AY Creative drives big online impact for clients

Next up in our SMB series - AY Creative in Salt Lake City, a community-based digital media agency helping Utah businesses make the most of their online presence.

At AY Creative, we’re a digital media agency — but we’re also much more than that. At our core, we’re a community based organization that isn’t afraid to get involved.

The vast majority of our customers are immigrant owned businesses that don’t have the resources or time to spend on any aspect of their business pursuits that aren’t day-to-day, operational tasks. Those clients are local, Salt Lake City area businesses that span from restaurants, doctors, lawyers, nonprofits, markets, construction firms and contractors, and many others. Our job at AY Creative is to work with those small businesses and help create a digital presence and cohesive branding. Many of our clients don’t have much digital literacy to begin with, so we help them through a sort of ‘digital transformation.’ 

We help them do this in English and Spanish. When I first came to the states, language was a huge barrier for me. That’s part of the reason it’s so important to me to do the work that we do and that every employee at AY Creative is bilingual. Each one of us is dedicated to helping immigrant owned businesses thrive and learn new skills, including the importance of a digital presence. That also means that when there’s a need for help, we step up.

When businesses are really struggling, we sometimes put our resources and knowledge to use for low rates. Right now, we’re working with a couple of restaurants that have been struggling to recover from the effects of COVID. From photography of their dishes, to menu design, to building a new website, to social presence, to helping them integrate with online ordering (which is now an essential component to owning a restaurant) — we are there to walk them through a complete takeover of branding and digital marketing.

We do this work because it’s important to us to lift up the members of our community — and from a business standpoint, it’s actually been a great investment. A lot of those customers come back in more fruitful times because they remember we helped them when they needed it. Or they refer us to other businesses across the Salt Lake City area. To our team, there’s nothing better than that. 

Functionally speaking, the work we do wouldn’t be possible without the internet. We’re often downloading and uploading massive design and video files from and to the cloud, and that’s part of what makes having Google Fiber as our internet provider so important. 

From the time we signed up for Google Fiber, to the installation, to any time we’ve needed to reach out for assistance — the response time has been great and customer service has been top notch. For example, we were on a 250 Meg plan but I wanted to get us on 1 Gig. I reached out to our local rep one day and by the morning I came in the next day, our service had been fully upgraded. Our files were flying faster than ever.

The switch to Google Fiber also cut our previous internet bill in half. For us, that means a little more wiggle room to be able to help more struggling Salt Lake City businesses — and to AY Creative, that also means just about everything. 

Posted by Alfonso Ayala, Small Business Advisor, AY Creative