Tim Alston of 1st Metropolitan Mortgage in Hoboken is one fired up business owner.  Tim is one of the true professionals left standing after a massive thinning of the herd. 

Tim is moving to Google to begin a new business development strategy.  If you search for a mortgage in Hoboken, or Jersey City, or Hudson County for that matter, he wants you to find 1st Metropolitan.  So, I said the same thing I always say, “Video, video, video.”  Tim is crazy enough to buy in and here we go.  Tim is doing a weekly video informational piece on a Youtube channel.  

We set up a landing page  and a YouTube channel for Tim to distribute his videos.  This embed will keep the content on his landing page fairly fresh.  We can give visitors the ability to subscribe to a weekly video column for mortgage or refinancing shoppers.  Pretty timely content frankly.  And Tim gets pretty decent production value out of an off the shelf webcam.

Video, video, video.

We recently began working with Jody Gonzales from Kesstek, Inc. on her ecommerce product marketing.  Kesstek is a authorized reseller of recording and dictation devices by Olympus, Philips, and other brand name manufacturers. 

Kesstek sells enough to be considered a premier dealer for these national brands.  Located in Hawthorne, NJ, the company stocks, ships, and services a national client base.  Jody says they have a very loyal following of professional business clients such as doctors and lawyers.  While their customer base is mostly B2B, they also have a growing base of consumer customers. (You have to love an increasingly diversified base, particularly in a down market)

Jody has developed a very solid ecommerce platform that she manages in house.  Starting online just a few years ago she has built a very solid business around providing these products:

• Dictation devices, voice recorders, and transcription kits.
• Voice recognition software
• Digital recorders
• Headsets
• Network security cameras
• Business phones by AT&T and Panasonic

Jody uses an x-cart PHP ecommerce solution with an SQL database. This is an extremely popular product with tens of thousands of live applications. Most all of her management and design is done in house.

Kesstek is a good company. I would refer anyone with a need for transcription or recording solutions to call them and ask a few questions.
-Tom

Michele Petrillo has built a profitable business during the past 15 years.  From her offices in Dumont, NJ, Michele creates and distributes gift baskets to consumers and corporate accounts.  Baskets-n-beyond has gained success regionally and nationally by offering high quality custom gift baskets at a competitive price point.  Perhaps more importantly with personal items like gift baskets, the level of service provided is always referral worthy.

Recently Michele called upon G Street to enhance her online lead-gen with the goal of increased sales overall.  Michele has been advertising on Google, and Yahoo for years with some degree of success.  Unfortunately the only measurement of that advertising spend is predicated on questioning the caller about how they found Baskets-n-beyond. 

The goals for transitioning Baskets-n-beyond to managed Search Engine Marketing services by G Street are:

#1 Free Micheles time to focus on her core expertise. Creating and selling gift basket packages.

#2 Identify not only what works, but more importantly what does not work in her advertising.  This will allow G Street to “cut” the ineffective spendingand free up that budget for refocusing on the higher perforning elements of the ad-spend.  This is a key ingredient in the plan to grow her business along with her marketing budget over time.

#3 Focus on soft targets in her competitive market.  In other words do not spend money on keywords like “gift basket” at several dollars a click.  That 3-5 dollars is more effectively spent on garnering 6-10 clicks for keywords like “kosher gift basket” or “yankees gift basket” than it is to get one click on the very general “gift basket” keyword.  I would add that those clicks are not only less expensive, but offer a more highly qualified prospect.  The more specific the keyword phrase, the more specifically the prospect has defined the need they want to address.

#4 Transition some percentage of Michele’s sales to online.  Baskets-n-beyond is installing ecommerce shopping cart functionality on the site.  This will allow us to drive direct sales through the online technology versus traditional telephone.  This is like giving Michele an employee that can take calls and sell 24 hours a day.  Only this way is far less expensive then a human resource.

 Finally, it should be noted that we are starting this initiative in a targeted geography including NY Metro.  Once this effort has been proven one of the easiest modes of expanding the scope is to broaden the overall geographic targeting.     

G Street is working to grow the online sales of a great company based out of North Jersey.  Kesstek sells electronics by Olympus, and Phillips, and others in the recording and dictation market.  They are in fact, according to owner Jody Gonzales, one of the premier volume dealers for these manufacturers. 

Jody is focused on enhancing SEO, and PPC exposure and conversions related to the targeted traffic.  It just so happens that we (G Street) have a great deal of experience with the particular ecommerce platform that is being employed by Jody.  This gives us a bit of a leg up in assisting her with landing page optimization and a significant comfort level for the client to boot.

Jody has elected to focus her initial campaign on a limited number of products with similar prospects.  She is starting with products that serve professionals such as doctors and lawyers.  These are products with a relatively high sales volume, and because Jody is one of the larger resellers her margin on these particular products is healthy enough to absorb a single digit hit from additional lead-generation costs. 

