Even Throughout the Pandemic, Your Online Brand Can Still Be Beautiful, Says NVS Designs CEO Chad Brittian

Even after 11 years in business, NVS Designs CEO Chad Brittian still gets excited about creatively meeting the marketing challenges of his clients. He insists that despite the pandemic of the past year, a brand can thrive but marketers must pay attention to their online presence, and be more creative and innovative than their competition.

Just how did he get here, and come to know all of this? Growing up an hour and fifteen minutes north of Indianapolis, Brittian knew that being a Hoosier never defined him; rather, he believed a career in advertising would allow him to make big moves and travel the world. “I had my eye on a much larger identity,” Brittian recently told Luxe Beat Magazine.

Brittian created NVS Designs to provide a full-service digital marketing to small to medium-sized businesses. NVS specializes in digital marketing, events, SEO, app, and web development, and has a full development team located in the United States. Over the years, the company has also worked with major household name brands such as Adidas, Grey Goose, Red Bull, HGTV, and The Discovery Channel.

NVS Designs began as NVS Graphics, Brittian told us, taking its name from a senior-capstone class project at Ball State University. “Our student team named our agency NVS, and I saw how it seemed to resonate with everyone and stand out,” he said. “I knew it would be a hit, and it speaks to our company’s creativity.”

Upon graduation, he moved to Indianapolis, but found few opportunities at the local agencies. Undeterred, he was determined to get into the advertising and marketing space, so with a strong belief in his abilities, he founded NVS.

According to Brittian, the company is great at leveraging relationships in traditional media, but it thrives on creatively meeting challenges, allowing it to stay on the forefront of trends and technology. “This is NVS’s true strength,” he said.

An attitude of mutual respect and partnership is key. “I believe our ability to work closely with each client sets us apart,” Brittian explained. “Our client with the smallest budget gets the same degree of attention, respect, and effort as the client with the largest budget. We are realistic, honest and do our best to maximize each marketing dollar. We constantly work on developing partnerships to ensure we provide the best service at the best rate possible.”

Luxe Beat Mag: What aspect of digital marketing do you find most satisfying? How does your appreciation for your craft help you continue to grow the agency?

CB: I love that there are no cookie-cutter answers; each industry is different, and it requires a lot of research to determine what type of advertising will be most successful. It’s also satisfying to know that we’re providing a truly valuable service for our clients that they can’t do for themselves — or at least can’t do effectively. For example, the biggest issue we run into is that our clients are not well acquainted with their customers. They don’t know how to identify their target audience, so they waste money trying to reach everyone. It’s very ineffective.

As an agency, we work hard to precisely identify both their target audience and that audience’s buying habits, so we have a clear idea of where and when we need to advertise a client’s business.

Luxe Beat Mag: Today’s marketing sector is saturated and overly competitive. How do you tread those waters?

CB: True, we’re in a very saturated market, where everyone is claiming to be an expert, and it’s only going to get worse, but that challenge is what makes developing solutions for our clients so rewarding. Technology has made more tools readily available to market a business. That’s great, but just as owning a saw doesn’t make you a carpenter, having a new tool won’t help you market your business well without also having the ability to use it efficiently and effectively. That’s where an experienced agency like NVS, with a proven track record and credentials is an invaluable partner. In other words, just because you can do your own marketing, doesn’t mean you necessarily should.  Having a team like ours behind you that knows the ins and outs of the industry is critical to anyone’s ongoing success.

Luxe Beat Mag: What made you believe there was an untapped market in the Midwest when it came to advertising and marketing? And do you still believe that? You said the region was in “need of highly creative, unique, out-of-the-box thinking.”

CB: Oh, I believe it now more than ever. This area can be very traditional when it comes to the visual aspect and way of thinking in the marketing world. Our agency works to break that mold in a good way and expand each client’s vision. We develop ideas that are more visually impactful than that of their competitors, to make them stand out. We try to push more radical ideas whenever possible. Ideas you won’t get from just any typical Midwest thinking. A good example would be the campaign for Ovarian Cancer we helped with a few years back.

We wanted sponsors to be easily recognized and we also wanted to create buzz for those that may not be as familiar with what this disease is and how quickly it can affect someone you know and love. We created sets of teal footprints with a statistic and information, along with the website URL that led from the entrance of the sponsors location to their reception desk. This was a non-traditional, out-of-the-box strategy that created a ton of buzz. It was unlike anything the organization had ever done before.

Luxe Beat: Let’s talk about your business model — how does market size play into growth and success here, as opposed to major markets like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago?

CB: Larger markets are more diverse and have considerably more competition than that of smaller cities where most of our clients do business. We’ve found that while major market clients may be more open to radical thinking, they also depend more on social media such as Instagram to succeed from a digital presence standpoint compared to the majority of our Indiana-based clients. To succeed here, it takes both creativity and far more than just social media.

Luxe Beat: And how does a marketing agency market itself?

