Home / Merged Marketing Services
We’re about business. We try to be fun and we like to learn about your business but always with a purpose, to get at assembling and managing tools and programs that are specific to you. This is another founding principle at Stratum. We believe the fields of marketing, advertising, information technologies, design and public relations all converge online. Recently we heard it said this way:
“When you think of a pie chart and try to allocate a slice for the internet you must realize that it’s not a slice of the pie it’s the plate.”
You can take this to the bank. Online tools are specialized flexible and evolutionary. In turn, the execution of marketing online is too; like audio in the form of podcasting and video in the form of YouTube or ‘user created content’ like CNN.com’s iReporters who have scooped a number of big stories.
Stratum doesn’t have a toolset that we pull out every time the same way. We believe that if you do, as the old saying goes:
“When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail”.
We believe the day has passed when a marketing firm had the lock on the keys to your success. Nowadays it just might be you who found the software that will work; if you just could get it tied into your web site. At Stratum, that’s ok. We believe a technology or tagline or something else in the mix can come from any part of the extended team, without there being a mark against someone else in the process. The information flows freely nowadays. Fact is we kind of think it always did, but the old school agencies and firms tried to make it look like it was all coming from them, when in fact many times it was the client who brought a new publication to the mix or a new trade show. We believe that what the customer really wanted all along was an extended team.
Stratum spun-off as an independent firm in 1997 after being the in-house design/build group for InfiNet a company owned by Gannet; Knight Ridder & Landmark Communications. InfiNet had a large-scale hosting system for the newspapers. The system was dual-redundant failover supported; mission critical. So the founders of Stratum were steeped in understanding critical technology and the internet backbone that connected it all up.
Just like getting the news out, we understand getting your marketing message and advertising published online to be a critical business function too. Stratum became a customer of Verizon Business and has hosted all the sites and services we offer on our own equipment, through Verizon in Northern Virginia for over a decade.
Why? Because you don’t want the time your CEO gets intercept interviewed at a tradeshow by a news service to be the test of your web site server that you hadn’t planned on. Nor do you want to invest tens of thousands of dollars in an online ad service to learn whether your shopping cart application can deliver on the traffic numbers the campaign generated. And our favorite example: You don’t want to have to accept it when the I.T. staff tells you “that’s the way it has to look”.
We know our customers ask questions like “If I see domain names for sale for $8 why does Stratum want $35? or “If there’s $10 a month hosting why would I pay you $50? Stratum adds value to our hosting service by running servers yes, but with other parts of the whole, like multiple domain names to track metrics; keeping track of everything for you individually and as a system.
