Goshen, IN
574-500-2053
chris@mediaryte.com
Chris Risse started Mediaryte 13 years ago after several prior businesses evolved into his current business. A Purdue grad, he started school as a visual communication and design major.
Basically what I wanted to do was learn how to persuade people visually.
I was one of those kids who made websites and made some money online. And what happened is, I basically almost failed out of college because there was really no reason to go to class. I was doing very well at what I was doing on the side with the websites that I had. This shows my age a little bit, but there was a thing called AOL instant messenger that had these things called buddy icons. Basically I just created places, websites, for people to upload the buddy icons that they had made. Other people would come and get them I just served advertising. So that is kind of what I had going on on the side.
That’s what all really then became Mediaryte at one point. I did graduate, but I actually changed my degree just to graphic arts because I already kind of picked up everything from working on my own and getting some school education. It really took both things to help me focus, help me find a direction and figure out what I wanted to do. Actually, my parents found out I was failing out of school and it really upset my mom. My dad kind of just said 'we can’t really give you direction because you’re doing things that we’ve never experienced.' They themselves were business owners. I just wasn’t really going to get advice anywhere and so I decided to sell everything to completely get out of the websites and the portfolio I had and graduate. So I did. I got my grades back up, graduated and ended up getting a job with Purdue Extension. And I was there for four years and realized I was not doing what I wanted to do because I was constantly getting phone calls from businesses asking for help with marketing online, building sites, building systems for them to do business digitally. And that then is what became Mediaryte.
Q: Have you always wanted to work in media?
Let’s say yes, but that role has changed over time because I was in building sites [and] managing online communities since the late 90s. And watching the internet evolve in what is needed for business and how business does marketing, it’s changed a lot. There’s still the fundamentals. People still want to be seen. They want to have a good brand that has a reputation to back it up. They want that visibility but then they want the conversion to go along with it. That has become way more defined now. Twenty years ago that wasn’t so well defined. It was ‘just put something up there so we can say we have something and maybe we’ll get some organic traffic from a search engine.’ And anymore there are clear paths on the way to get business depending on the type of industry you’re in and the size of your business… So yes, I’m doing what I thought I wanted to do and a lot has changed along with the industry. We don’t do as much marketing per se for businesses anymore. We actually do more of the technical side where we work with other marketing companies who are doing the creative marketing, doing the advertising, and then we handle the technical for that. So we make sure the advertisements get smarter and are served better and improve conversion rates. When it comes down to it that’s essentially what Mediaryte does now. We are about getting the lead, generating the lead, and getting the conversion that our marketing clients are looking for.
While Mediaryte plans to update their website to more current offerings, the content available now shows a lot about how the company has evolved in the last few years, particularly with their client base.
In 2007 when the business started, it was simply a web development company because that’s what we were getting. A lot of the tools that are available now, solution systems or whatever you want to call them for advertising for small businesses, none of that existed. Over time as those things became available we started to incorporate those in. We wanted to be like a lot of other agencies and be kind of a full service one-stop shop. And in 2015 that’s when we really doubled down on small business. The reason behind that is I got involved with Business Network International in early 2012 and really just saw all the potential that was there. Finally a few years later, we doubled down on it wanted to really focus on growing that area. Since then, we did that. We had a lot of growth in small business. The issue with growing a business like that is eventually you get what you wish for but you also get a lot of the other things that come along with it. And I know right now we are at the point where we manage over 500 websites. And that’s awesome. But that doesn’t mean we have 500 individual clients. That would be a nightmare. What I was finding was when we would pick up small business clients we would pick up a lot of work. There was just way too much to do. And to fix everything, the client didn’t necessarily have the budget to fix all those problems. I did not feel like we were providing the level of service that we could provide for a lot of those businesses simply because they needed more than they could afford. So what I’ve started doing is I’ve started, depending on the industry and their size and what they’re capable of and kind of the state of their current marketing, I actually refer them out to other businesses now that are more suited to handle them. And that has come with just experience. I guess when you get into business you feel like "I want to serve everyone and everybody that I potentially can" and that’s just not as feasible as you want it to be. So long story short, we just keep narrowing and narrowing and narrowing. A lot of companies in our area are still trying to be that agency, that one-stop shop. I try to be ahead of that and knowing what’s coming up. If you want to be good at something and provide the best, team up with somebody else who is really good at what they do. Be really good at what you do and that then ultimately provides the best service for the client.
