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Archive for May, 2009

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Traditional Marketing Strategies Are So Pre-Recession

Thursday, May 21st, 2009 by Mariah Hibarger
Image by Jeff Keen/Flickr Creative Commons

Image by Jeff Keen/Flickr Creative Commons

Stop beating your consumers over the head with a dead fish to get their attention. Digital marketing tools talk to the people that are listening and offer unmatched measurability and market analysis.

In today’s economic environment, everybody is feeling the pinch.

Businesses large and small are taking a critical look at ways to cut spending while maintaining market performance.

Just like President Obama’s goal of taking a scalpel to the government budget, you are likely taking a more critical look at your own budget.

Companies are downsizing, cutting out day-to-day business costs, identifying and suspending business service subscriptions no one in the office uses anymore, eliminating employee perks, and even getting rid of Bob from Accounting.

Many companies are ditching the scalpel and grabbing a chainsaw.

So, what’s getting cut out of business budgets? (more…)

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Get Outside, and Go Ride Your Bike

Sunday, May 17th, 2009 by Reid Williams

Team WELD-NRB Biking

Part of what we call the WELDlife is balancing your quality time in and out of the office. Put another way, one of the reasons we choose to live here in the New River Gorge of West Virginia is because we play as hard as we work.

It won’t surprise you, then, to learn how proud we are of Team WELD-NRB.

Team WELD-NRB is a grassroots cycling team. The idea is pretty simple: WELDers and the staff at New River Bike and Tour Company rounded up riders young and old to represent our area in mountain biking and road races around the Mountain State.

The team hopes to raise awareness of the benefits of a healthy lifestyle that includes outdoor activities, not to mention how West Virginia provides unbelievable terrain for those who love travel-by-pedal-power.

At WELD, we want the world to be a healthier, happier place. We honestly believe our work can help accomplish that goal, and it’s important for us to walk the talk when we’re outside the workplace.

So we bike.

If you’re into cycling, the team’s website also includes gear reviews of all the stuff they’re trying out. (And it works for some of them — we’ve already had a first-place finish!)

Does your office have an extracurricular club? How do you explore your community after you punch out for the day?

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Posted in WELD, WELDlife | 1 Comment »

Social Media and Email Marketing Will Duel to the Death

Saturday, May 16th, 2009 by Reid Williams

First, let me say that your business should be using both social media and email newsletters as part of your integrated digital marketing plan.

Deciding which one you lean on more heavily, to which one you apply greater resources and expectations, that depends on your target audience.

Both of them, as marketing channels or as basic means of communication in the Internet age, will be around a long time.

But it will be interesting to see if one outlives the other. (more…)

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Posted in WELD, Work | 3 Comments »

Which Employee Is Your Undiscovered Star?

Friday, May 15th, 2009 by Reid Williams

ACE Blogger Scott Perdue

He’s going on 40 years old. He’ll tell you he’s the least athletic person around. He answers the phone all day at work, taking reservations.

But Scott P. is quickly becoming the rising star at his company.

It’s because he’s a blogger.

Scott works for ACE Adventure Resort, West Virginia’s largest outfitter. Each year, the company takes tens of thousands of people whitewater rafting, rock climbing, ATVing, fishing and other tours with all sorts of outdoor activities.

ACE has a blog team.

WELD trained 10 of their employees, from diverse departments, to contribute and publish regularly on the blog we built for ACE’s website.

You’d expect the raft guides — known for their colorful personalities, adventurous lives and gift for gab — to be highly successful bloggers.

But Scott is a stand-out, not because his stories make people laugh (and they do), but because he converts them into customers. (more…)

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Would You Trade 3 Minutes of Your Day for This?

Thursday, May 14th, 2009 by Reid Williams

Forget that your email marketing is an exchange, not just a nudge toward a transaction, and it will doom any effort at digital marketing.

For e-newsletters to work, they better be a fair trade.

Take a hypothetical subscriber, for example. I will opt in to your email messaging if I believe there’s value in it for me. Every time I see your business in my inbox, the subject line should remind me why I continue to subscribe. (more…)

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Does Your Website Sit Still?

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 by Reid Williams

WELD Web Designs

The website is the cornerstone, the foundation of your business’s web presence. But that doesn’t mean it should just sit there. If it’s not active, it’s not working.

Even 3 years ago, you might have gotten away with an electronic brochure of a website.

Web surfers didn’t expect much more.

Your website was a digital version of the company prospectus, with an assortment of sales brochures woven in the pages.

The only call to action possible was to list an email address and phone number and hope prospects used them to contact you.

In today’s Internet, your business website is not only capable of doing so much more, it has to do it to win customers. (more…)

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