arthurficial’s posterous

Three Saturdays ago at about 12:30 midday I got a call from my accountant Arvind Magan, who wanted to talk to me about the most unexpected topic of all. Online Marketing.

His exact words to me were:

"You know Arthur, I've been thinking about your business a lot the last few weeks. I know how you creative types just wanna sit and come up with ideas and run with it. You don't have time to be chasing clients for money and do paperwork and that kind of stuff. So I want you to think about doing something where all you'll do is come up with the creative ideas and implement it. Let me worry about money and admin. Leave that side of the business to me."

Arvind clearly understands that the future of marketing is online and that soon all other marketing activities will shift to the web. As an accountant in his late 40s\early 50s, he is remarkably clued up on the role of technology in business and has his entire office networked. The last profession you'd expect to be "hip to what's happening". He further assured me that he will be 100% behind me in whatever I endeavour. (i wondered whether i should tell him now that i need 500K to do a full-day seminar with David Meerman Scott in South Africa)

Since then I've been thinking long and hard about the direction to take in future. I run a reasonably successfuldesign & branding agency part-time and I have been done in to the tune of 22K by 3 people I knew well and trusted; all this just before Christmas 2007. In addition I am tired of printers wanting artwork in this format and that colour profile.. running up and down to get banners printed here, and business cards printed there - all just to increase my margins. So as a result I started thinking about the direction to take in future.

I have to say that thanks to the excellent education I have received from the guys at Hubspot, David Meerman Scott,Seth Godin, Chris Brogan, Guy Kawasaki and the entire South African blogosphere over the last 9 months, I know exactly what I'm going to do and when.

I am launching an advertising agency for the internet. Call it a NEW MARKETING agency.

This was all crystallised today with the release of a captivating video by the guys over at Hubspot.

I have to admit I was still a bit lost on where to start, but was fortunate to find that Hubspot had everything I need to know to get cracking, from a webinar on SEO 101, to How to use Facebook and now this video.

I am now convinced that I will help my clients achieve optimum brand awareness and bottom line growth by getting prospects to find them instead of them finding prospects. Thank you Hubspot.