Recently, Dominate Digital Founder, Gregory Wright was interviewed by Bentley MBA student Daniel Cohen about his entrepreneurial experience. Here is part of the outstanding final product that Dan put together.
The Story Behind Dominate Digital
Dominate Digital is the brainchild of a May 2009 graduate of Babson College. Those who know about Babson know that it is renowned for Entrepreneurship which is one of the reasons as to why Needham, Massachusetts native Greg Wright elected to attend Babson. During his time at Babson, he earned a degree in marketing and was able to take some entrepreneurship classes where he become attracted to starting his own business once he graduated. However, it was not until the summer before his senior year that he found an avenue that he wanted to focus his business on. He interned at an internet market company where he “became very interested in all of the aspects of online marketing and saw that it (digital marketing) really was the future of marketing.” Shortly after he graduated, armed with a strong business background, he conducted some further research on internet marketing all while coordinating the digital marketing activities at a local law firm called Trinity Law Group. It was this experience that opened his eyes as he “saw the importance it (digital marketing) was making for all size companies,” and had the realization “that that there was very little overhead and would not cost me much to start my own company.” The concepts all came together rather quickly for Greg as he now had the idea to create a digital marketing company that specialized in search engine optimization, pay-per-click management, and social media marketing. Now that he had the vision in place, he saw the potential opportunity and went for it.
The very first obstacle that Greg faced is a common one among first time entrepreneurs in the sense that he found it difficult to start a business by himself. He had to come up with a name, purchase the rights to the name on the internet, think about getting clients, and perhaps the most daunting task he faced was creating a website (because he had very little idea of how to do so). Once he settled on a catchy and purposeful name, “Dominate Digital,” he set out to purchase the domain rights on the internet and learn how to build a website. Thanks to his uncle who has some background in the field, Greg was able to learn a little bit about building a website and graphic design, so after months of diligent work he was able to launch DominateDigital.com. Greg received “a lot of good advice from family and friends” along the way to creating his website, but now that the business was live, he needed to go about finding clients. Since Greg was a recent college graduate when he started the company, a significant problem for him was a lack of capital, so he could not aggressive market Dominate Digital like he wanted to. Instead of waiting for potential clients to find him on the internet, he capitalized by using social networking sites (Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn) as well as an extensive network of family and friends to track down potential clients. Greg was able to secure some clients shortly after his official launch using these methods and got his business off and running. This was a significant milestone for Greg and proved that a combination of good old fashion word of mouth marketing as well as a blend of new age social networking marketing had worked.
Now that Greg had a couple clients, “it was essential to do quality work for them because if the job was done well, it will turn into sales for their company and hopefully they would tell other people about my service.” For a business that does not have a lot of capital, referrals are the best type of marketing because they are free. As the business continued to evolve, Greg found himself meeting with more clients and found his first couple meetings with clients a bit of a challenge. However, like any good entrepreneur Greg realized that he had to be more prepared for the meetings and started writing up a specialized digital marketing analysis for each company that he met with describing what he could do for them. This type of personalization is a rare treat in today’s business world, which is why Greg was able to acquire a couple more satisfied customers. Greg is really still at the start of this entrepreneurial endeavor and is constantly looking for new and unique ways to attract attention and clients to this young and growing business.
For a business that has been around a little less than a year, there is no doubt that it is successful this far because Dominate Digital has clients and a presence online through a website and many social media networks.