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Services for Ultimate Promotions include:

Website design
Continuous search engine optimization
Integration with online payment service
Content and product updates
Custom quote forms
Set up email marketing tools
Dynamically rotating testimonials

How to Profit from Progress

The company: Ultimate Promotions supplies inspired corporate gifts and promotional products.

The mission: To create a full-service e-commerce site that would transform a home-based business into a dominant player in the sector.

Ultimate Promotions was founded by Craig Davidiuk in 1998 after he spent several years working for his family’s manufacturing business. When Craig started Ultimate Promotions from his home in Squamish he wanted to set himself apart from other vendors in the industry and he decided to take the online route. A combination of Craig’s business acumen and Leif Jason’s tech savvy has seen turnover double every year for the last four years, a customer base swell by several hundred and recognition within the industry as a business innovator.

Say Goodbye to Average

When Craig Davidiuk looked around at industry competitors, he saw an opportunity for change. The typical sales model for a lot of people in this industry is the little store where people come in to touch and feel samples, have a look at the catalogue and meet with the sales person,” he explains.

“But that is very limiting in terms of the geographic territory you can handle. I’d always been very interested in working in my own home, running a very small, lean operation and that’s just not possible with that sales model so I opted to go more aggressive with a web presence because then I could sell across Canada and the United States.”

Not only did he want to go online, he wanted someone who could help his business evolve along with the internet and he believed that Mastermynde’s Creative Director Leif Jason was the person who could help him dream big. “I had ideas about new markets and new ways of doing business and Leif was the one who showed me how it could be done. He has proved himself a very valuable part of our organization.”

Turning Marketing Into Money

As he started developing the Ultimate Promotions website, Jason used Search Engine Optimization (SEO) during the early stages of development so he could offer guidance on the classification and breakdown of product offerings based on actual search terms used by visitors. “A lot of times I take direction from the client about what they think the business priorities are. But with Ultimate Promotions, the success of web marketing lead to changes in the business model. By using marketing information from the website and analyzing search patterns, we were able to drive change,” he says.

Initially unconvinced about the power of SEO, Craig is now a true believer as he has seen the huge impact Mastermynde’s online marketing activities have had on sales and the customer base. “I was quite skeptical because I was coming from a sales environment where you use advertising or Yellow Pages or the local paper or do cold calling,” he admits.

But now he views SEO as one of the key factors in his business success. “Leif’s SEO talents regularly land me contracts in the $2,000 to $5,000 range and my average sales dollar value climbs each year due to our positioning. Out of the 1100 leads I generated in 2006, over 250 of them were from web search. It took about a year before I really started believing in it and eventually this became a cost of doing business that was necessary and it would pay for itself.”

Business Essentials Made Easy

Sourcing relevant online services is another key Mastermynde service offering. Leif prides himself in being able to identify the internet tools that provide the best fit for his customers. Beanstream Payment Engine and the Constant Contact email marketing service are two of the internet tools that have been integrated with the Ultimate Promotions site.Craig was already using Beanstream to process payments because it was a great vehicle for people with low volume on credit card transactions. We decided to continue that relationship and plug into the other tools/applications offered by Beanstream such as product and content management.”

Staying in touch with existing and potential customers was another vital element of the website, says Leif and Constant Contact offered a competitive and simple solution. “Constant Contact is the ideal system for people who are sending out frequent emails because they are pricing the number of times you send out emails rather than the number of people you send it to. The system is easy to manage and for a tech-savvy business user it is great.”

How to Make Money Online

Today, visitors to Ultipromo.com can browse 15,000 product lines, request quotes and buy online with ease. “Industry magazines interview me to find out how I’ve broken the mold of the traditional promo products distributor,” says Craig. “I’m the “little website that could” in an industry full of crusty old sales types. I sell more with two people than most distributors do with a sales team and support staff due to efficiencies realized through e-commerce and my website.”

The relationship between Ultimate Promotions and Mastermynde provides a classic example of Jason’s partnership strategy. Rather than offering a cut-paste-and-run web design service, that gives you a fixed solution that may be okay for the present but will soon be out of date, Mastermynde is set up to provide multi-faceted, sustainable support. “It’s not just about putting the website together and then we’re done”, he explains. “It’s about what your website is doing for you. Is it making your business more efficient because it answers people’s questions? Does it have the right info about products to generate more leads and act as a funnel for your sales? We invest a lot of time in making websites work for business because when the right infrastructure is in place, you really will see immediate and long-term results.”

Mission Accomplished: By collaborating with Mastermynde, entrepreneur Craig Davidiuk has turned his grand plans into reality. Not only does his website stand apart from his competitors’ offerings, it works harder too. The company is getting more lucrative orders and in the last 12 months, around 40% of the new names on the customer database came from the internet.

To find out how Mastermynde can help your company, contact us today.

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