We are also recording all the calls that come in from Kessteks new advertising campaign.  This feature allows Jody to log into http://calls.gstreetweb.com and access high level reports, or individual call recordings.  This is a powerful business tool when the client chooses to use it.  Not only does it provide an idea as to where your prospects are coming from, but also how their phone calls are handled by your staff when the phone rings. 

In the next couple weeks we’ll be launching a broader campaign for Kesstek.com’s sister site Vipertel.com

Vipertel is a full service telecom hardware reseller.  Both new and refurbished business phone system components are available for sale and immediate shipping.    

I must admit to feeling like “The Mack” in front of a colleague when calling to have my car service pick me up for a business trip to St. Louis. 

“Yes, this is client 2711.  I need my car at 6:45pm.” 
(that is not an actual client number so dont bother making any crank calls)

The booking phone call was so quick, easy, and mac-daddy sounding that my search marketing manager turned to ask me “What the heck was that about?!?”   

“Our clients do not want to waste time and money.” says Mike Elshenaway, head of Downtown Car and Limo Services.  Sounds like an idea that would make sense to most business people and the tri-state clientelle that use Downtown for newark airport car service,  a night out, package delivery, and even regularly scheduled visits from out of town.

Downtown will allow people to have a client profile.  And it is very cool when you do!

Downtown clients never have to repeat their address, phone number, name, or method of payment.  The client can even set up a regular pick-up schedule if they would like to.  All this means that Downtown Car and Limo clients dont have to go back to Google, or the yellow pages to find and book a car service or delivery.

G Street Media is very excited to be running a couple of unique online advertising campaigns that are designed to bring in new clients for Mike and his business.  

We started with one client type:

Professionals who want to ramp up the convienience factor and savings when they book a car service or limo.

But after the conversation with my SEM guy we expanded the scope of the campaign to include:

Professionals who want to sound cool when they make their booking. 

Either of these prospects is perfect for Downtown.  I fall into the latter catagory.  I’ve never needed a car service in my cell phone before, but you can bet I do now.  And you can bet that I will be loyal as long as I get to sound cool when I book my pickups.  My Search Engine Marketing guy called and set up a profile too.  (I am positive he will use this primarily to try and impress the ladies by sounding like he has a car at his beck n’ call.

Time to get back to work on some techie-geek-nerd-speak-stuff.  But anybody in Hoboken should put this number in their celly and get ready to look like a cool guy next time they go to Newark Airport, JFK International, LaGuardia, Philly and especially Atlantic City or Foxwoods. 

Click on the “Book Online” button to go to the Downtown website and contact Mike to set up your profile. 

Mack-Daddy, out.

Situation:
Many small businesses are cutting back on marketing and lead generation or waiting for the economy to pick up before they invest in websites and Google advertising.

This blows me away!  Now is the time to stake a claim online.  Much like real estate, in this economy online advertising presents a buyers market.  There is no better time to assign a budget to developing a plan for growing your business online. 

There are 2 types of businesses that we are having success with right now:

#1
Small businesses that are thriving. Real estate agencies, title agencies, lawyers, mortgage brokers, and other organizations that in many instances are actually doing more volume than a year ago.  These clients are calling us to capitalize on this momentum and expand upon their ability to pull in and sell new prospects.

#2
Businesses that are hurting and need to make adjustments to accomodate a slowdown in their market.  Many small companies are concerned about a drop in activity.  A great percentage of these companies never had an online marketing/business development agenda to begin with. 

The slowdown has prompted such businesses to finally take a look at how the internet is the primary hub for sustainable and affordable business development.  Website development, and search engine marketing (Pay Per Click advertising) are the primary methods these businesses are using to stop the bleeding and develop an online initiative.

If you are kicking butt, it is a great time to figure out a way to capitalize and generate some tremendous growth potential for the coming upturn in the economy.
OR
If you are concerned about a big slowdown, it is a great time to make the adjustments you need to “recession proof” your business.

Good luck!

Client:  Hoboken Electrolysis and Skin Therapy by Carla 

We recently took on a website project right here in Hoboken. 
Carla’s Electrolysis and Skin Therapy is a small service business catering to a specific geographic area in Hudson County, NJ. 

Unfortunately, Carla fit the profile shared by many small business owners:
Her website had absolutely no measureable affect on her bottom line.

Carla wanted to develop new business using the web.  The internet, especially in a HIGH traffic area like Hoboken seemed like a valuable resource worth another marketing try. She needed to build a website that was both aesthetically pleasing and structured for Search Engine Optimization.

G Street Worked with Carla to create the message and content of the site while simultaneously managing the SEO tasks to affect performance.

When prospects search for her services the website now performs far more effectively. 

See:
Google Results for query “Hoboken Electrolysis“  
Google Results for query “Hoboken Skin Therapy”

Carla launched her new site in January of 2008.  She is now able to leverage the web as a primary source of new business development. 

Waxing!