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Testimonial

 

Christine Chmura and

Chmura Economics & Analytics

 

Chmura Hears ka-Ching! ka-Ching!

 

Christine Chmura, president of Chmura Economics & Analytics, has only one complaint about VA Newswire’s digital promotional package. “Last week was a real busy week,” she says. “We got so many leads that we had to put in extra time to get our regular work done!”

 

VA Newswire published an Entrepreneurial Dominion profile about Chmura’s company on April 28. The article ran as news content, not an advertisement, but she liked the way the story succinctly described her innovative workforce-database and analysis tool, JobsEQ, so she signed up for VA Newswire’s special digital promotional package. The results exceeded her wildest expectations: 30 e-mail responses, a couple of phone calls, a newspaper article and innumerable mentions in personal conversations.

 

Best of all, says Chmura, “We have seven serious leads to follow for JobsEQ.” Oh, and four or five more leads for her traditional economic consulting services.

 

It all started with a profile in VA Newswire. VA Newswire's editorial staff selected Chmura Economics & Analytics for a news feature because the company exemplified the entrepreneurial leadership that’s transforming Virginia’s economy. Chmura’s proprietary workforce database promised to revolutionize the fields of economic development and workforce development.

 

The article was well received by VA Newswire readers, generating a respectable number of click-throughs from the weekly newsletter to the full text of the profile. Chmura got a phone call from a prospect literally an hour after the newsletter was e-mailed.

 

Next, VA Newswire re-published the profile in Bacon’s Rebellion, a sister publication aimed at a state-level public policy and economic development audience. Again, a significant number of readers clicked from the newsletter to the full text of the article. Although this venue did not spark any direct leads, Chmura has no doubt that it boosted the company’s visibility. “We went to the Governor’s Business Appreciation breakfast,” Chmura recalls. “Several people said we’d been doing a really good job of getting our story out. … A couple of people said they’d seen it three different places” – in VA Newswire, e-mail and Bacon’s Rebellion.

 

The second phase of the promotion was a bulk e-mail distribution of just the profile. Chmura and her partner, Leslie Peterson, combined e-mails from their personal contact lists and added names from a local professional association. They sent out 1,159 copies of the profile to this highly targeted list. That’s when the e-mails really started pouring in. According to the readership metrics that VA Newswire provided Chmura, this distribution enjoyed an 80 percent “open” rate: 707 recipients accounting for 928 e-mails opened. In an indication of the high level of interest in the profile, dozens of readers either opened the e-mail multiple times or forwarded it – using VA Newswire’s “forward to a friend” feature – to other people.

 

In the third phase, Chmura e-mailed the profile to a list of 621 workforce development professionals around the country. Even though this list included very few people she knew personally, she still logged a 38 percent open rate and received another round of solicitations from parts of the country. Says Chmura: “We received e-mails from Florida , Wisconsin, California, Washington, D.C. and Maryland.”

 

Even now, Chmura is enjoying a residual effect from the promotional campaign. A major state newspaper spotted the profile and wrote its own article. A local chamber of commerce wants to write about JobsEQ. E-mails continue to dribble in.

 

Something that Chmura did not anticipate was the way the article revived the interest of potential clients she had approached in the past but whose leads had grown cold. “We were getting calls from people who saw JobsEQ earlier on.”

 

Meanwhile, Chmura intends to continue using the profile as a marketing tool. “As we make appointments to see clients, we’re sending it out ahead of time. It gives potential users [of JobsEQ] a really good picture of what they would get out of the product. VA Newswire did a great job of capturing the story.”

 

The campaign, says Chmura, was a great success. It rekindled the interest of old prospects. It prompted people she knew to give her a call. And it generated responses from people she never would have time to reach on her own. Concludes the pragmatic, bottom line-oriented economist: “The program is a very cost-effective way of reaching a targeted customer base.”

-- May 19, 2004

 

Try it Yourself

 

We can't promise you results like these -- Chmura Economics & Analytics makes a more compelling story than most -- but we can assure you this: We can track your results so you know exactly how much return you're getting from your investment. And at the end of day, you have a profile that you can place on your own website or convert to print to use as mailers, brochure stuffers or handouts.

 

For information about sponsored profiles, click here.