Signalfire Lights the Way for Small Business Marketing

Signalfire, LLC (http://www.SignalfireProductions.com) is located southwest of Milwaukee in Delavan, but don’t let the small-town location fool you, their strategic position between Milwaukee, Madison, Chicago and Rockford suits Signalfire just fine. Dubbing themselves “brainstormers with unbridled creativity” and drawing their name from an ancient Roman messaging system, Signalfire is working hard to help brands pass their own messages to customers. Signalfire is a full service branding agency specializing in brand strategy, web development and social media management. Started as an extension of Signalfire owner Matthew Olson’s freelance work, Signalfire now employs 2 project managers and a host of contractors in many online marketing flavors who coordinate with Matthew and his team in a virtual studio environment.

I sat down with Matthew to talk about how Signalfire has helped businesses motivate their customers to action in the online space.Matthew stated that he has had the most success working with small and medium-sized businesses in the manufacturing, financial and tourism industries in Wisconsin and Northern Illinois. He mentioned that the beauty of the Internet is that a small company can compete with larger organizations because everyone has an equal shot at their presence on the web, and that just because a business is small doesn’t mean it can’t afford to have a great website.

Matthew’s mission statement for Signalfire is that “Value must exceed cost”, meaning that with every customer, with every Request for Project, they must educate and justify why the value of bringing Signalfire to the table exceeds any dollar cost to the customer. This has been also been one of Signalfire’s greatest challenges with clients, many of which have never had a professionally designed website, or have done little online marketing. Matthew told me that the first step is telling their clients right away that “you will know your website as well as we do”. This includes building a custom Content Management System which allows clients to make changes to their sites themselves, although they also offer clients the option for Signalfire to maintain it as well.

Matthew helped me gain a new perspective on launching a website, as well. As Matthew put it “A website is not launched, but born. A good website needs to be fed fresh content all the time. It is raised, not just launched and forgotten.” As far as future projects, Matthew wouldn’t talk specifics, but alluded to big projects already on the horizon for Signalfire in 2011. Sounds like this startup will stay burning bright for many years to come.