Business finds success through social networking

(NECN: Peter Howe, Littleton, Mass.) – With its humble little office and warehouse next to the railroad tracks, fencing supplier Louis E. Page Inc. may not immediately look like a firm using cutting-edge marketing. But in fact, the 116-year-old company is proving to be a raging success story for how to use social networking and other online tools to increase sales and sales leads. Duncan Page now runs the company his grandfather, Louis, started in 1893. It began as a hay and peat-moss supplier on a railroad-siding wharf in Boston’s Charlestown neighborhood, then moved to Concord and ultimately Littleton as it evolved to sell fencing supplies when suburban development claimed dozens of farms around Greater Boston. As big-box stores like Home Depot and Lowe’s ate up the plain-vanilla fencing business, Louis Page continued to find ways to specialize and gain a niche, like importing a unique high-strength mesh from Belgium that is used around paddle tennis courts. It sells a range of fencing meshes that are used in horse paddocks and game-bird cages and other specialty installations, with customers from all around New England and other areas of the country. The company supplemented its mailed-out catalog and ads in specialty magazines with a website about five years ago, but the big breakthrough came last December, when Duncan added a blog that he calls The Fence Post. Since then, he has had an 850 percent increase in sales leads. One article Duncan wrote was about how to use something called woven wire fencing to build a horse paddock. Guess how many people have downloaded it? More than 1,500. Duncan admits it is surprising how many people turn out to be interested in reading a blog about, of all things, fencing products. “It was surprising when I started looking at the data coming in. You can tell how much of an increase you’ve had every month.” Inbound-marketing expert Mike Volpe of www.hubspot.com, an online marketing advice company, says Duncan is a classic smart soft-seller. Not hyping his products on his blog, but positioning himself as a trustworthy authority, which winds up being one of the most effective ways to attract business. “What you want to think about is who your customers are and what are the issues that are important to them.What are they thinking about.? Usually it’s about their problems, rather than the name of your product and things like that. So what you really want to do is blog about topics that are going to be interesting to your customers before they know who you are,” Volpe said. Volpe adds: “I think the big don’t is, just like you wouldn’t walk into a cocktail party and just start screaming at the top of your lungs how awesome you are, you shouldn’t do that on your blog.” Duncan Page said his typical blog post is “just an article about the products. We don’t say you should buy this from us. We don’t really refer to ourselves at all. It’s really important to the whole marketing effort to blog and sort of become known as an authority and a trusted authority on what you’re selling. We’ve been around enough to know the kind of questions people have about products, so we try to explain that in the blog. It’s information like that they wouldn’t be able to find out easily any other way.” “One of the things I’ve learned is that it really works,” Duncan Page said. As Louis Page & Co. enters its 117th year, the namesake’s grandson’s looking ahead … to video blogging. “I would like to get into video, is one thing, because that’s very effective to be able to actually show somebody rather than have to write and describe it with words.”