CB: By creating innovative stand-out solutions for our clients, we’ve made a name for NVS as well. As our creative content was shared, and people could see the difference in our approach and we acquired more followers. More followers opened doors for us to be invited and included in private events, which then allowed for photo ops and endorsement opportunities with celebrities. This generated articles, covers and appearances, which turned into more followers and more events. It is because of this business mentality that I was able to attend a private giving suite for Coachella, which turned into an opportunity for us to represent and work with the W Hotels for their Queer Me Out Campaign: Breaking Barriers in Business.

Another opportunity that grew out of our social and media exposure was an invitation to the premier party for season three of Netflix’s hit show Stranger Things. They closed down the Santa Monica Pier for all of the stars of the show and a few select guests, of which I was one, to have a night of fun. This allowed for more exposure for the agency as well as for me personally and bodes well for future opportunities with Coachella and other media partnerships.

Keeping SEO Beautiful and Luxurious

From an SEO perspective, NVS works with link-building, content creation, and tagging to achieve the strongest digital presence possible for clients, regardless of where they’re located. SEO, or search engine optimization, is the process used to assist clients with maximizing their rankings and indexing their websites on search engines, pursuant to algorithms, so they can be seen by prospective clients.

“SEO, for someone not familiar with it, can seem like so much mumbo-jumbo. So to keep it real for clients, we integrate a custom SEO dashboard that allows them to access real-time data on the work our team has done; they can see how their current key terms are ranking, along with the number of site visitors in any given day, week, or month. All the reporting can be exported for reference, providing a one-stop solution for SEO and analytics,” he said.

Five years ago, SEO was easily manipulated; developers would saturate the copy or tags with the keyword terms a business felt potential customers were using in their searches, Brittian explained. “The goal of course, was to rank on the first page of search results, which usually worked. However, Google noticed and quickly put a stop to it by changing its algorithms that determine search results.”

Leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, SEO was important; today, it’s become absolutely essential to just be seen. “More businesses have gone online and created e-commerce shopping sites, which augments or eliminates the need for physical locations, which have always been expensive to maintain,” Brittian says, adding that, “online options can represent a business-saving revenue stream, but it also means increased online competition.”

Search engines like Google are constantly improving their algorithms to ensure that companies listed through their service are of high quality. These ever-changing policies eliminate a business owner’s ability to “set it and forget it” when it comes to digital marketing effectively, according to Brittian. “NVS is a certified Google Agency so we can provide the necessary education and industry knowledge to our clients so they can continue focusing on their brand’s long-term success.”

With SEO changing drastically, search engines via Google become more adaptable to the latest trends, which often prevents websites from “easily ranking.”

“[Google] has made great strides to ensure that search results are accurate and authentic…today, updated, quality, appropriate content is the top component to any successful SEO strategy,” Brittian explained.

Advertisers in particular, have suffered during the pandemic, according to the Brittian, because they lost opportunities to get their messages out.

“Even celebrities and influencers lost a lot of their mojo because of the shutdowns due to the pandemic. After all, how can you be envious of what an influencer gets to buy, wear, do or have if they are sitting home on the couch the same as you? Many businesses have closed, and we’ve seen a lot of agencies go under because such a large percentage of their revenue was derived from the event space. Naturally we’ve also seen a decline in spending; no one spends money to market a business that has been forced to be closed. So there’s a ripple effect to that. It spreads from the business to employees and customers as well as up the supply chain to their vendors and partners like us. I understand it. When you have no idea if or when you will reopen, the last thing on your mind is marketing,” he said.

Pay to Play is a Viable Option as Businesses Open Up

While many in the media consider the “pay-to-play” or P2P campaigns to be harmful and damaging, for many throughout the pandemic, it has presented an opportunity to continue thriving or to at least survive. Industry experts like Brittian understand when and how to leverage these types of campaigns, and can actually keep your brand relevant and pretty.

Explaining further, Brittian pointed out that “when a business is starting out, it’s hard to get media coverage. Everyone wants what is hot right now, especially in the entertainment industry. It can be difficult to break in. Pay to play allows a business that may not have much credibility yet to be seen as a true contender right away. This often opens doors to other opportunities that the business wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. It’s essentially spending money to make money. The silver lining here is that we’ve seen a lot of the rates for this type of advertising and coverage decrease as businesses get their footing back from the pandemic. Most advertisers are in need of revenue so now is the time to negotiate and create an opportunity that may have been out of reach just a year ago. It’s all about being strategic and having a plan in place that will help highlight and showcase your business in the best light possible.”

For 2022, which is almost here, Brittian believes the marketing sector will continue becoming more saturated:  “This means businesses will find it harder and harder to stand out from their competition. It’s important to build a solid foundation with your business’ marketing model, which requires you to have a clear understanding of your business, what your clientele wants, and the direction you want to go so you can truly make your competitors ‘NVS’ of your company.”

Today’s digital age requires everyone to have some type of digital presence for their business. Of the many obstacles the pandemic brought upon our world, it also created this “oversaturated” environment, which Brittian believes requires any brand, local, regional, or global, to stay relevant online.

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