Louie Lorenzana on building a start-up business

How did you get into your industry?

I have been working in the sales and marketing industry for about 5 years before I got into the Industrial machinery field. The sales and marketing that I was familiar with prior to Solid Lift Parts and Lift Parts Warehouse was a traditional B2C and B2B  that are sometimes done person to person and mostly though the phone. So, getting involved with companies that focuses highly on online traffic was definitely new to me. But very quickly I realized that online and offline marketing doesn’t really stray too far from one another. Marketing will always revolve around the same core values no matter what platform is used.

What’s been your biggest challenge in building a start-up business in your niche market?

I’m not saying that this is a tremendous challenge. But one our greatest focus is the process of understanding such a tight knit niche market. Since our industry is one of the most overlooked industries, figuring out what our customer are into can sometimes be tricky and mystifying.  The reason is because it is able to stay under the radar. And since it lacked of presence and engagement with today’s online platforms, this type of niche market makes it very challenging for us marketers to configure. Our niche markets are currently untraceable through many social media platforms. This gave myself and our other marketers all the leeway to come up with some creative and non-orthodox marketing strategy just to keep our traffic afloat.

What’s been your most successful growth strategy for your websites?

I am extremely proud to say that we have been able to consistently produce highly effective marketing efforts, considering that our niche market doesn’t really play nice with many of the popular online platforms these days. But to narrow down to our number one best strategy, so far, has to be our email campaign. We periodically send out emails to our customers and subscribers with targeted style content and a very unique way of engaging customer response. It’s ironic that most companies actually consider email marketing a separate entity from SEO or content marketing. This is completely opposite with how we view email marketing. From early on with both of our companies, we understood that we need to utilize our email campaign to its full extent and not only drive us sales or awareness but use it to engage our customers with what our websites has to offer. Contrary to popular belief this consistent customer engagement can actually affect our SEO. The reason being is that when there is some form of customer engagement, the right approach can create more than just sales but it can start a process which a customers or a subscribers can turn into a community.

Where do you see your business going in 2015?

2015 is going to be a big year. For both Solid Lift Parts and Lift Parts warehouse. We are looking forward to connecting even more with our customers and we have some amazing things waiting to be unveiled. I cannot be more excited for the new year with all the innovations that we will bring. This will be the year that we will introduce simple yet effective solutions to our industries tough and complicated problems.

If you could leave our readers with one last piece of business advice, what would it be?

In all my career in marketing and business I’ve had roller-coaster ups and downs and one of the greatest lessons I learned is that platforms, systems, and techniques, will come and go. Whatever is efficient and effective now will later become obsolete. You will always have to innovate and improvise. But culture and core values will remain. You can add on to it, but in most cases it will always stay inherently the same. So search for that core value that you can always live with no matter what for it can be with you for the rest of your life.