Q: What services does Front Range Marketeer offer and who can most benefit? Sparky: Our services are focused on helping local businesses with online internet marketing and reputation building. Many local business owners understand the importance of having an online presence in order for their potential customers to find them easily. But most of these business owners are focused on running their business and don’t have the time to navigate the complexities of internet marketing and the constant changes that the major internet search engines are making. The business that benefits the most is the business focused on the local community to provide the best of best products and services. Q: What are Front Range Marketeer’s key market differentiators Sparky: People often categorize Front Range Marketeer together with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) companies. But, we really are not SEO focused. We certainly use SEO best practices, “white hat” SEO activities that meet search engine guidance. But, what makes us different is our focus on not only giving the internet search engines the in-depth and constantly refreshed local rich content they need, but also looking at innovative ways to provide a business’ potential client with the most convenient and complete user experience possible. Part of this user experience is making sure customers to have to “hunt” the internet to find a business and contact them. Being mobile friendly, email friendly, and social media friendly are standard features for our business partners. We also help businesses with reputation building by reaching out to related industry communities to establish strategic relationships through the internet as well. Putting the complete package together is what I call a “full spectrum” internet marketing strategy that establishes the business as a community partner and continues to build upon that solid reputation over time. Q: How has your career journey prepared you for your forays into marketing with Front Range Marketeer? Sparky: I’ve had the pleasure of having had many interesting work experiences that brought me to Front Range Marketeer. My 39 years of experience have allowed me to have an U.S. Air Force career where I served as an intelligence data analyst and linguist, a weapon system acquisition engineer, and an astronautical engineer developing requirements for major space and cyberspace systems. Followed by business development and engineering analysis consulting in support of defense contractors and some time providing sales, marketing, and engineering development support to internationally focused internet companies gave me a unique set of skills, experience, and strategic contacts to respond when local business owners asked for recommendations on how to better market their products and services on the internet. What started as providing informal advice turned into a business that really benefits local communities? Q: What do you see are key marketing challenges that businesses with limited budgets face? Sparky: The greatest challenge for any local business is to be visible to potential clients. People have become “ad blind” to pay-per-click advertising on the search engines and in social media. The businesses that are most effective are engaged with the community on a regular basis with interesting content. For example, I’m a coffee person (or a coffee snob as my wife likes to say). I follow my local coffee roasting café on Twitter because he tweets when he finishes roasting a new batch and I receive a notification on my smartphone. Then I can run out and get my coffee as freshly roasted as possible. For me, that’s a powerful example of great user experience. But that’s real challenge, keeping your message and online presence persistently refreshed in an engaging way that keeps your customers’ attention. Q: What are your pointers for early stage and growing companies/entrepreneurs on how best to get the best bang for their marketing buck. Sparky: Many business owners set up a website and forget about it. Having a website is a lot like having a vegetable garden, it requires Tender Loving Care (TLC) to get the most out it. Writing in-depth content for a website requires a good amount of thinking and effort. But, my advice to businesses is if you do nothing else, take the time and effort to write as much content as you can. (It’s also the stated number one criteria that Google uses for ranking.) I also recommend doing due diligence on keywords because the keywords that a business owner may think are important may not be the same as the keywords potential customer search for when seeking out that product or service. And in today’s world, having a website just isn’t enough. You need to be where the community is online, so that includes a website; getting registered in the major search engines; having a Google+, Facebook, and Twitter page at a minimum and continually submit posts or re-blog from your website. Mostly, the price is taking the time to write content and tell the story. Also, reaching out to past customers to have them write Google+ or Facebook reviews can result in a significant increase in sales calls. Pay-per-click advertising is a great way to jump start a new offering, but while doing that, start to nurture the online reputation building tasks for long term strategic and persistent positioning. And having a good “special deal” always helps attract those first time buyers.