There are currently four or five internal employees at Mediaryte, along with contractors.
Q: What are some of your daily duties for the business?
Every day duties are usually reviewing service requests. That’s kind of the day in, day out thing. A lot of our clients, small business and other marketing agencies, submit service requests to us to have work done. It can be little things, big things, usually it's related to web technology or marketing technology. Either we’re updating websites, and those websites, it could be just simple sites though typically we’re servicing some sort of system in the site, It could be e-commerce, a lot of the sites that we build are special user experience sites and that simply means the customers might have an individual experience. So I’m trying to think of a good way to say this…you’re familiar with shopping with Amazon probably? So it’s a giant catalog, you can search everything and make a purchase. Pretty straight forward. With a special user experience basically if you would go to Amazon and only see the products that you would have most interest in or only the products that Amazon wants you to see is a good example. And making your pricing different than somebody else’s pricing as well. How the site communicates with you. All those things. So we build those types of experiences. We do a lot of municipal government stuff so there’s a lot of those updates day in and day out. And then we have projects. So there’s always project work going on too.
Right now Risse says there are around 10 concurrent projects taking place. However that number is still higher than what he would like for the business, saying five concurrent projects is better suited for the type of work they do. Departments aren't defined with in the business, as Risse prefers everyone working together on projects.
We don’t necessarily have one person in charge. We basically have everybody in charge and things are created as they go. So like when we create a new project we literally have from start to finish every task that needs to be done, or at least every task that we think needs to be done. And that task list grows or shrinks depending on the project. And at that point certain people might be assigned to certain parts of the job so like graphic or page building or development, that sort of stuff. And some are better at certain areas than others but we try to make it so that everybody’s doing what they’re great at but also improving the things they’re not as great at. The reason why I run our operation that way is it seems to be a better result at the end. It's not a constant work, stop, work, stop, work, stop as it's being handed off to the next person. Everybody kind of gets to work at the same time. And they’re all updating each other. There’s more internal communication.
Q: So you find that way is more efficient in getting things back to the client?
Yeah, it definitely is. There’s just a better result because we are way more detailed that way.
Q: So how does analytics fit into Mediaryte?
It’s everything. All the decisions that we make are based upon data. We try to avoid gut feelings. We let the data tell us. And what’s nice is we’ve built so many websites, we’re Google Integration Technology partner. We get lots of data and we have the tools to basically view that data in a way that gets us results. Like I said, we’re all about the conversion here and that data helps us get to that conversion. It tells us everything from who the person is that’s at the website, where they came from, and all the details that come along with that. We’re able to create attribution models and for our marketing clients we know the first time somebody had interaction with a brand or a product and then we can see that story unfold as they come back. They do searches for a project, they come to the website, they go look for reviews, we see that entire process come through. And with some of our higher level clients we can get all that information into a CRM so we know when this person was there. We can look at everything cumulatively so we can look at multiple users, timed purchase, and we source data from Facebook, from Google, from other partners as well or other platforms and we try to make it all make sense.
Q: What ways are you able to manage your clients' data?
We use Google tools a lot. We actually have lots of databases. We do a lot of database SQL work. And then from that we will populate it into different tools or we might just take data straight into tools. It really depends on the client. So for our small business clients, they really don’t need all the nit and gritty. They just want to see improvement. They want growth. They want to see more impressions, higher conversion rate. That’s what matters most to them. That’s pretty easy. When it comes to a marketing client who might have multiple clients, or we’re helping them with some very large clients, that’s where they want to be able to get to the nit and gritty, but then also have us teach them what’s important here, what are they looking at in the data.
The tools really don’t matter, it’s kind of the knowledge and experience that really matters. We actually source a lot of Google tools. Because we’re a Google Technology Integration partner, we have access to a lot of the tools that you can use even in Google Suite. We use Google Sheets a lot because we actually build scripts on it that will populate data into the sheet.
The reason why (we utilize Google) is that we can create kind of an interface overlay for that or we can output data in a way that’s easier to understand and we don’t have to then go through some sort of third party system to create an interface for like reporting, as an example.
Depending on the client and the data they need to see, we can actually create reports that focus strictly on that data. Sometimes it’s pretty sometimes its not.
Q: You mentioned earlier that conversion and impressions are really important for your clients. Are there any other insights that you find helpful for your clients?
