Around 60% of the work that we do is with growing or startup businesses (in other words, ones that are turning over under 100k per year and are in their first year of business). Funds are limited for businesses at that stage of growth - which means that money spent on marketing has to be spent on the most cost effective areas (you'd be surprised at how often larger companies spend money on 'prestige' projects which do not deliver measurable, bottom line revenue benefits).
In 2012, we have worked with 5 companies that are in 'startup' stage and I'd like to look at a specific service we have offered to some of those business to help them grow and succeed.
DirectMeditation
E-creation has created branding, stationary and a website for a Dutch meditation specialist with a fantastic background in air industry crisis support. Creating a new business with unique brand requirements, we worked out that P2P (person 2 person) marketing is still the most important marketing channel for this sector. As a result, E-creation focused it's efforts on the design of a highly memorable brand and business cards.
ChampagneAndLemonade
This was a business that was at its core an online business - it sells 'preloved designer clothes' using the Magento e-commerce engine. E-creation was asked to launch the website & create the most efficient 'digital marketing' engine for the site. E-creation extended Magento's functionality to directly upload items of clothing into Google's shopping cart with highly tuned product descriptions. This ensures that web users searching for very specific & limited quality designer clothes are always made aware of the fact that they can in fact purchase these very expensive items at a discount online (something that was previously controlled by the designers themselves).
Haygain
Migrating a business from a successful e-commerce platform up to the next level is never easy. With significant investment in the existing website and SEO, E-creation needed to ensure that all the previous efforts were transferred over to the new website - something we achieved using page redirects.
This involved looking at the old website, mapping the pages that were indexed by Google and creating a mapping document that sits on the server redirecting visitors who were finding the old pages in Google to the appropriate pages on the new website. This ensures that whilst Google reindexes the website, all the existing traffic from Google isn't lost, keeping the business going.
The important information is that E-creation spent the time thinking about the real marketing behind the businesses rather than simply suggesting the easiest route of adding Facebook pages or creating a Twitter account. Every business has unique selling points that can make or break it - and as business consultants, our job is to find and understand those elements.
