peterson said. “We get a lot of companies that say, ‘We’ve got a website, now the phone will start ringing.’ That won’t work anymore.”

Peterson hopes regular DigiMark conferences will help create a community of businesses and local brands committed to helping each other stay on top of the latest marketing trends.

For Gill, it means managing a brand. Which is more than just a company or a product — a brand is an experience and a lifestyle.

“I’ll take the example of Napoleon grills,” he said. “They were advertising their grills with product shots. Which is fine. But we told them, stop selling the barbecue, and start selling the experience.”

Gill said he advised Napoleon — which makes very high-end outdoor grill units — to show people using their grills, enjoying their lives while they do so.

“It’s all about family, fun, the outdoors, a lifestyle,” he said.

Gill said that the marketing tools available through giant companies like Google make it possible for even small companies in small markets like Moses Lake to create very targeted and effective marketing campaigns.

“Moses Lake is not that competitive a market, and there aren’t that many brands that are properly optimizing their web sites,” Gill said. “You could dominate Google at a local level, there are some practices that would see results in a small market.”

Small or big, Gill said it’s still important that companies understand where their marketing dollars are being spend and how many conversions — sales, orders, time on site — they get from clicks and visits.

“Larger companies have bigger budgets, smaller companies have a local and they can apply the same strategies,” he said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.