RSS feed. Thanks for visiting! Thanks for visiting! This site posts interviews, news, stories and jobs about Canadian advertising, marketing, public relations and technology companies - "the connected community". Go ahead, subscribe to our feed!

In this edition, I had a chance to interview Ross Dunn, CEO & Founder of Victoria-based StepForth.

Any highlights for StepForth last year that really shaped your business?

2007 heralded a major jump in the awareness of SEM and its global importance. For the last 10 years the SEM industry had been fighting to justify its existence to a wide swath of the commercial and advertising community. In the past but last year SEM came of age gaining validity and acceptance that seemed to minimize considerably in these communities; the word was finally out… SEM is important! Also, most importantly, 2007 was StepForth’s 10 year anniversary so it was a time for us to celebrate while reflecting on the past and visualizing the next 10 years of success.

Will SEM continue to grow in 2008? Any particular factors that will cause this growth?

Search engine marketing (SEM) will definitely continue to grow for a variety of reasons. First: although 2007 showed increased awareness in the importance of SEM there are still many more late adopters to the Internet that still will require a variety of quality search engine marketing services. Second: many clients are still ramping up their budgets as they consistently see the powerful results that quality SEM services can provide. So not only have they discovered the importance of SEM but they have a clear understanding that big budgets can translate into big profits. The results of the SEMPO in-house salary survey really drove this home by highlighting the impressive 200k/month budgets that in-house SEMs are getting to play with these days. Third: social marketing continues to grow at an amazing rate and a lot of social marketing concepts involve facets of search engine marketing so with the two intertwined I think that SEM will continue to grow and evolve in ways no one expects.

What can we expect from StepForth in 2008?

In the past 6 months StepForth has greatly expanded its workforce. In this short time period we have hired 3 additional staff, which is unheard of in our 10 year history. One staff member is handling our growing pay-per-click management wing, another is taking on the growing realm of social media marketing and the remaining member is the latest addition to our sales force. Thanks to these additions in staffing we will be introducing a whole new array of services; these will include social marketing and hopefully, in the near future, mobile marketing. To tie all this in we will have a new website launched soon along with a client portal and we are moving to an office with three times more space. Last but not least the StepForth blog will become a lot more active as more staff contributors chime in with the latest news and strategies in web marketing. As for acquisition, StepForth is not planning on acquiring any other businesses at this time but stranger things have happened.

Categories: Features