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.

The mantra of the small business marketer could well be:  “It’s not worth doing if you don’t collect data.” 

Most small businesses are going to learn this the hard way when the owner attempts to cash out, or when it is time to change direction. No data.

For businesses that are ready to take marketing seriously there is a hosted application from StructuredWeb that answers many needs for small businesses who need to invest in their future success. 

The StrucuredWeb platform is a marketing database tool integrated with website management, email marketing, CRM, and ecommerce tools.  We have this web based platform in place with 2 of our clients: Castle Point Realty, and TDNYC.com.

The CRM is comparable to most other solutions in the small & midsize space.  The really cool advantage is the integration with your website and emarketing solutions via the same management interface.  This allows you to manage and access data collected from your website, email campaigns, and through your CRM all in a single tool.  This single tool gives StructuredWeb a great pitch to small businesses who need to establish a marketing effort in house. 

The drawbacks to StructuredWeb are obsolete technology (not including custom solutions for the apparel industry), non-existant SEO/SEM capability, and an ecommerce platform that could only be intended for use by office supply dealers.  Of these shortcomings the only one that gets annoying is the lack of SEO/SEM capabilities.  It actually requires custom work to plug in a Google Analytics or AdWords tracking script.  SEO is simply not a priority for SW.  They seek to drive existing contacts to the web through email marketing.  PPC is another option, but better for a less capable client to use SW to run the whole campaign.  Definately not for the savvy SEM professional who wants to run their own campaigns. 

I definately recommend a closer look for any small business that is ready to get started with a marketing effort.  The technology is web based with an annual licensing fee.  To implement the technology, design a site, and deploy 10 CRM licenses will run you about 10-15k to do it right.  Any small business should expect to invest another 20K in services during the following year to make it worthwhile. 

If you cannot afford to invest in a marketing strategy there will be in trouble if you ever need to change direction or face an economic slowdown.

To learn more or to see a StructuredWeb demo click here.

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!

I encourage you to check out the Website Time Machine to examine the progress of your website and any other properties you might be interested in. 

Simply enter your website URL (unified resource locator), ie: “http://www.gstreetweb.com” and this particular time machine will show you the different stages of your websites lifecycle going back to 1996.  This is way cool for business owners and web designers alike.

The only thing I should point out is that very poorly implemented websites tend not to show up in the ”Time Machine Database”.  This is for many of the very same reasons that sites dont show up in search engines.  So if you cannot find your site in the time machine, you better give us a call.  You need help with online marketing. 

If you want to see some really bad looking websites just go back in time to about 1999. Enjoy.

G Street Media, LLC is proud to release our GStreetWeb.com website, version 2.0.

We have redesigned the site architecture and optimized for search engine performance and a clean, clear presentation. Please feel free to contact us with any feedback regarding ease of navigation, or how we can offer you a more robust online resource.