Sew What? / Rent What? Places User Preferences First with Expanded Flickr and YouTube Content

Custom theatrical drape manufacturer Sew What? Inc. along with sister company Rent What? Inc. are expanding their online marketing and social media efforts to allow web users to experience the companies' drapery products on the users' own terms.

Recently, the two companies expanded channels on both Flickr and YouTube, including cross-links with their own websites. As a result, prospective customers can research hundreds of stage curtain and backdrop photos, watch corresponding videos, and then visit the company web sites and company blog for more details.

"After 15 years, we've got so many amazing images and videos in our portfolio. We wanted to find a more meaningful way to integrate them into a proper online experience for our customers," said Sew What? president Megan Duckett. "Our customers live on Flickr, they live on YouTube -- in other words, we want to be where they are and not force them to always have to come to us."

Those who do visit the companies' main websites are provided links to their Flickr and YouTube channels, see URLs below. And these channels link back to their respective company sites, so the user never feels lost. An additional benefit says Duckett is that the cross-linking of these platforms strengthens the effectiveness of the companies' search engine marketing efforts. "Everything we do is now key-worded," she commented. "We want to make it insanely easy for producers, tour managers, special event planners, and designers to find exactly what they're looking for when they decide to put on a show and make it really fantastic."

Since the 2008 formation of Rent What? Inc., which rents out many of the fabrics and materials produced by Sew What? Inc., one of the marketing challenges has been to decide where content appropriately overlaps and where to differentiate the two services. Duckett pointed out that the two companies could be co-branded on the YouTube and Flickr channels, since many of the featured drapery products can be custom-fabricated or rented or both, but each entity would maintain its own unique website.

"The old days of online marketing are gone," Ms Duckett added. "We have to stay current with where our customers are going, what they're looking for, and how they're using the web. We can't say we're here to serve them if we're not where they hang out."