Public Company Marketing

Matthew's first job after college was with the brokerage firm First Summit Securities, Inc. located in Montville, NJ. During his tenure there he held both Series 62 and Series 63 broker licenses while developing their inhouse computer software and websites.

Fast forward to 2011 where Matthew had the opportunity to provide programming and consulting services to a newly public company. The details of the project are outlined below.

CASE STUDY:
Company: AmeriWorks Financial Services, Inc.
Stock Symbol: AWKS

GOAL:
AWKS wanted their first project to be launched correctly, and for it to surpass shareholder expectations.

BACKGROUND:
AWKS put more than 12 months of research into creating a website for point of sale cashier training and certification. The website is www.pos-university.com and it uses WordPress and Moodle as the underlying technologies to power the site. However, both systems are notorious for difficult setups when trying to accomplish something unique. Deployment and development of the POS-U website took more than 6 months simply to get WordPress and Moodle to work well.

INITIAL HIRING:
Matthew met with the AWKS executives in early January 2011, spending an entire day at their offices in Pennsylvania to get an idea of the operation, employees and executive goals. On that same morning he also had one of his employees in New Jersey sit and video record their usage of the current beta POS-U website.

The day long meeting covered topics of mobile marketing, training, Amazon eBooks, advertising and branding. The video recording was sent over and Matthew sat with the top executive and watched the recording and together was able to identify areas of the technology that still needed work.

INITIAL FINDINGS:
In order to gain recognition with job seekers and supermarket owners this new service would have to get their attention. Market research at the time identified that no other company was providing a certification program for cashier training. However, Matthew's findings also seemed to indicate that no one was searching online for that type of training either. Although, after interviewing several random people it was discovered that it seems like there is a level of dissatisfaction with grocery store cashiers, but it also seems like there is a general assumption that nothing can be done about the problem.

In order for the POS-U program to be effective it would have to be introduced at the same time in all digital formats and made available through the widest possible distribution networks.

PROJECT STRATEGY:

• 3 New websites for marketing and additional education
• 1 Twitter account
• 1 Facebook Business Page
• EZine Articles
• Amazon Kindle eBook
• Downloadable and printable PDF book
• Mobile website with similar functionality of the POS-U site
• YouTube Channel
• Multiple press releases

PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION:
Matthew was given full creative freedom of project implementation. This allowed him to use the content management system he programmed and uses for all his other customers.

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