For Chase Fairchild at Bolt Marketing, identifying a business’ core story is what makes marketing successful. Fairchild and his partners, Sam and Maddie Duff, started Bolt Marketing to help small- and mid-sized businesses grow through marketing. Their goal, Fairchild said, is to help businesses first identify what their marketing message is before sending that message out.
Left to right: Sam Myers, Ryan Filchak, Raegan Reynolds, Zack Andrews, Hannah Childress, Stephanie Kaewell, and Chase Fairchild
“What sets us apart is our way of using narrative to invite customers into the story of your business, rather than shoving your marketing message down their throats,” Fairchild said. “We help our clients understand where they’re at in their marketing journey and build a plan around it.”
A full-service marketing agency with in-house production of strategy, branding, website, video and social media services, Fairchild said Bolt Marketing aims to provide agency-quality services to smaller businesses at affordable rates.
Now in its fifth year, the company has provided services to a wide range of clients, including the Defender Kentucky Three-Day Event, Alltech, Bluegrass Agtech, Saxony Farms, Silent Guard, Woodford County EDA & Tourism, Boone Contracting and GCH Insurance, among others.
Providing those services, though, means starting with the basics, Fairchild said. The first phase of the relationship with Bolt, he said, is to help businesses define their messaging and positioning.
“A lot of folks skip this phase because it’s expensive and takes a long time,” he said. “They’ll start running ads, and then they get frustrated when their ads don’t work because nobody knows what they do. We like to start in the first phase… so businesses can better communicate with their customers and convert those ads into actions.”
From there, he said, Bolt works with clients to make sure the creative content produced clearly and effectively communicates that message.
“A lot of small- and medium-sized businesses struggle — the statistics are not in their favor. A majority of them fail before the first 10 years,” he said. “We looked at why they’re failing. Number one tends to be leadership or management. Second is they run out of money. And third is marketing. We can’t necessarily help with the first two, but we can help them figure out how to integrate marketing into their business early.”
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor and Statistics approximately 20 percent of new businesses fail during the first two years of opening, 45 percent fail during the first five years, and 65 percent fail within the first 10 years.
Businesses thinking about their marketing should put the time in to determine what niche they fill in the market, and what problems they solve for their customers. Once businesses can identify what they do well, Fairchild said, the marketing of the business will communicate that to the business’s customers.
“Good marketing, if you have a good product, is going to amplify and showcase that you have a good product, good customer service, and good quality,” he said.
With five years under their belt, the partners are looking forward to seeing what the next five, 10, or 15 years have to bring for Bolt.
Bolt will soon move into a larger space in the Commons, allowing it to rent out studio space and host events, including marketing workshops for smaller businesses.
“By the end of the year, we hope to have our first boot camp,” Fairchild said. “That’s going to be a one-day workshop, where we’ll have five to 10 business owners come in and we’ll teach them some of our frameworks and work with them to create some core marketing product to set them up for success.
“We are thrilled with what we’ve accomplished in the last five years and are excited to keep growing,” Sam Duff said.