Recently Ian Payton sat down with Jennifer Kelly Founder & CEO of New Initiatives Marketing and NimbleQuotes and discussed Jennifer’s business challenges; her marketing services and more.

Jennifer: Hi, my name is Jennifer Kelly. I am the CEO and Founder of New Initiatives Marketing and of NimbleQuotes.com. New Initiatives Marketing is a marketing company that works with business owners that are committed to growing their business and understand that marketing is a huge component in that growth. We make sure that the marketing strategy is sound, and then we implement and execute each element of the marketing every day, week, month in order to help the growth of their business.

With Nimble Quotes, it is a content service for Twitter users, and what it does is users select over 60 categories of inspirational and motivational quotes. They can out in their Twitter stream as if they’ve tweeted it themselves. This frees up time for them to focus on the business content that they want to share with their users.

What makes New Initiatives Marketing different? There’s a lot of different marketing companies out there. According to Forrester Research, 70% of the buyer’s journey is complete before you even realize somebody might want to do business with you. What that means is 70% of the buyer’s journey, that the buyer has already made up their mind that your business is on the short list that they’d like to do business with. Well, what about all the other short lists you haven’t been on?

Your customer is doing this type of research online. They’re also consulting with 11 different sources of information. That can be online. That can be in person as well, and they’re very confident in their ability to do this research. No matter how complex your product or service is, your buyers are very confident that they’ve done their research and they have the skills to do that online. How New Initiatives Marketing can help you in this new situation is with online marketing, with social media marketing, and with generating leads into your business.

We have been in business since 2009. When we first started, one of the unique things about us was that we were a virtual marketing company, and back in 2009 it was quite a hurdle because a lot of our clients at that time were concerned. Can a virtual company really deliver on the marketing that we need done even though they’re not in the same city or region as us? We were able to deliver, and we’re thankful that they came along with us. Now, fast forward to 2015, many people have been either working with suppliers or themselves have been on virtual teams and understand that people can get work done even if they’re not physically located in the same space as they are. That’s been helpful for us.

The growth that we see coupled with the comfort of clients being able to work with a virtual company as well as the attitude and the focus of marketing as a system. We don’t focus on marketing as coming in per campaign. You need to get ready for Christmas. You need to get ready for a trade show. Marketing is a system, just like your payroll system, your operational system. It should be running all year round.

We’ve been working from a business center for about three years now. How it’s helped our business, especially with Telsec, it’s been a number of ways . First of all, the staff here is really professional. I have complete confidence that when my clients or colleagues come in for a meeting, they are greeted by reception and handled professionally. Number two is the location. It’s 1 Young Street. And so, that is really easy for anyone in Toronto or from out of town to understand where to go. It’s easily accessible by taxi, by transit, by car. The third thing I love is when I get assigned to one of the conference rooms for businesses with a gorgeous-like Ontario view.

One of the neat things is you probably can’t see everything because I’m facing the wall, but there is a complete wall of a whiteboard. It’s whiteboard paint in this office, and it really helps because I bring my team in here, and we can have a brainstorming session and collaborate. And all of us are writing all the ideas on it, and we can really get some brainstorming done and really come together and get some kind of strategy figured out by the end of the day. The fact that there is rooms like this that really benefit the brainstorming and collaboration with the team is wonderful.

Ian: Would you recommend this to your New York customers and clients?

Jennifer: Any of my clients or customers or colleagues that need a co-working center, I would recommend Telsec, again, because of the location and the professional service that I’ve gotten from the staff here. One of the great things about Telsec is the community that they’ve built here. They really encourage each of our businesses to interact and do business with each other. They do their very best to promote their client businesses to their other clients, just like we’re doing here with this video. It’s really business focused and a warm community to be a part of.

I’ve seen other videos from other clients at Telsec, and what it really does is put a name to a face and a name to a business. It makes me get to know that business owner a little bit and make it feel like a warm call from the first time I pick up the phone to see if we can do some business together.

Judy Hughes, one of the co-owners of your planning partners was actually a business that we did a lot of work with. We had been a client of theirs for two years and had found out about them through the promotion that Telsec was doing with their own clients.

Ian: Where do you see your business going with this? Jennifer:

The very same thing that Telsec is doing to promote their community and the clients within their community is what we at New Initiatives do with ours. We’re here to work with fast growing, small businesses that understand marketing is a key component of their growth, and we’re here to promote and help them achieve that growth.