How Glenn Street Embraces His Niche and Keeps it Entertaining for Everyone

Glenn Street isn’t your average guy. His claim to fame is being the very first mascot in  the National Hockey League, as well as one of the first mascots in professional sports.  After his debut, Glenn began receiving calls from the opposing teams asking where  they could get one of those costumes! He and his small team startedsimply sewing and  building the costumes for the random customers who were calling.

After a while, the calls started flooding in, and it became too much. That’s when Street Characters was founded. Today, Street Characters is best known for creating sports characters (mascots). Their clients over the years have included about half of the teams in the National Hockey League, National Football League, and Major League Baseball.

This might not sound like a company who needs much social media or content marketing, but we all know that a company like that hardly exists anymore these days.

When Glenn started his company 25 years ago, the Internet wasn’t very popular. As time went on and the Internet became increasingly available, though, he realized that it was the perfect tool for a small business like his – one with limited marketing dollars and a global clientele.

After creating his website, mascots.com, Glenn realized how much easier it was for him and his company to be found. In recent hears, Street and his team found value in social media. They began sharing content including information about their mascots as well as entertaining pictures and videos to spread the word about their success.

Glenn found Scoop.it while perusing articles on Mashable. He was drawn in by the concept and thought it could be an interesting addition to his social media efforts.

The intriguing aspect of Glenn’s business is that it is entertainment-based. He finds that most of the content he finds on Scoop.it related to his field is entertaining to a very broad audience. Although it is always related to mascots and street characters, who doesn’t love watching a giant animal do crazy things on the Internet?

Street used to find this content using Google Alerts and reviewing all of it before posting it to Twitter, Facebook, etc. Now, with Scoop.it, he has all of his content in one place and is able to go through it and feed it directly to his networks. He has found this is a great way to create good looking content and increase his SEO.

In fact,Glenn Street’s main goal when he first joined Scoop.it was to find a way to improve his SEO. He had been researching ways to do so, and learned that the more often you update your website with new and interesting content, the better your rankings are.

The Mascots.com website hadn’t been updated in quite some time, and he knew that it would take a lot of time and work to begin updating it and continue doing so on a regular basis. Finding relevant and entertaining content via curation as well as hosting their Scoop.it page on their website has helped Street Characters move up drastically in rankings. According to Glenn, most Street Characters’ new clients come from prospective customers searching for “mascots” or a related term and coming across their page.

Reaching a Broad Audience

To be frank, most people aren’t in the market for a mascot costume. This is a situation that is run into by a large number of small businesses in a niche market; only a small percentage of readers are actually interested in your product/content.

Glenn Street found a great way to use curation to navigate around this obstacle: to “always post things that would be of interest to the broadest audience.” Although this might sound like it’s easier said than done, it is very important to try and post some content every once in a while solely for entertainment value. This will keep your readers coming back for more, and ensure that all of your content isn’t just “dry” industry-related information.

Glenn says that curation has made this task easier beacuse he is constantly adding new content to his page, making it easier to sneak in something just for fun every so often. Although a lot of his readers are current and former mascots looking for new jobs and opportunities, as well as companies looking for new mascots and costumes, these are the types of people who share funny content related to this market. Once that sharing occurs, Glenn’s audience expands exponentially and more traffic is driven to his page and his company.

When asked the best way to sum up his best advice for getting a broader audience, Glenn explained that he is “…part of the entrepreneurs organization, and it’s a group of over 8k entrepreneurs in 140 cities in 42 countries, and a lot of them have businesses very different than mine. But, one of the things i always say to them is to try to make it interesting – give good content but give a little entertainment as well.”

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