MarketShare Communications Claimed

We are MarketShare Communications, a boutique marketing firm specializing in small business marketing initiatives.

MarketShare Communications takes a professional approach to marketing in the New Jersey (NJ) / New York (NY) marketplace. Our firm creates customized marketing initiatives specifically for your business. We’ll help your company grow  – we deliver a unique and effective multi-channel approach that gets results.

We’ll give your businesses an edge in an extremely competitive market. Not sure where to begin? Start with our FREE Marketing Assessment.

Video Transcript:

Hi, this is Elizabeth Gearhart. I’m here with Eileen Greene and Ted Polmar with Market Share Communications, a marketing company.

Good. So why do I hire you instead of somebody else?

Well, we are a husband and wife, a marketing team that comes together with many years of experience we’re one of the only husband and wife teams that bring this kind of thought process and experience to the table. And basically we specialize in working with small and middle market companies for the most part.

As well as solopreneurs. Let’s not forget the people who are starting a business and the people who have been in business for a while and are hitting a wall or want to go to the next level.

It sounds like you can work with any budget. Is that right?

Pretty much. Yes. We do work with some of the small companies and as Ted said, solopreneurs, so we work with smaller budgets for those people who can’t pay for a huge amount of marketing as well as larger companies.

One thing that we were talking about that I found extremely impressive was your SCATTER program. Can you explain that?

Yes. Our SCATTER program is a process by which we actually do our marketing and we work with our clients to teach them this program so they can do it themselves. It basically starts off with a strategy, like you want to accomplish. Then you get your stakeholders together and you discuss the different options on how to do it. And you get to consensus. Everyone then makes a commitment as to what their part is going to be in this initiative. The action starts, what everyone is supposed to do, and they should do it on a timely basis. You will then have transition. People will then start to change. Transformation. The company starts to make major changes. You evaluate where you are and you take a look at your results and it works through marketing, it works through sales, also through a manufacturing process.

And professional services. We do work with a lot of professional services companies. And when you have multiple partners in a business, law firms, CPA firms, often they’re not all on the same page for how to market the business. And when we go through the SCATTER program, we get everybody on the same page and that really helps move the marketing forward.

Plus it helps their morale. Everyone starts to smile and say hello to each other in the morning, enjoy coffee together. Because they have a common purpose.

And that’s so important in a company. Oh my gosh. So it kind of helps define the culture a little bit is what you’re saying. And you’ve said that you work with family companies and that presents its own special challenge. Can you talk about that a little?

Yeah. A lot of what we’ve done for years now is you know, small closely held businesses are often family owned. So you have multi-generations working together. You may have grandma, grandpa still coming into the office in their seventies, eighties, and even older, who ran the business the way they ran it, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and things have changed. Then you have the second level of generation, the kids, and now you have some grandkids coming in who have recently graduated college or graduate school. And it presents a whole other series of challenges when you’re trying to market a company in 2020.

And we have often said we’re more like business psychologists than business marketing company, but it works well. And we really get close with them. We get inside their businesses. We don’t take on too many clients at one time. We work with a small amount of companies because we want to really be there for them, understand their business, really get inside their heads so to speak, to know what they’re thinking, and then we can move forward with a marketing program. And every one of our programs is customized. So we’re not just, you know, everything fits into a cookie cutter kind of thing. Everything is different.

How long have you guys been doing this?

A long time. Both of us had our own companies previously. We are a second marriage. But we knew each other as kids and bumped into each other some years ago and realized we had a lot in common. We merged our two companies under the Market Share Communications heading, and then we moved our staffs together and then got married.

Everything else was done, so we might as well get married.

Market Share has been around for 30 plus years.

So if somebody’s working with you, then I think they get the benefit of the Saturday afternoon discussion. What about this company? And they get two very high level intelligent people with a lot of knowledge, brainstorming about their own project, right?

Absolutely. We’ve had clients call us late in the evening, on Sunday morning, and we encourage that. That’s something that makes us different too. We tell the clients we’re working with and they’re usually owners or stakeholders of the business, if you have an idea, don’t wait until Monday morning if you want to talk about something. Email us, give us a call. They all have our cell phones and we enjoy that. It’s part of what we do and we’re very passionate about it.

So how many clients do you have right now?

Probably six. We’re working with about six clients right now.

We don’t want to dilute our efforts because the type of work we do is so intense, whether it be working on a website program, which then leads to a social media program, which also includes the SEO program, everything. You just can’t quickly finish this and go on to something else. It needs to be well thought out and put together just with the same similar action plan as SCATTER, we take every one of our projects and it has to go through the SCATTER.

Do you have some people that will do the social media posting and the SEO work for people so we can hand you the whole thing and say, just do it.

Yeah. We have people who work for us. Of course, everyone’s virtual right now. We have a social media person and she takes care of all the social media. We have a graphic designer, we have a website developer and we’re on zoom calls and, you know, discuss the client projects as we need to. But they’ve all been with us for quite a while. So, you know, we email what’s going on and the work gets done throughout the day and throughout the week.

Nine to five is really half a day for us.

Nine to five is half a day. So will you set something up and then hand it over, say I wanted to hire my own social media person. Will you set everything up and hand it off and then I can do it in house?

We’ve done both. So we can set up all your social media channels, explain to you, do a tutorial, and then be there as a backup, but you can take it over. Or some people just say to us, I don’t even know what to do, do everything. So what we’ll do with a client like that is, we’ll decide what we’re going to do for the next two or three weeks. We run it past them just so they know what we’re going to be posting. We’re encouraging a lot of video now. So YouTube is huge. If you’re not aware of it already, well, you obviously are because you’re doing video.

