Marketing solutions for little orgs with big dreams.
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JTE Communications is Moving

JTE Communications is excited to announce that we are moving from New Mexico to Oregon. After two years in Santa Fe, New Mexico the company is relocating to Beaverton, Oregon.

Existing Customers

Fear not, the move will have zero effect on our existing clients. We will still provide the same remote offerings as we always have, and there will be no interruptions to your services. The move will actually save a bit of money for our for-profit clients, as we will no longer be charging state sales taxes as soon as the move is complete in June 2022.

New Clients

Due to the chaos of moving, we will not schedule any new client consultations through June 6, 2022.

Why we’re moving

It’s nothing personal, Santa Fe. JTE Communications will never forget it was born New Mexico True! But part of the excitement of owning a home business is taking it with you when you move your family across the country. Tim has accepted a great new position with Intel so Falkor and Amanda are packing up the office and resettling. We look forward to mingling with the Beaverton business community and sharing our marketing and communication know-how with the Pacific Northwest!

We’re moving from New Mexico to Oregon.

JTE Communications
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Women-Owned Businesses

March is Women’s History Month, and Monday, March 8 is International Women’s Day. It is officially time to celebrate female achievement, recognize the women who have paved the way, and raise awareness of women’s equality! What better time to talk about women-owned businesses?

Infographic about women-owned businesses

To be clear, “women-owned business” is a technical term in the realm of federal grants and contracting. To provide a “level playing field for women business owners” the U.S. Federal Government aims to award at least 5 percent of all federal contracting dollars to women-owned businesses each year. (If this sentence leaves you scratching your head, believe me you are not alone.) In order to qualify for this designation, you must register your business with the US government System for Award Management (SAM), and then create an account with the Small Business Administration (SBA) to become certified. It’s a whole thing – and there are other less-free ways to go about it, too. There are far better sources than this blog to find information on what all of that actually means!  I’d suggest checking out the SBA, your local Small Business Development Center (SBDC) and/or SCORE for more info.

Federal funding and contracts aside, most actually small businesses know whether they are women-owned without needing a certification. But can that designation actually help us? This optimistic woman says yes!

The number of women-owned businesses increased by 21 percent between 2014 and 2019, while all businesses increased by only 9 percent. And the rate of growth for businesses owned by women of color grew at 43 percent!  It isn’t all good news, as there are growing revenue gaps for women-owned businesses, and an even wider gap for most minority-women-owned businesses. For every dollar that a privately held company generated in 1997, women-owned businesses generated only 37 cents. That went down to 30 cents in 2019.

SUPPORT NETWORKS

There are a host of nonprofit associations advocating for women entrepreneurs and providing resources and services to support them. Here are just a few:

If joining an association or getting certified is not in your budget, there are free and lower-cost opportunities available as well.

  • FREE – highlight your business as women-led on your Google Business Profile.
  • $2/day – highlight your business as Women-owned & operated on your Yelp for business page
  • FREE – join free networking groups for women business owners and entrepreneurs on LinkedIn and Facebook
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What is Marketing?

And why do I need a consultant?

The term “marketing” has many definitions and subsets, but broadly speaking marketing is anything you do to persuade people to buy your product or use your service. It is all of the activities and tools you use to connect your target audience with your special sauce.

No matter what your industry is – if you manufacture widgets, serve food, provide professional services or human services – you have a special sauce, something about your organization that distinguishes it from all of its competitors. You could be objectively producing the greatest sauce the world has ever known but it isn’t going to do you any good if no one else has ever tasted it and no one wants to buy it. You need marketing to find out who your potential customers are and to convince them to engage with your product and support your business. Paid advertising, printed materials, branded swag, earned media coverage, public events and social media posts are all examples of marketing tools you might choose to promote your special sauce to the sauce-lovers in your community. Marketing communications is using those tools to tell your story and to build relationships that will allow your business to succeed.

Large companies and nonprofits have big marketing and communications teams on staff to create and implement marketing plans and to monitor and analyze their activities. They may also employ full-service marketing firms to do all or some of this work for them. According to The CMO Survey (https://cmosurvey.org/) released in August 2019 US companies allocate between 7.1 percent and 11.1 percent of their budget to marketing.

That is all fine and well for multi-million-dollar corporations, but what about the rest of us? If your budget is closer to $500,000 a year you probably can’t afford to hire a marketing team or a contract with Epsilon (https://us.epsilon.com/). If you are not a marketing pro and 7 to 11 percent of your budget is not enough to support a full-time or part-time salary plus marketing expenses it probably makes sense for you to consider working with a smaller marketing consultant.

Working with a consultant means you get all of the benefits of a marketing professional but only pay for what you need when you need it. You do not need to worry about hiring and training staff or investing in marketing tools that might not end up working the way you expected. You might want to have a consultant create a marketing plan for your organization and provide coaching to your existing staff to help you implement it on your own. You can work with a consultant to identify which aspects of your marketing plan are feasible for you to do on your own and have the consultant focus on the elements that you can’t do yourself. Or you can have a consultant do most of your marketing tasks so you can focus on the rest of your organization.

JTE Communications would love to schedule a free 30-minute consultation with you to learn about your special sauce and see how we can help you persuade more people to try it, to buy it, and to tell their friends to do the same. Click here to get started.

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Introducing Falkor – the JTE Communications’ official spokeslizard

I would like to formally introduce you to Falkor, the official spokeslizard of JTE Communications. 

This stunning reptilian prince is a bearded dragon estimated to be around six years old. He was adopted from one of my favorite animal-related nonprofit organizations The Northern Colorado Herpetological Society (https://nocohs.org/). 

Falkor is what many in the animal rescue community call a Foster Failure – which means I originally planned to foster Falkor in my home until he was adopted by his forever family, but then decided to adopt him myself instead. Falkor has been a fixture of my home office since late 2016 when I fell in love with a bearded dragon while volunteering at an event and offered to foster one of the three beardies that were surrendered to the organization that day. When it came time for my family to move from Colorado to New Mexico that Spring I knew there was no way I was about to leave him behind.

Named in honor of the beloved Luck Dragon of The Neverending Story fame, Falkor’s favorite activities include basking, hiding under bookshelves, climbing furniture and generally “boogeying” around my office. And he is easily the best supervisor I have ever had!

GIF by Tras la Cámara - Find & Share on GIPHY

Falkor has provided his support and leadership at my desk for years, and he is definitely up to the challenge of official spokeslizard duties. You can look out for his work on JTE Communications’ Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn posts as well as in future newsletters or in the background of our next video chat.  

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