Business Owners Weigh In on Internet Marketing

As today’s consumer looks to purchase online as a way to flee hefty sales taxes, Culver City business owners are looking to the Internet as a valuable tool to expand commerce.

According to Steve Rose, president of the Culver City Chamber of Commerce, businesses like Fresh Paint and Wonderful World of Animation are part of a current trend to mix both physical stores—bricks and mortar—with Internet technology.

"I think that there's a consistent trend toward social media and the Internet," Rose said. "The Chamber, in a couple months, is going to do a series of social media seminars."

It's practically ancient history in terms of the Internet, but about 15 years ago, gallery owner Debbie Weiss put up the first site for her business, the Wonderful World of Animation at 9517 Culver Boulevard, in Culver City at animationartgallery.com.

"When I first started, I was in Manhattan (New York)," Weiss said. "And one of my clients said I needed to get a website. And I realized I could reach a lot more people with a website."

Norma Ibarra, an art consultant with Fresh Paint Art Advisors, at 9355 Culver Boulevard, Suite B, said that she and Fresh Paint owner Josetta Sbeglia put up the gallery's website at least eight years ago.

"The website was used as a presentation tool," Ibarra said. "The business came from referrals and we weren't really exploiting the Internet as a tool."

Weiss' gallery specializes in animation art and cels for collectors and Fresh Paint features art inventory, but mostly consults with corporations and designers to provide artwork for specific projects. Both consider their physical locations the heart and soul of their businesses.

While neither Ibarra nor Weiss wanted to say exactly how much of their business comes via the Internet, they both described the business as significant. In fact, Weiss said that having a website made it a lot easier in some ways to move her business from New York to Southern California 10 years ago.

"It makes it a lot easier in that you don't have to lose touch with your clients if you have their email addresses," Weiss said, although she conceded that one can lose a little momentum during the parts of the move where everything isn't completely hooked up yet.

As for social media like Facebook and Twitter, Weiss was less than enthusiastic.

"We haven't done anything on it in a year," she said about the gallery's Facebook page, which can be found by doing a search on the popular social media site. "Part of it is that you can spend a lot of time on Facebook reaching a fraction of the people you can reach with a website."

In contrast, Ibarra said that Fresh Paint's Facebook page has been quite helpful, especially for events at the gallery.

"They see other people attending the show and they decide 'I want to be a part of that,'" Ibarra said. "It's inviting and encouraging and that sort of stuff, definitely a good tool from what we've seen from the last few months."

She added that the page sometimes reminds clients that to check in with the gallery, perhaps because they have a job that needs completing, or they haven't been to the gallery in a while and they see that an event is coming.

"It's generated kind of a constant presence," Ibarra said.

Ibarra mentioned that Fresh Paint is in the process of having their website completely re-done to allow visitors to view artwork currently in stock, to buy directly from the site, if they wish, and also to track what people are looking at. She's also interested in exploring all the different avenues for Internet marketing there are, even if she concedes it can be a bit of a time suck.

"We have one person that manages that," she said about the Facebook page, which is assigned to an employee to update. "So it's not something that sucks away an employee's time."

Rose also uses the same tactic with the chamber’s Facebook account, designating only a one hour a day for updating the page, he said.

Weiss, for her part, is perfectly happy sticking with what works.

"I wouldn't say I've done a lot with the new technologies. I think because we're kind of a small niche business and the site works," she said, explaining that a friend of hers tried something complicated that pretty much crashed the friend's site. "We have a site with thousands and thousands of pages. The last thing I want to do is [crash it]."

Also, all of the website work is done in-house.

"I taught myself to code and some of the other members in the gallery to code," Weiss said.

But while Ibarra said that her company will probably re-coup the $20,000 it will cost to have the website re-vamped with only one or two sales, Weiss said that any store looking to go online needs to be aware of what their business needs.

"I can see for what we do, there's a worldwide demand," Weiss said. "I don't think somebody's going to order a bed off the Internet."