It’s been two months since Parsons Marketing moved into their new downtown space located inside the Grand Manse, and Dan Parsons, co-founder of Parsons Marketing with his wife, Sunny, said the agency is enjoying their new digs downtown.

“Just being downtown is really beneficial to us. It’s been a goal of ours personally to be here. Because of our business model, we rely on freelance graphic artists and web designers, and a lot of them are down here; they’re an integral reason why we moved downtown.”

Founded in 2003, Parsons Marketing offers a variety of marketing services to companies and organizations around Lincoln. Some of their clients include Hampton Enterprises, College of Hair Design and Itpac Consulting.

“We started as a small publications and consulting business, and then, over the last eight years, we’ve morphed into a small full-service agency that provides everything from traditional PR to media service, ad campaigns, web development; the whole gamut,” Dan said. 

With the evolution of the internet, mobile and social media, the fields of marketing and public relations are rapidly changing; at Parsons, they’re doing their part to keep up.

“We recognized three years ago that social media is an important component of social marketing,” Dan said. “So we taught ourselves how to do it. We also had the advantage of working with young designers and programmers who had already experienced it on a social level. We feel confident with Facebook now; it’s been a great tool for our small business and virtually every client we work for now has a component to social marketing. I have between 20 and 25 years of marketing experience to understand traditional marketing, and marrying those ideas to social media is vitally important, and I think it will continue to be so.”

Parsons has developed a semiannual event called Brand Camp, an opportunity for people to create personal brand identities to communicate who they are in the marketplace.

“The genesis for brand camp is the idea that branding is an important part of marketing.  We’ve done large brand makeovers for Hampton Enterprises and the College of Hair Design, and what we’ve discovered is the need to take that larger corporate brand and bring it down to a more personal level; an individual level. Brand camp talks about branding yourself as an individual. Even if you’re a recent college graduate, a personal brand is important and ties in well with marketing, and with the advent of social media, personal branding has become even more important.”

When they’re not busy helping clients, Parsons is heavily involved in the community. They are proud sponsors of Lincoln Tennis Buddies, a program that connects tennis lovers with mentally challenged athletes. They also created Operation: Medicine Cabinet, a pre-packaged public safety and environmental awareness program that aims to prevent the abuse and misuse of unwanted medications and to void them of our communities’ water supplies. The program was designed to be affordable and easily implemented.

“As responsible business owners, if you’re going to be a leader in your community, you need to think about giving back; we don’t tell our clients anything that we don’t practice ourselves,” Dan said.

While the Lincoln native loves working with the community, he enjoys working with his wife more.

“There are challenges being a husband and wife team, but the rewards are greater. My love language happens to be that I enjoy spending time with my spouse. I often think: ‘Man, this is perfect for me!’ Just as long as you understand your roles and responsibilities; I think we do compliment ourselves, though.”

Parsons is currently developing what they call the Parson’s Creative Café. Its design is still in the works, but Dan said it will be located in the Grand Manse and will be conducive to the freelance workers Parsons hires as well as other freelancers in the area. Parsons will supply them with high speed internet, desk space, monitors and coffee.

“Downtown Lincoln is a breeding place for artists, graphic artists and photographers, so we want to be able to have a space for their use as well.”

Parson’s Creative Café is set to open this spring.

See all the creative work and community projects Parsons has done on their website, and keep up with the latest marketing trends on Dan’s Blog: Ask Dan the PR Man