We were lucky to catch up with Anthony Galizia recently and have shared our conversation below.
Alright, Anthony thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. One of the things we most admire about small businesses is their ability to diverge from the corporate/industry standard. Is there something that you or your brand do that differs from the industry standard? We’d love to hear about it as well as any stories you might have that illustrate how or why this difference matters.
The GW Branding Group sets itself apart from industry standards by focusing on delivering solutions rather than just diagnosing problems. Our unique method allows us to save our clients time on marketing strategy and move forward immediately. Our Foundational Brand Package, for example, is an intensive 8-hour or two 4-hour day process in which we develop a complete brand and marketing strategy that can be implemented immediately. This package includes a range of services such as website development, search engine optimization, social media marketing, content creation, email automation, data analytics, and advertising strategy. We also offer a Full Brand Builder Package, which is a custom digital marketing management solution that helps our clients develop and scale their brand’s marketing. This package includes website development, SEO, social media channels, content marketing, and video production. Our expertise and ability to deliver our hand-crafted brand strategy in record time offer our clients considerable value. We are focused on delivering value-based strategies and campaigns that help our clients save time and money on their marketing investments.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers
I always knew that I was going to get into entrepreneurship. To be completely honest I had no idea it was going to happen so fast! I have a background in marketing and sales with a Bachelor of Science from Grand Canyon University’s Colangelo College of Business in Marketing & Advertising. I started out by joining the Marketing Club and AMA (American Marketing Association) at GCU where I got to learn hands-on from larger agencies and industry experts. My first failure in marketing was an internship in commercial equipment where I was able to gain a lot of key insights into how not to market businesses. If you have not learned already, your career in marketing will be full of testing strategies and implementing what works while gaining a great amount of experience to understand how to not make the same mistakes.
My first success in marketing came in my professional career when I was working for a commercial and residential building and manufacturing company in Phoenix. I cut my teeth in content creation and social media management, but that only sparked my interest in how the rest of the marketing tactics need to play a role in the overall digital strategy. From there I became obsessed with learning everything I could about digital marketing and got myself certified in SEO, Email Marketing, Inbound Sales, & Google Digital Marketing. I quickly started to see how managing marketing departments was very costly and time-consuming with hiring contractors and agencies to work on specific marketing campaign needs. I wanted to find a way to have a marketing strategy that I did not need to have to coordinate with a bunch of different agencies and or contractors.
This led me down the path of being a business owner as I quickly went from being a freelance marketer to raising enough capital to start a small digital marketing agency! Giving You Digital is a marketing and advertising agency based in Geneva, Illinois but we serve clients nationwide. Over this past year operating Giving You Digital from the trenches has taught me so much about innovation and strategy as we have been experiencing a large percentage of growth. This only led to us expanding into another niche in marketing which we had been studying closely for years. Through working with many clients this past year, we found that offering a full-stack digital marketing service model is the best way to go for us. When it comes to a full digital marketing plan, there are a lot of client interactions that need to take place in order for us to get a full picture of their organization and how we can develop their custom plan. Usually, with larger marketing agencies, you are assigned a success manager that is supposed to be your go-to person, however from our experience with clients, a lot of times this back-and-forth can lead to confusion and dissatisfaction and over-promising.
Recently, I co-founded the GW Branding Group to serve that niche of people who are willing to invest in their digital marketing strategy and understand that a good marketing plan comes from experience and understanding how a brand can set itself apart in often overcrowded industries. With the GW Branding Group, our goal is to develop your marketing strategy and start executing it right away rather than waiting around for countless brand meetings and approvals. Our new model is to offer an exclusive VIP day with our clients where we put them through the Foundation Brand Program.
The Foundational Brand Program is a comprehensive branding and marketing strategy package offered by the GW Branding Group. It is designed to cut through the red tape and quickly develop a holistic branding and marketing plan for businesses that can be implemented at a multi-channel level. The program is typically completed in an intensive 8-hour or two 4-hour day process, during which our team works closely with the client to understand their business and develop a customized strategy tailored to their unique needs.
