THE CHALLENGE
Amy Ballon and Danielle Botterell, co-founders of Admiral Road, recognized that customers were increasingly buying their fleece baby blankets online.
The partners knew their Internet sales channel had even greater potential but they were not sure how to achieve it. “We knew how to convert customers if they already knew about us,” Ms. Botterell explains, “but we couldn’t get new customers to our site. We were completely unsearchable: unless you typed in our company name you wouldn’t find us online. We’d dabbled in (Google) AdWords but ultimately found them expensive in terms of bringing actual customers to us.”
Like many businesses, Toronto-based Admiral Road is a small, lean company with no IT staff. How could Ms. Ballon and Ms. Botterell get the specialized expertise they needed? The issue is not limited to search engine optimization (SEO). As customers increasingly want to buy online and through mobile devices, businesses are feeling pressure to keep up with technological changes and they often need help to do it.
THE BACKGROUND
Admiral Road produces handmade fleece blankets for babies and children, as well as other fun products carrying their original designs, such as T-shirts and winter scarves. Ms. Ballon and Ms. Botterell are that rare breed – best friends who can run a business together. They met at university, worked abroad, got their MBAs and had corporate careers on Bay Street before deciding to go out on their own.
When they founded Admiral Road, developing a professional image and a website was a priority. “Our website has always been our main interface with customers, and we wanted it to reflect our products: accessible, high quality and functional, with a great design aesthetic. We built it with the help of a talented web designer. It was a straightforward design and branding exercise,” Ms. Ballon says.
But once you establish an online presence, you need to keep it up-to-date, especially if you sell to end consumers. Ms. Ballon and Ms. Botterell were able to do much of the work themselves. They regularly updated their website, they sent quarterly e-newsletters to their customers, and they got involved with social media – starting a blog, a Facebook fan page, and an active Twitter account.
Their online photo gallery, depicting babies with Admiral Road blankets, provided great visuals. When it came to increasing traffic to their website through SEO techniques, however, they hit a wall. “Neither us nor our web designer at the time had the technological know-how to optimize our website for search engines. We were referred to local SEO firms, but initial research showed it to be costly – especially since we didn’t know if it would be effective,” Ms. Botterell says.
Entrepreneurial friends had told them they could hire technical expertise online and they decided to give it a try.
Fleece baby blanket design by Admiral Road.
THE SOLUTION
There are websites that bring buyers and sellers of technological services together in an online market, the way eBay does for products. As with eBay, the advantage of an online market is that a greater number of sellers are connected with a greater number of buyers.
For the seller, you can pitch your specialized skills to a much larger market. For the buyer, it’s easier and faster to find someone with the specific technical skills you need who has time in their schedule to do the work when you need it done.
Ms. Ballon and Ms. Botterell used elance.com because they’d heard good things about it from their friends. You post a job on the site for $10 and get proposals from freelancers telling you what they can do and how much it will cost. As with eBay, you can check out feedback from past jobs they’ve done. When they’ve completed the work, you can pay for it with PayPal or a credit card.
