Overview
How does E3 increase your business with the internet?
- We build an attractive, functional website.
- We get your website found by optimizing it for Search Engines.
- We promote your website with techniques like online video and social media marketing.
- We improve your bottom line with internet technologies for accounting, collaboration, billing, HR, etc.
And because E3 integrates eMarketing activities, you get end to end marketing analytics that help you make smart marketing decisions! Metrics such as Per Page Traffic, Pay Per Click Efficiency, Conversion Ratios, etc. allow you to identify how many people are coming to your page, how many are purchasing your products, and how many are leaving valuable sales prospect information like their phone number of email address. We then make recommendations on how to improve these metrics for higher ROI on your internet marketing investments.
When/Who?
The founders of E3 are experienced Internet Strategy consultants with backgrounds in Law and Business. We were interested in the transformative impacts of the internet on small businesses and were early students of web2.0 concepts. The discussions and early work were on-going for two years and in March of 2007 the company was officially founded and funded. For more information about them, see our management page.
Why?
The most interesting aspect of the internet’s impact on business from E3′s perspective is in how it has changed the nature of shopping and the shape of the seller’s marketing funnel. Ten years ago, if a company was interested in buying a new product or service, it started by attending trade shows, reading industry journals, and going to seminars to learn more. Early in the shopping process, it would engage directly with the key vendors’ sales people who would feed them asymmetric information from the top of their marketing funnel to the bottom of their funnel. Today, that same process looks very different. The potential customer starts in Google by searching relevant keywords. The prospect would spend time on each seller’s site, subscribe to the most interesting seller blogs, subscribe to the seller’s customers’ blogs, join an industry discussion forum, etc. Relatively late in the prospect’s decision cycle, it would engage the vendor’s sales people directly. That first vendor conversation today is much different from the one a decade ago because the prospect often knows as much about the vendor’s product as the sales rep does and the prospect is already “qualified.”
The result of this shift in shopping patterns is that the internet has tended to make every marketplace more “efficient.” Just as Ebay makes the niche market for antique lamps, WWI collectors items, and Pittsburgh Pirates ticket stubs more efficient, the internet as a whole is making the niche markets for intellectual property law, IT consulting, retail equipment, and food brokerage more efficient. It used to be that the size of your firm’s sales force was the key to finding the most new customers, but that is not the case today. The good news for small businesses is that on the internet, no one can tell if you are a one person sole proprietorship or a 1000 person agency.
It turns out that most small businesses have relatively niche products that they generally sell to companies in their black books. The internet disproportionately favors small businesses since it enables them to position their niche goods to people shopping for that particular niche good regardless of the numbers of degrees of separation from their blackbook.
What?
E3′s vision is to provide internet marketing services and great advice to small businesses enabling them to leverage these disruptive effects of the internet to “get found” by more prospects shopping in their niche and to convert a higher percentage of prospects into customers.
Most small businesses have a website that behaves like their old paper-based brochures, but just sitting online. It is rarely updated, is not given significant visibility by the search engines, has low traffic levels, does not encourage return visits, does not enable/track conversions, etc. E3 transforms that relatively static website into a modern marketing machine that produces the right leads and helps convert a higher percentage of them into qualified opportunities.
Where?
The company is based in Pittsburgh, PA, near the Carnegie Mellon and University of Pittsburgh campuses. There is also a branch location in Columbus, OH.