The Foundational Brand Program includes a range of services that are essential for building a strong brand foundation and driving growth. These services include your website’s strategy to help you gain insights on how we can rebuild. We create a website that actually wins you the job and allows your business to function cohesively with the structure your business already has in place.
Search engine optimization (SEO), is the backbone of organic online traffic. We provide the client with SEO strategies that are needed to rank and populate in search engines such as Google for the keywords they are targeting within their industry. Additionally, we provide research on the competition and their strategies, as well as social media marketing and content creation, which are some of the most common needs we see in building a brand and marketing department.
Also included are email automation and customer journey drip campaign strategies, which are often overlooked in marketing budgets, but essential for successful communication with customers. GW Branding Group is experienced in developing drip campaigns and developing customer journeys that can be implemented into email automation. Furthermore, we help to use the best platforms in today’s world of email marketing.
Understanding your data analytics strategy is another important service included in the foundational brand program, which is what ties marketing and sales together and is what we use best to drive targeted business decisions. Understanding how to use data analytics in a business is crucial for success. GW Branding Group will guide you through data tracking and how to make the best decisions based on your brand data.
In addition to the above services, we also offer a deep dive into advertising strategy and optimization of your advertising budget to get the best ROI using PPC through Google Ads. We have experience managing Ad accounts with $100,000 Advertising Budgets, and utilizing software to stop and prevent click fraud from damaging your advertising spend.
Overall, the Foundational Brand Program is a comprehensive and intensive process that helps businesses develop a solid foundation for their brand and marketing efforts. It includes a wide range of services that are essential for building a strong brand, driving growth, and reaching customers effectively.
The Brand Builder Package is the ultimate marketing solution offered by the GW Branding Group. It is a custom digital marketing management package that helps businesses develop and scale their brand’s marketing efforts. With over half a decade of digital marketing experience and years of running a marketing agency, GW Branding Group has the knowledge and expertise to deliver a comprehensive and effective marketing strategy.
The Brand Builder Package is designed to replace the need for a marketing manager or month-to-month services. It works with the client exclusively for 1-2 weeks or 1 Month to focus on and execute their brand foundation’s marketing strategy. This package includes a range of services that are essential for building a strong brand and driving growth. These services include website development, search engine optimization (SEO), social media channels, content marketing, and video production.
During this package, we help businesses to develop and optimize their website to ensure it is user-friendly, responsive, and search engine optimized to increase visibility and conversion rates. We also work on building and maintaining their social media channels, creating and delivering engaging content, and social media marketing strategies that help to grow their following and engagement.
Additionally, we provide content marketing and video production services to help businesses develop and execute a consistent and effective content marketing strategy. This can include anything from blog post creation to infographics and video production, to help businesses build trust and authority with their audience, and create a memorable and engaging brand experience.
Finally, GW Branding Group provides expert guidance on data tracking and analytics to help businesses make informed and data-driven decisions about their marketing efforts. We use data analysis to identify key performance indicators and adjust and optimize marketing campaigns accordingly to help reach customers effectively and efficiently.
Overall, the Brand Builder Package is a comprehensive and intensive process that helps businesses develop and scale their marketing efforts. It includes a wide range of services that are essential for building a strong brand, driving growth, and reaching customers effectively and efficiently. It’s specifically tailored to replace your need for a marketing manager, and save time and money on your marketing investment.
We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.
Donny and I have been friends since high school, but we both went our separate ways after graduation. I moved to the west coast to attend college, while Donny stayed on the east coast. After finishing college, we both went on to pursue our own professional careers, not knowing that we both had studied marketing.
Years went by, and I formed Giving You Digital, a digital marketing agency, while Donny was working for a large E-Commerce company in marketing. It was only by chance that we reconnected and discovered that we both had studied marketing in college. I was impressed with his skills and expertise, so I asked him to join Giving You Digital as the Director of Business Development.
