With Covid-19 keeping many customers at home rather than at local Bloomington businesses, it’s more important than ever for these businesses to establish a strong online presence.

For many local businesses, their brick and mortar stores, restaurants and bars are no longer the frontline of consumer interaction. That role now belongs to phones, computers and tablets.

Local businesses are realizing it’s time to put their best virtual foot forward, and digital media agencies might be able to help.

Arnold Adel, a digital creative at the local digital media agency known as Reinvented, said, “Basically, if you’re not online, you practically don’t exist; you’re a ghost.” He believed companies like Reinvented are poised to prevent local businesses from fading into obscurity.

Reinvented focuses on helping businesses with content creation. With a plethora of cameras, gimbles and microphones on hand at their studio, they record and edit promotional videos that showcase a business’ services.

If a business contracts Reinvented to make a promotional video, digital creatives like Adel record footage on location. After some editing, the professional-grade promotional video is given to the business and can be posted on the business’ website or social media to attract customers.

Beauty Bar Salon hired Reinvented to shoot a promotional video in January. Deemed Project Beauty by Reinvented, the promotional video features vlog-like editing highlighting what services customers can expect from a visit to Beauty Bar Salon.

Reinvented also operates as an independent record company, renting out studio equipment, time and creative assistance to local Bloomington musical artists. “Whether it’s a company, a small business, a chain of offices or even a musical artist, they all have a brand, whether they realize it or not,” Adel said. “That’s where we bridge the gap with our technical expertise so that we can take care of businesses and artists and showcase what they’re good at.”

Local Bloomington rapper Abdul Fall,  EDM DJ Raja the Tiger and rapper and beatmaker Natty Rico collaborated with Reinvented to make a music video for the song titled, “Coastin.”

IU students have also started digital media agencies of their own. Tejas Hullur, an IU junior and Tik Tok influencer with almost 350,000 followers, cofounded a digital media agency called the Content Creator Club.

With the creation of the Content Creator Club, Hullur aimed to give Bloomington businesses guidance when navigating social media algorithms, online engagement and content creation.

“Nobody gets on social media to look at ads,” Hullur said. “The new wave is for companies to realize this and make a point to be personalities on social media rather than just ads.”

Hullur cited the Wendy’s twitter account as an example of this. Wendy’s posts about current topics while also providing some humor and interaction with their audience which showcases the brand’s human side.

“If we could see a playful social media feud or rivalry between Kilroy’s and The Bluebird, that would be really awesome,” Hullur said. “The Bloomington community could really get behind that and it’d be fun for everyone.”

For the time being, the Content Creator Club is indefinitely closed as Hullur aims to further develop his own growing social media career. “My personal brand is very tied to the Content Creator Club because it served as a source of credibility,” Hullur said. “My brand was able to grow because my team at the Content Creator Club helped me with the analytics of it all and that shows how effective our digital media agency was.”

According to Hullur, Bloomington businesses and artists can experience great social media growth if given proper guidance. Digital media agencies aim to provide that guidance.

Adel and Reinvented plan to continue offering online and technical expertise to businesses and artists in the Bloomington community. “We promote the importance of living vicariously and we’re all about reinventing ourselves into the best version of ourselves,” he said. “We aim to give people and businesses these creative tools to showcase their best selves because we truly believe creativity runs this game.”