Sometimes you arrive early for a meeting and end up finding a very fun article in the waiting room. That happened today when I ran across The Everywhere Economy in the Initiative Foundation Quarterly magazine. The article featured a number of businesses in rural Minnesota that have improved business with e-marketing strategies. Here are excerpts from their stories…

From Pierz

Computers weren’t really my thing,” said Smude, a life-long family farmer, cattle rancher and John Deere dealer. “Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest—I didn’t know much about any of that.”

 

But with the first batch of his family’s bottled cold-pressed sunflower oil about to go to market, Smude knew they needed an online calling card where potential customers could learn more and see that the company was legitimate. “These days, if you don’t have a website, you’re kind of nobody,” said Smude, who set up a simple site and taught himself how to create pages and product descriptions “every night at 10 o’clock, after the chores were done.”

 

The strategy soon paid off. Smude’s Sunflower Oil (smudeoil.com) soon found its way onto grocery shelves and into high-end restaurant kitchens in St. Cloud and the Twin Cities, more than doubling sales within the company’s first two years. As preparation for this success, Smude’s received an Initiative Foundation loan along with technical assistance to apply for a United States Department of Agriculture Value-Added Producer Grant.

From Menahga

That’s how a Google search for vintage tractor collectibles led customers from Ireland, England and Australia to the gravel road in Menahga where metalsmith Steve Peterson crafts custom orders at Kettle River Iron Works (kettleriverironworks.com). “Once I figured out how to get this stuff going on the internet, we had success right away,” he said. “We ship all over now.”

From St Joseph 

Battery Wholesale, Inc., (http://www.bwioutlet.com) a St. Joseph-based wholesaler and Initiative Foundation loan client with six brick-and-mortar outlets across the state, has been dispatching 10 to 15 packages from its warehouse every day since October, when the company became a certified vendor on Amazon.com.

 

“There are a lot bigger players out there, and we’ve got a lot of competition,” said Grant Brastad, the company’s vice president and co-owner. “But if you can deliver a quality product in a decent amount of time, we’ve found you don’t have to be the cheapest and you don’t need to be the most expensive—you just need to be in the game.”

 More from Menahga

 “The internet is a gateway to doing so much more than people realize, especially in a region like this where the overhead and cost of living are relatively low,” said Frank Bray, owner of Final Frontier Toys (finalfrontiertoys.com). His high-end collectible toy shop got its start in a storefront in Gilroy, Calif., in 1994 and signed on as an eBay seller in 1997.

 

“We saw right away that the internet was going to change our business completely,” Bray said. “A storefront is incredibly labor intensive, and the overhead in California is outrageous.” By 2005, as the real estate market began reaching “ridiculous heights,” Bray and his wife decided to cash out their California house, close the storefront and concentrate on e-commerce exclusively. “As long as you have a good internet connection and reliable pick up from FedEx or UPS, you can do what we do anywhere, and anywhere ended up being Menahga,” where Bray’s wife has family.

From Little Falls 

An increasingly global economy has also been a boon to Little Falls’ Atomic Learning (atomiclearning.com), which provides on-demand technology training and support for educators around the world.

 

Launched in 2000 by a team of tech-minded teaching professionals, Atomic Learning soon found a major client in Australia—a development their marketing plan hadn’t anticipated. “But once you launch something on the Internet, it knows no boundaries,” said Dan Meyer, an Atomic Learning co-founder and a member of the Initiative Foundation’s board of trustees. “You can’t put up walls and say we’re not ready to do business with you yet.”

 

Today, the company’s 60,000 how-to videos and tech curriculum tutorials are accessed every day by an audience of more than 7 million users in Australia, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Qatar and 25 other countries.

From Mann Lake 

But social media savvy is not a requirement for succeeding in the world of e-commerce. In fact, Mann Lake Ltd. CEO Jack Thomas, who started his beekeeping supply company (mannlakeltd.com) from his front porch in 1983, is proud to report that he’s never sent a text message, logged on to Twitter or ordered anything from the internet.

 

Even so, the Hackensack-based company has grown to become the world’s largest supplier of beekeeping products, a global reach that Thomas credits in large part to Mann Lake’s move to the internet in the 1990s.

 

Starting with a simple site of pages numbered exactly to correspond to Mann Lake’s popular catalog, the company’s products can now be shipped through Amazon and from their own virtual storefront, where customers can “live chat” with a knowledgeable staff person. Thomas, who now employs 235 people in Minnesota, California and Pennsylvania, believes that responsiveness is a key to their success.