Cheetah and the NCRA Mid-Year Convention
Cheetah will not be attending the upcoming NCRA Mid-Year Convention and we will continue to advertise periodically in the JCR.
We have thought hard about our marketing and advertising decisions over the past half decade. We have also received some comments and observations from people that, by not attending or by advertising sporadically, that the industry might not be aware that we are in business.
We acknowledge that those speculations may be right and we could possibly be making a mistake by not being present at the mid-year NCRA event and in the national Journal of Court Reporting magazine.
We decided that we would try something different a few years ago after our conversations with some customers, reviewing what the previous owners/managers had done and surveying the changes in the media world.
Most of our customers had started to search for us on the internet – not in the JCR.
We heard a significant number of customers tell us they did not go the mid-year or annual NCRA shows, they like their state reporter association meetings better.
We also started to feel that advertising was a bit more ‘big company’ than we really wanted to be.
So we thought we would try an experiment for a while. We have spent our time and money contacting all of our customers via phone and taken great care in hiring really talented people to working in customer service and technical support. We have also spent more time working on our website and providing user forums.
Our customers have helped us understand that it is better to be small and personal, and better to have our solid technical support available 7x24x365 than to spend money advertising in a magazine that reaches only about a third of court reporters and attending an annual event that is attended by only about 5% of court reporters.
How has this been working? So far, the results look positive – we are able to incorporate more in to the products and services we offer because we talk to more customers and we are getting more referrals from customers using the new software.
We are getting out to more local state reporter events and advertising in their newsletters. Of course, we would love to be in all these places. That does take time, effort and money – we are trying to be good custodians of the funds our customers send us. This, to us anyway, means product and support first through personal contact, then advertising.
I hope this answers any concerns about our decisions to not be in the JCR and at the Mid-Year convention. I am pretty sure that we will be at the annual event this year, as we have been at them since 2000.
Again, thank you to everyone for your concern and input. If there is anything that we can do to help, please let us know.
Regards,
Don Miller
President/CEO
Cheetah International, Inc.
We have thought hard about our marketing and advertising decisions over the past half decade. We have also received some comments and observations from people that, by not attending or by advertising sporadically, that the industry might not be aware that we are in business.
We acknowledge that those speculations may be right and we could possibly be making a mistake by not being present at the mid-year NCRA event and in the national Journal of Court Reporting magazine.
We decided that we would try something different a few years ago after our conversations with some customers, reviewing what the previous owners/managers had done and surveying the changes in the media world.
Most of our customers had started to search for us on the internet – not in the JCR.
We heard a significant number of customers tell us they did not go the mid-year or annual NCRA shows, they like their state reporter association meetings better.
We also started to feel that advertising was a bit more ‘big company’ than we really wanted to be.
So we thought we would try an experiment for a while. We have spent our time and money contacting all of our customers via phone and taken great care in hiring really talented people to working in customer service and technical support. We have also spent more time working on our website and providing user forums.
Our customers have helped us understand that it is better to be small and personal, and better to have our solid technical support available 7x24x365 than to spend money advertising in a magazine that reaches only about a third of court reporters and attending an annual event that is attended by only about 5% of court reporters.
How has this been working? So far, the results look positive – we are able to incorporate more in to the products and services we offer because we talk to more customers and we are getting more referrals from customers using the new software.
We are getting out to more local state reporter events and advertising in their newsletters. Of course, we would love to be in all these places. That does take time, effort and money – we are trying to be good custodians of the funds our customers send us. This, to us anyway, means product and support first through personal contact, then advertising.
I hope this answers any concerns about our decisions to not be in the JCR and at the Mid-Year convention. I am pretty sure that we will be at the annual event this year, as we have been at them since 2000.
Again, thank you to everyone for your concern and input. If there is anything that we can do to help, please let us know.
Regards,
Don Miller
President/CEO
Cheetah International, Inc.
posted by Cheetah International @ 12:59 PM
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