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Marketers often use simple images or scripts to illustrate their goals, strategies, and projects. The common image of marketing uses the military concept of “air cover” that both tests and prepares the market for the arrival (launch) of the product while announcing the arrival of the sales force and sales efforts by softening the market segment with demand creation strategies and tactics to facilitate market penetration. But we are getting ahead of ourselves; at the very start of a company, many marketing tasks are performed, often well before the product itself is completed and ready to be launched into its appropriate market(s). Beyond the product itself, the company’s image, culture, logo design, mission statement and solution/product positioning, must be designed and tested until its final draft is approved by executive management for publication. Before the product or service is ready, marketing activities can be planned and launched to reach out and expose the company’s story, its products, services, and solutions, to its potential customers.
Each marketing activity has its cycles and its associated goals, which can be measured with predetermined and accepted sets of metrics. Metrics can be reported counts of “eye balls” on the company’s website, downloaded solutions white papers, case studies, positioning documents, product data sheets, customer and industry surveys, published ads (print and internet), social media feedback, trade show booth presence and accumulated leads, worthy encounters, as well as targeted numbers of published press releases, trade publication articles, interviews and published products/services evaluations, participations in product benchmarks, customers testimonials, partner activities and partnership announcements, reseller wins, customer wins, etc. The job never ends and, actually, if done correctly, gets increasingly more interesting and challenging.
Our company was founded in the summer of 2001 after a deliberate extrication from the San Francisco Bay Area. We met in San Francisco in 1992 where we both worked for a very large publishing house. It was love-at-first-sight, sparking an ongoing approach to life – feet first and in it for the long game, tempered by a very healthy sense of humor.
Prior to our planned exodus from the Bay Area, Fredo moved from sales and marketing for various publications and profit centers while working for the big publishing house to business development for a foreign company’s prelaunch into the US market, then into product management for software and hardware high tech vendors for the next decade. During his sojourn, he developed a passion for technical marketing, which eventually lead him to a product management team lead role for a suite of information security products for a worldwide networking company. Renee cut her teeth in the production and graphic design side of publishing before the birth of our two sons. Afterward, she freelanced design and production for a few magazines and online publications for leading software vendors.
By the end of 2000, it was clear to us that the rat race was not our “thing.” The deliberate extrication was ON. So, we chose to leave the Bay Area, move to the California Central Valley, closer to Renee’s family, and worked toward launching our own company almost two years later. Our collective focus, from the inception of Workingarts Marketing, has been to help businesses tell their own stories. We’ve helped them expand their online visibility and marketing reach with sensitivity to the communities within which they function.
We incorporated our company in 2004 and celebrated its 15-year anniversary in 2016. The unique story that lead us to start selling our services seems to still be very much in demand today: the combination of art and design expertise on one hand and deep technological knowledge on the other, still makes Workingarts Marketing a vendor with a rich skill set that benefits each and every one of our customers. During our tenure, we have had the privilege to work with some great people from a variety of industries, ranging from small enterprises, manufacturing, service, farms, and local organizations to large international companies in various markets and government agencies.
Marketing automation Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software products and/or cloud services are maturing rapidly. Subscription-based systems such as SalesForce.Com, Marketo, Eloqua, etc. in combination with lead cleansing solutions such as jigsaw (a crowd sourced contact information updating systems that is constantly refreshed by member customers) enable companies to automate their lead qualifications via automated and manual monitoring of prospect activities, to eventually graduate them into their proper qualification, historical mapping and nurtured lead information gathering. These systems interact with email campaign solutions (native or third party like Constant Contact, Vertical Response, iContact, Campaigner, etc.) with up-to-date performance metrics available via the web, iPhone or smartphone apps. Many of these tools require training and are not as intuitive as their vendor would have you believe, but minimal training to let you understand the basics and advanced training via online seminars and training videos can help familiarize you with their tools. However, such solutions require you to use them often enough so that you do not forget what you have learned. Workingarts Marketing can help you fill in the gap by training you or implementing strategies on those tools. If we know the tool, we can implement the marketing project for you – if we do not yet know the specific tool you wish to use, we take the training (no charge) and implement the marketing project for you. Our experience allows us to learn new tools quickly because most of them are similar. If you have not yet selected a tool, we can help you decide on the right solution for you based on your goals and resources.
