New Small Business Activity in Grey Lynn and New Directions for Kurb
Need Marketing and Branding support that’s affordable from Matt at Kurb in Grey Lynn?
web development + online marketing // cd dvd duplication / design + posters
Email kurbpromo@gmail.com // 027 684 8250
Alright time for an update on new ideas that are coming out of my head for Kurb and a little bit of discussion around that. Might give you some thoughts on marketing and business, but really I find these kind of blogging sessions helpful personally for working through ideas.
Recently things have been a little weird because April was really full on, things got a bit unmanageable and I found myself back in the 10+ hours a day zone slogging it out, but now I’ve made solid progress in managing a few guys to be around, I’m just readjusting now to having the time to work on new ideas.
What’s on the agenda:
Website Overhaul: Whenever I see how well I’m doing with stuff like PPC adwords and my videos I remember that the basic design of my site looks pretty amateur and I don’t think it really conveys much professionalisn to prospects.
On top of that, other than the flagship pages, the rest of the site is very disorganised from over four years of evolution, though I did move to a new server last year there are lots of pages with disorganised links and probably a lot of outdated stuff as well. The real problem here is that it is probably effecting my google ranking that this is all fairly hodge podge and needs to be improved with just basic SEO stuff. At the end of the day nothing has the power to effect my business like even slight improvements in Google rankings but SEO is such a long and fickle game.
Getting aggressive with CD / DVD duplication: This is my flagship service so I can’t afford to not think about taking what we do best and making it better, making a renewed effort with marketing to take this to the next level. Site overhaul would be part of that, so would videos and a general all over commitment to building up our brand. Then it would be about targetting certain niches – one of my best niches where I’ve been getting word of mouth at the moment is reproducing promotional DVD’s for construction and marine products so it’s a matter of thinking how to laser target that market and also make it easier for the word of mouth process to unfold – again, branding stuff.
Video Marketing and Branding: Video I believe has had a high return on the very small investment I made in it and I have every intention of continuing to develop my online video presence and in fact I think it’s actually becoming imperative to use video to cut through the clutter and cumbersome information overload we’re experiencing online through text based communications.
Garage: I have about a 50-60ft sq garage that I have tidied up and painted but it’s still leaking badly. I’m trying to make it an appropriate space to expand my operations aswe have a great location in terms of the area we’re in - grey lynn, which is close to the city and a creative area in amongst several other affluent suburbs. My concept has been to move from conducting our regular operations into retail and more retail style service. My ideas for retail products and service have mainly branched off from what I’m doing currently - promotional tools.
Printing is too low margin but I’ve decided that this is one of a number of service s I will look to contract out including t-shirts and clothes, stickers, and other promotional items. In terms of products I will start with raw materials that I would otherwise use for CD reproduction and expand from there with practical items that people need, perhaps more plastic items that would store and wouldn’ be at risk of being attractive to thieves then in a year or so look at more high end promotional goods such as cameras, video, electronic items.
Also there could possibly be a connection between sourcing promotional products and items for branding clients and facilitating the sale and distribution.
Leverage: The concept of leverage is that I provide service to a market that will then act in a way that provides value to a third party that will the provide that value to me as cash. That’s leverage and I believe it’s a powerful business model so I will continue to tread carefully as I investigate this avenue hopeful that it will bring new prospects not oly for me but a whole new way of working with and for my marketing clients.
Personal Branding: developing more cohesive and in depth branding packages for new and valuable markets.
I’ll keep writing more but these are just some of the bigger directions I’m looking to go with my business so I just looking for the convergence, the target, the magic leveraging point thats going to point toward the gap - the right turn with all the ideas.
