Demystifying Tulmar’s Web Presence
by Vicky-Eve Lovvorn – Marketing & Customer Support Coordinator
Internet has taken a major place in our lives, and this rule makes no exception for the lives of businesses, big or small.
I started working at Tulmar 3 years ago, in 2017. As an entry project, I had to revisit and modernize the company’s Website. The exercise was an eye opener in just how quickly things move in the digital world. At that point, the Website was a mere 5 years old, which, in Internet life, is a very long time. It was very clear that whatever was to come next had to be “alive” and kept up to date.
This was a very exciting project, and honestly, a really great way to join a small business. I had to really learn all the products and services, and how the industry works, to get ahead. Not to mention the trends. For those who aren’t as familiar with what that represents, a trend a way of doing things, a style, that is popular in the moment but that also lasts and spreads. It doesn’t last forever, but it has a full life cycle: creation, spreading, peak, plateau and a slow decline. It is often mistaken for a fad, which is very short lived. Investing in a new thing that is a fad, rarely brings a return on investment, as the fad’s popularity dies before you can even start to see real benefit come from it. A trend however, if you catch it early or even in its peak, can be greatly beneficial. Not to mention the costs of not jumping on board.
This experience with our new Website did dive into this. A lot of SMEs (small and medium enterprises) often make the mistake of thinking trends don’t apply to them, or that the cost is too high. More and more however, the Web is building on making trends and tools more accessible. There are alternative for almost anything, and the era of information is ripe for the “Do it yourself” movement, with all tutorials and guides available with just a few hours of Web searches. In itself, it was one of the large trend we aimed to apply to our new Website, and still sticks today: accessibility. That means content written for the masses, with less jargon and speech-like sentences; quick loading images rather flashy banners; video galleries and responsive design (meaning a site that works just as well on your mobile devices than it does on a desktop workstation).
A few months down the line, we had achieved it! www.tulmar.com had migrated to a brand-new design. It was designed to be mobile friendly, easy to navigate and yet, complete, with all our most important resources at your fingertips. Most importantly, it held a plan to not sink into the list of outdated Websites. We had to keep our news section relevant, and our events up to date and clean of anything past due. After a year, we created a transactional face to Tulmar, with our eStore at www.tulmarstore.com. This permitted to reach the customers who wanted to do quick and easy business with their credit card in hand, saving themselves a lot of time and simplifying the whole process. Of course, this eStore isn’t an entity alone, as we have since connected it to our Website, with some landing pages offering the same functionalities. Last but not least, we also linked our Social media to our Website.
Ah yes, the Social medias. Nowadays, you cannot be expected to be relevant on the Web without at least some form of Social media presence. After the project of launching our Website, that is where Tulmar focused: It’s social media presence. We already had an active Facebook and a few videos online on Youtube. The difficult thing with managing Social media, is that there is a lot of activities and changes in that world. There are a lot of existing options and a lot to manage for each! So how to choose?
Well first, you need to really understand the type of business you are, and the world you interact with. For us at Tulmar, a lot is B2B (business to business) and requires us to communicate with people during their work time, rather than reach consumers using their leisure hours. Furthermore, the Aerospace and Defence industries are both very specific niches, with targeted needs. Based on these facts and few others, it was soon clear that the main tools for us would be Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and LinkedIn. Each would have it’s own purpose. Twitter is more of an echo, resonating the other Social media and easier to manage due to shorter post and more used to link to other content. It was a great tool to have on our Website to keep it relevant and let everyone know at a glance “What’s up with Tulmar”. Facebook is more of a community tool. We can keep in touch with the area around our main office, in Hawkesbury Ontario. It’s a great way to leverage our Human Resources when we need new talents, and also to keep our employees engaged! It’s always fun to browse our Facebook at home, in the evening and see some of the antics our employees have gone through, or reminisce about a particular success we had when Tulmar participated in a community event. Youtube is our video presence, both due to its proven lasting success, and its collaboration with Google. That helps the Website stay relevant on search engines, meaning we come up even higher when people look for products and services we can offer. Finally, we have LinkedIn, our most developed Social media for sales and the one we have worked very thoroughly in the past years. This is the social portal for professionals. Not only is it great for finding talents, but it helps remain visible to those we want to know about us. We started off with a simple business page, and now, we have a complete team of people that actively share internal news, leverage one another and keep an active profile. It’s extremely important, to grow a social media, to have a lot of people participate in it. If only the marketing rep in a company posts news, it looks overly manufactured. It lacks a bit of that human touch. With the whole team involved, we get the share the same news, but with different perspectives, and that’s important. These angles reach different groups and display Tulmar’s humanity, its warm side. It showcases that our customers, our partners, when they reach us, they are dealing with people, rather than a calculate cold front.
I could go on with a lot more about our presence on the Web, how we manage to stay relevant, the work we put into it daily. But it would never end. It changes, every year, every month. There is something new. It’s an exciting world where we never stop learning. As a business, we aim to stay on top of it, so you can expect to see a lot more of Tulmar on the Web in the coming years.