As we reconnected, Donny and I realized that we had similar goals, and morals, and were both hustlers. I had a vision for a new kind of marketing agency, one that would focus on delivering solutions rather than just diagnosing problems. Donny had been working in the industry for a while, and he was ready for a change. We both shared a desire to build a company that would help businesses grow and succeed.
And that’s how the GW Branding Group was born. Donny and I joined forces to form an agency that was different from anything else on the market. We wanted to focus on cutting through the red tape and providing our clients with a holistic branding and marketing strategy that could be implemented at a multi-channel level. The GW Branding Group was built on a foundation of honesty, integrity, and a deep understanding of the marketing industry.
With a shared passion for helping businesses succeed and a determination to be the best in the industry, Donny and my partnership at GW Branding Group has been a resounding success. We continue to work together to provide top-level service and deliver results for our clients.
Giving You Digital is still going strong and continues to help small businesses with their digital marketing needs. However, we’ve recently begun to pivot the company towards a software-as-a-service model. One of our main offerings is the GYD Website Builder and Editor, a user-friendly platform that allows small businesses to easily create and edit their own professional-grade websites. Additionally, we are currently in development for GYD Analytics, a marketing data management, and reporting tool, this software will be an all-in-one solution for businesses to easily track and analyze all of their marketing efforts in one place with over 70 platform integrations. Having our own agency software has allowed us to help small businesses in an even more efficient way, by providing them with the tools they need to grow and manage their online presence.
Have you ever had to pivot?
When Donny and I first started GW Branding Group, we were running a small marketing agency that focused on delivering a variety of digital marketing services to small businesses. We quickly realized that while we were helping our clients, we weren’t making as much of a difference as we could be for our client’s long-term success. It has always been our goal to make a great impact on the businesses we partner with.
We realized that many of our clients didn’t have a solid foundation for their brand and marketing efforts. They were struggling to develop a clear brand identity and messaging, and they weren’t sure how to effectively reach their target audience.
That’s when we decided to pivot our focus from running a small marketing agency to becoming a brand development consulting agency. We recognized the need for businesses to have a solid foundation for their brand and marketing efforts, and we knew that we could help.
With our new focus, we developed the Foundational Brand Package, an intensive 8-hour or two 4-hour day process in which we work closely with our clients to understand their business and develop a customized branding and marketing strategy tailored to their unique needs. The package includes a range of services such as search engine optimization, social media marketing, content creation, email automation, data analytics, and advertising strategy.
The pivot was not easy, but we knew it was the right decision. Since then, we’ve seen a significant increase in the success of our clients. They now have a clear brand identity, messaging, and a marketing strategy that is tailored to their unique needs, which has helped them to reach their target audience and drive growth.
It’s been a huge change for us and our clients, but we couldn’t be happier with the results. We’ve seen firsthand the difference that a solid brand foundation can make in the success of a business, and we’re passionate about helping others achieve the same success.
It has been a wonderful experience to watch our companies grow and develop strong relationships along the way. In all, Giving You Digital has made a crucial pivot to enter the SAAS market as we now have our own GYD Website Editor that allows our clients to build their own website or have us do it for them! With our Analytics Software, Giving You Digital is able to provide our clients with over 70 marketing and sales platform integrations to a custom dashboard all in one place. GW Branding Group has become our high-performance marketing agency working with our clients to develop their foundational brand strategy and implement it through our Brand Builder Program. We are proud to announce that we are now launching the Off The Ground Podcast that will be distributed on Apple, Spotify, Google, YouTube, and all the major streaming platforms! The Podcast is all about bringing on successful entrepreneurs and learning how they got their businesses off the ground!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.gwbrandinggroup.com
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gw-branding-group/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwyL-CfYdd9K1Qb8OdAgMkg
- Other: https://gwbranding.youcanbook.me
Image Credits
Matthew Gans