Yes, so I myself actually am a digital commerce consultant. I actually help a lot of businesses that have a lot of manual processes convert those to digital processes. Everything from operational automation, marketing automation, sometimes it's simply just showing them how to connect the dots or sometimes we’re building the complete system. That’s kind of our niche now in the market in what we’ve kind of narrowed down to is building those systems. I myself, my job is to look at the top level view, see how the whole system is supposed to work, and then try to find ways to eliminate a lot of data entry.
Q: Do you think that sets you apart from your competition in the area?
I hope so! It’s what is attracting other marketing companies to us. A lot of businesses get kind of the basic technology. They can do Facebook posts, they know how to do basic SEO stuff, they know how to create campaigns, ad campaigns for like display and search. But when it's 'try to connect it all together and have a feasible system,' for you’ve got part doing discovery, part doing due diligence, how it all dovetails together into people coming through the site, getting populated into a CRM, they’re experience of going through that site, tagging what they’re doing via the CRM so that then there’s all these follow up processes. There’s retargeting, there’s re-marketing, email sequences, all of that stuff, and making it all work together, that’s kind of our bread and butter.
Q: How has working with your clients’ data changed over time?
That’s an interesting answer because with Google we actually had a lot more data for a long time… Let's just say that we got all the data for free, no questions asked. But then at some point when Google decided to - and I think this would have been around 2010 - when they decided to start serving ads and have an ad platform so that they could basically show revenue to their investors, that’s when things started to change. We started to get less and less data. Information was taken away from us. We did get tools to replace them, so you got things like Google Analytics which is a great tool. But the data that you have there now compared to when you first started using Google Analytics, it pales in comparison. There’s just not as much data. But again, the tool has become more sophisticated. You get to look at that limited data in new ways. But if you want the actual data, you really have to pay for it now. You get more of that data if you pay for ads but you would have to pay for the Google Analytics premium services to get access to more of that data. And then you get into big data.
Data is valuable, so it has a price tag. That’s really what’s changed. You had to start paying for the data if you really wanted it.
Q: How has some of the other analytics software that you’ve worked with changed or even improved over time?
That kind of comes back to an earlier answer about how we prepare that data. There’s a lot of tools out there that will source analytical data from different providers, mainly Google Analytics. However, they really just give you a different way to look at the same data. And that can be valuable, that is valuable, but still you’re looking at a limited picture. If you try to pull all that data together that can still work… Google Analytics is really bad at their attribution model. They’re trying to get better at it, but what’s happened is all that attribution data was available at one point and then they’ve slowly taken it away and now our industry is like ‘we need that!’ but we don’t want to spend $10,000 a month to get that data. So Google is now reintroducing that sort of stuff but it’s still patchy, there’s still a lot of gaps in there. And so other analytical tools will allow you to kind of piece in those gaps. Like if you’re running multiple tracking systems, you have Google Analytics, you have Facebook and you have Admiral, you know it's better to do all that through tag manager from a set up point of view and then source all that into a different analytical tool that you might also incorporate trackers in. Putting trackers into more than just a website too, from the email newsletters and transactional emails and communication emails, that gives you another picture or another look so you can fill in that gap. Any sort of landing page you might have on any web property you own that helps you get a better picture of that data…so that allows you then to create better attribution models that then allows you to know where to spend your marketing dollars. At least to my experience there’s not a way to look at it at a total view. You still have to look at it in parts. Let me rephrase that. You have to pay a lot to look at it in whole.
Q: How do you think analytics and data management can be more efficient in the future?
It’s an industry question, because there are easy ways to do it now. There are amazing ways to just show that data because honestly you don’t need all the data, you just need the data that matters. But the data that matters is different per client and really per industry. So I would say to improve that down the road is having systems that are industry specific and even size specific would be helpful. Because it would be easier to just say ‘a-ha! That’s the tool we need to use to look at the data we need to help this client’ instead of ‘we have to take this tool because this is the tool that does everything and we now need to modify that tool to show the data that we think we know.' So analytics is going to become industry specific I think down the road because that would be the most convenient way for us to work with our clients.
Q: Do you have anything to add about working in a media industry, anything that you’ve learned that you think students that maybe want to enter the industry could take away?
Don’t try to do it all. Try to be the best at one part of the whole process. Be an inch wide a mile deep. And also don’t let the tools dictate what you need to know. Learn how data is handled and what’s important out of that data and then find the tools that then will help you make it more convenient for you to do the work you need to do for your clients.