Of course how silly, but YouTube is a huge resource for search. So we’re encouraging all of our clients to do YouTube videos. We’re helping them with that. Right before we were locked down, we have a client that does kitchen remodeling. So we walked in with the the phone and we did a whole YouTube video of the showroom. So people who might not want to make the ride there can first go online now on their website and see the entire showroom. The owner walks through, explains everything. What kind of products they carry. So video is having a huge impact and we’re encouraging that a lot.

And where do you post those videos then?

Well, YouTube, on their website, on social media, in an email with a link to an email marketing campaign. So video it’s everywhere.

It’s almost as good as being there.

It is. It’s the next best thing as we’ve all had to find out, right?

But that’s good because using video to contact people, instead of seeing one person at a time, several hundreds or thousands of people can be seeing your video and getting your message.

Right. And I think too, with video, you can convey the message much more quickly, cleanly and easily. Interestingly too, right?

I’ll tell you something interesting. Years ago before video was as big as it is now, we decided to put a few videos on our website. And it got such a positive reaction because people that were deciding whether or not they wanted to work with us, that might have been a referral from someone else, so they hadn’t met us yet, would look at the video. And then when we spoke to them, they’d say, Oh, I feel so much better because I got to see what you look like. And I got to hear what you had to say. So video has a really positive impact all around.

And now with FaceTime and also the zoom and the WebEx and all of these different new programs, doing face to face is really the way to do business. Because they don’t have to be there for you to be seeing and communicating to them.

And you can record your meetings that you have. So you have a record of it if you need to refer back, which is wonderful.

Right. So do you help people SEO their videos?

Yes.

I don’t know if a lot of people realize you can SEO video now on YouTube and that’s important.

Yeah, absolutely. Keyword description, title, tags, all of that.

And statistics, very important. So you know what you’re doing, how successful your programs are, the topics that you use. It’s just invaluable. We can now use a metric for almost everything.

And we audit our client’s websites or our prospect’s websites. So oftentimes people will come to us with an older website and they want to know like, do they really need to update it? And why should they? And we have an auditing program that we can put their website through, compare it to local competitors and give them some, as Ted said, some statistics and some numbers on why they’re not getting found and how we can help them, you know, do better.

That’s important too. So are you constantly doing research on the newest techniques and the newest technologies?

A lot. Yeah.

I haven’t done that for a couple hours now!

Because I think that’s the most important thing.

You’re right. It’s research. When you have a subject to look for, and you’re trying to put ideas together, for example, for our blog, which we do for our clients you just, can’t have an interview and think you’re going to write without doing the research and looking at several different opinions, several different approaches, watching videos of processes.

Yesterday I was researching the difference between fiber board and plywood, which is really quite a strange thing, but I know much more about how plywood and fiber board are made, from the point of cutting down the tree till the time that it’s installed for a kitchen cabinet. I never thought I’d get this knowledge, but I was able to get it and write quite a good blog about it. This is what a true marketing company does, the business owner doesn’t have the time to do what we do.

You know, it goes back to that e-book, The E-Myth. Work on your business, not in your business. And that’s the dilemma that a lot of small businesses have. They don’t have time to work on their business because they’re doing their business.

Right. But I think that you brought up a really important point, Ted, because I do the marketing for my husband’s patent law firm. And it’s very complicated and it’s a whole new language and we’ve hired people to do blogs and they don’t know the difference between a patent, a trademark and a copyright. And they interchange the words and get them mixed up cause they haven’t done the research. And so I had to take that over you know, so really you need a marketing firm that’s going to understand your business and do the research on the kind of things you do.

We also do take a lot of webinars for us so that we’re learning, as you said, the new techniques and the new ways of doing things for SEO and for video and all of that sort of thing.

Over the years, we learned a lot from our clients. You have to listen with both ears and speak with only one mouth, make it short, concise, and start listening again. So for example, if the copywriter or the person you’re using, doesn’t get what you’re saying or the message you’re trying to get across, they’re not the right person for you. Do you need someone who asks questions, who has an open mind to learn. If they don’t, they’re not for you.

So is there anything else need to know about you guys?

Well, just that we are, as I said, we are passionate about what we do. We do get results for our clients. We’ve had some clients that have been with us for 10, 12 years because we are helping them. They’re finding success. And we just, we love doing what we do.

One other point that we didn’t mention was several of our clients that, we have been marketing for them, and they’ve been so successful that they were acquired by much larger companies and have become very, very successful in the financial department. They’ve become millionaires. So we’re very proud of what we’re able to do for our clients. And we look forward to continuing working with some new people as they come.

Well, it sounds like your clients get two for the price of one, right?

They really do.

At the same time!

As a matter of fact, I’ll just end with this. If one of us goes to a meeting without the other, we’ve become so much a part of each other, the clients go ‘where’s Ted?’ Or ‘where’s Ilene?’ I mean, it’s like, we’re almost attached at the hip and it sounds terrible, but it’s a positive kind of attachment. Ted always says he’s the 30,000 foot idea guy. And he really is. We could be sitting in a meeting, I’m very detail oriented. He’s the one that’ll suddenly come up with a great concept. And then I start putting the idea together. So we are a good team in that regard.

Plus we have a great time.

You seem like fun people to me!