Potential Capstone Project focused on marketing and social media

The BoCo Buzz to be offered by the Pamlico Business Resources Center as a free service to all businesses in Beaufort County and as a way to generate revenue to reinvest back into our ongoing support of the business community.

For rural small micro businesses of any sort, there are very limited opportunities for them to be able to advertise and or promote their business. For example, in Washington – the newspaper – is published twice a week, and a locally managed Facebook group called “What’s happening in Washington” and “Friends of Downtown” for service businesses that are 80% of our business population. There is nothing.

Last year Keith Hudson at the PBRC decided to develop a Beaufort County-focused business software that would provide ALL businesses with a place to list and promote their business at no cost – it would also give those businesses the opportunity to promote their events – sales, promotions daily menu choices, music and entertainment, new products, etc and the beauty of it all is that all content of the business listing and their events would be the responsibility of the business owner and a basic listing and event posting would be free.

The real beauty of this program is that it gives all business listings an online presence without having to invest in a website and they  will show up in Google searches through our SEO

There would be an opportunity for businesses to purchase enhanced listing and event-posting content to cover the costs.

The website would have 3 audiences – local residents, out-of-town visitors, and business to businesses.

We started development of the website last year and halfway through the developer became ill and the project fell into disrepair due to a lack of funds to restart it – we now have the funds and are starting over. The challenges are given the lack of marketing avenues how do we get the word out to our audiences that the Boco Buzz is available and designed to help them and secondly how should we format the website to be consistent with the marketing program so that once we get them to the site we do not lose them.

The website is https://thebocobuzz.com/. If interested, contact Keith Hudson at keith@pamlicobrc.org.