Member Success Story: Ray Perry | Nitro Marketing Blog ? Local ...

This Guy Gets It Done

"Busy" is a word that Ray Perry knows a lot about. Over the past couple of years, Ray and his partner, Scott Campbell, have teamed up to establish Blaze Marketing (BlazeMarketingInc.com), an online marketing company that assists today's small business. That's in addition to running his own successful MarketBlazer business. Read on to find out how this highly effective local marketer is making a difference in the lives of scores of small business owners.

Ray Perry knows details. This successful small business marketer has worked hard to educate himself in the technicalities and best practices of online marketing, and his research has paid off handsomely. Ray's regional online marketing business, Blaze
Marketing, has shattered the expectations of what an ambitious local marketer can accomplish with a little planning and a lot of effort.

Prior to his career in local online marketing, Ray spent 25 years in high technology sales, marketing and management. Most recently, he was COO of a technology distributor that sells hardware and software services to a nationwide base of dealers. He also worked as a VP of sales and marketing. Eight years ago, Ray decided to leave that company and start his own company, MarketBlazer, a small business marketing company that primarily focuses on technology companies, but can help any small company out there.

He continued his online marketing research and found some other courses he found credible, but with a somewhat different focus, including video and social media training. John Jantsch's online marketing techniques were particularly helpful for Ray, and he became an authorized Duct Tape Marketing consultant. By meshing together the concepts and processes of two or three proven experts, he had his own system in
mind and was ready to get down to business.

An Online Marketing Education

Initially, the bulk of services Ray offered focused on traditional marketing: helping small businesses focus on their core marketing message, then executing that message in traditional marketing venues such as direct mail, advertising, radio and billboards. "It quickly became apparent in trying to advertise my own business that I needed to execute a much broader strategy to include the Internet, so I started to research best practices in Internet marketing," explains Ray. "I found a number of 'marketing gurus' teaching IM, and I attended numerous courses both online and on-site."

Casting the Net

With his MarketBlazer business, Ray began to shift from just traditional small business marketing strategies to using the Internet to find more clients with focused landing pages, free reports, and similar tools. This process led to the birth of his current company, Blaze Marketing. "We've developed a very specific set of services to go after a small business and help them with their online marketing," explains Ray.

One of the most notable things about the business is that nearly 100% of new Blaze Marketing clients had nothing to do with Ray's existing MarketBlazer clients. "We're based in Atlanta, Ga., and we wanted to build a regional business. We focused on 31 cities in the Southeast where we wanted to ultimately hire salespeople and find customers," he continues. "We started with a website for each city, offering a free report for anyone to find." That report ? 'Ten Ways to Greater Visibility Within Your Local Market' ? cut to the chase for lots of small business owners. They liked it, downloaded the report, asked questions and became his first clients.

Something Old, Something New With a steady stream of prospective clients coming in, Ray and his team worked to hone the recruiting process. "Now that we have salespeople, we are teaching them a much more formalized process for going after the market. We're using direct mail, cold calling and other traditional sales tactics to dramatically increase the sales funnel," he explains.

"We set out to blend the best of sales strategy with online marketing tools. There are a lot of companies out there trying to do what we do over the phone," says Ray. "But since our target market was small mom-and-pop businesses, we felt that one-on-one connection with the client was very important." Blaze Marketing has been careful to localize all of its operations, including having a dedicated website for each city and personalizing every salesperson's web page and sales forms. Salespeople are hired within each market so that there is a solid connection between the salesperson and the client. One of the biggest challenges for Ray and his team was to create specific processes that would help Blaze Marketing grow yet still maintain its effectiveness. He and his partner have created a sales training manual, products and services manual and a presentation manual to thoroughly train salespeople and keep everyone on track.

Helping Small Businesses Survive ? and Thrive

Ray is acutely aware of the challenges faced by today's small business owner. "It's very obvious to us that what used to work for a small business ? Yellow Page ads, local newspaper ads, the Chamber of Commerce ? some of these have completely lost their effectiveness. Those that haven't are losing their effectiveness," he explains. This leaves many small business owners perplexed, not knowing what strategy does work in today's marketplace. And this is exactly what Ray finds so gratifying about his job. "We're trying to deliver a strategy composed of very effective online marketing tactics, and teaching them about the process so they understand how to do it." Businesses that once were desperate for a kick-start, business owners who had no idea which direction to turn in now have new hope for success. In some cases, the marketing strategies his team employs make the difference between a business surviving or dying. "They're absolutely grateful for the opportunity. You hear it in their voice and can feel the emotion," says Ray.

He acknowledges that marketing, particularly online Internet marketing, is a skill that requires a great deal of training. For a small business owner to take this on usually isn't feasible, and to hire out services can be extraordinarily expensive. With Blaze Marketing, he believes his team has struck a perfect balance between providing small businesses all of the online tactics they need at a price they can actually afford.

Looking to the Future

In the future, Ray and his team hope to manage their growth so that there is a proper amount of sales coverage in all 31 cities that they service. "We want to grow slow and steady rather than rushing in," he explains. "Our goal is to have systems and outsourcing in place so it can grow without having any negative impact on our clients." And with Ray Perry's proven track record of success, we're confident that's exactly what will happen.

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Source: http://www.nitromarketing.com/blog/lbmm-success-spotlight-ray-perry/

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