Friday, October 2, 2009

An Entrepreneur Interview with Carlos Obregon from Bloom Marketing

With the explosion of social media sites on top of the existing sites, it is difficult to navigate in the online marketing world  – how do I position my online brand and what do I do with this thing call social media?  I lucked out and landed my first entrepreneur interview with Carlos Obregon from Bloom Marketing, you bet I will be asking about social media.  Bloom Marketing is a leading search engine marketing agency located in Vancouver British Columbia.


1.  Tell us what you do.
In a nutshell, we do online marketing. The services we offer are:

  • SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to make your site easier to find by prospective clients.
  • PPC (Pay per click advertising) these are the ads you see next to search results.
  • Copywriting – we write text for websites, this text is different than the text you see in print media, it is designed to be easy to read and informative for users and easy to read for search engine robots at the same time.
  • Social media marketing - we help website owners unleash the power of Web 2.0
  • Web Analytics – We track and analyze the traffic that comes to your site, we can then determine who the most likely buyers are, which cities they come from, what times of the day do they normally visit your site, and a large number of other metrics that can shed light into how your online sales are happening.


2. What is the start-up story behind Bloom Marketing?

In 2006 Azita Fazli and I saw the opportunity to start this company because we were witnessing the growing demand for online marketing services. Azita has been doing internet marketing since 2000 and I have been in this field since 2005. We had paying customers from day one and despite the recession we have been growing every year. We currently serve clients in the following industries: financial, tourism, real estate and consumer products and services


3. Where do you see Bloom Marketing going over the next 2 years?

We seem to be specializing in tourism related industries; we currently have a hotel chain, an airline and two regional tourism associations as clients. We also work in partnership with 4 ad agencies in the city to enable them to offer not only traditional media capabilities but digital media as well.


4. Social networking is huge these days; do you incorporate that into your business offering as well?
We do, we are currently active on Facebook with and ad campaign and a Fan page, on LinkedIn and on Twitter.


5. Any tips for start-ups with regard to online marketing and how to navigate through the social networking explosions?

Try it. If you are familiar with print and electronic media, chances are you will be greatly surprised by the ROI and lower cost of online marketing. As for social media, make sure you claim your company name on all the major social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Even if you don’t have the time or resources at the moment to maintain your profiles, at least you can avoid the problem of someone else posing as yourself or your company.

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