Limelight Marketing:
Hometown Help for Your Organizations

By Pamela Miller

Anyone who has ever wanted a little light to shine on them or their company would do well to talk with Cathy Shaw and Kimberlee Shaw of Limelight Marketing & Promotions. The two women from Annapolis know marketing and promotional material inside out and have long experience shining the best light possible on all kinds of businesses and individuals. Each woman comes to the company with different experience, education and expertise, but with common goals: grow their business and raise their families with intelligence, grace, good common sense and enthusiasm.

As soon as they start talking about their joint enterprise, their eyes shine, smiles take over and they lean forward making points keenly and positively. Their obvious enjoyment in their profession is complemented with a hard-headed business sense. Face-to-face interaction with their clients and easily accessible up-to-the-minute technology are equal partners in their overall business plan. Their website, www.limelightmktg.com, was created to allow clients both current and potential to search through hundreds of thousands of promotional items, but does not include a way to order directly from the site. Cathy Shaw says, “We want you to [call us] because there’s a great great value in having that conversation with us because we become your marketing partner. We will make sure that your logo looks exactly the way you want it, the right size, that you have a PMS [Pantone Matching System] match for your colors and we’ll also, which is included in our counseling at no fee, we’ll make sure you’re ordering the right item.” Cathy goes on to say that “customer service is our number one priority. It’s right up there with making sure that our customers receive the items or that they’re purchasing the items that grant them the greatest return on investment.”

Cathy Shaw and Kimberlee Shaw are married to first cousins, and it was their husbands’ family events that brought the two women together. They discovered common work in marketing and later, a common goal to stay home to raise their children while keeping their hands in the business world. Each had started doing work independently as consultants, and upon trading notes, were inspired to combine their talents in making a new company. Each brings separate and complementary strengths to the company: Cathy, with a degree in Journalism and Public Relations, is comfortable jumping right into a conversation and taking the lead in discussions, and Kim, who has a degree in marketing with a minor in economics, is the go-to woman with snarly financial issues. Their thinking is so alike when it comes to the best interests of their clients and their business that they can almost take for granted that if one thinks something is right, the other will as well.

One of the ways they fit so well together is their approach to making motherhood and business successful on all fronts. Speaking one after the other, both Cathy and Kim said, “We decided to create a business that would allow us to be at home with our children and still allow us to function as marketing consultants in a more formal way because we were working with a number of clients already individually on our own.” Kim went on, “We do work from our homes and it’s kind of the beauty of what we do in our business. We may have something we’re researching for a client and we can put our kids to bed at 8:00 and then work on it. It’s not a nine-to-five—which sometimes is not always a great thing, but overall is the beauty of the best of both worlds. We’re there for our kids every day when they’re home from school, yet we’re still doing a rewarding job.”

Some of Limelight’s major strengths are the owners’ expertise in providing the right materials to promote a company or individual and their long-standing and cordial relationships with their suppliers. Cathy and Kim are both adept at helping a company figure out what its objectives are and how promotional materials will help achieve those objectives. The two women have found that companies know they need to give out something, but often don’t know what—Limelight can work out a whole package of things “with staying power” that will be useful to the people who receive them and will therefore be memorable. Cathy and Kim have established rock solid relationships with their suppliers and that’s helped ensure that they get really good pricing they can pass on to their customers—and that’s especially important when they’re working with schools and non-profits. Both women firmly believe in what they call the “cycle of goodness”—using their skills and expertise to give back to their community by, as Cathy says, “offering the best deals possible so that people are spending as little as they have to to keep the most” of the money coming in for the benefit of the school or the non-profit. Inspiring other women who are out there trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives is another part of giving back that’s important to the women of Limelight Marketing & Promotions.

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