Our marketing experiences
by Andrew Smith on 07/09/06 at 4:48 pm
8 comments
One of the lessons we learnt when we launched Bug Zapper in 3 days a year ago (read about it at the bottom of this page) was that marketing cannot be an after-thought. We had aimed to make a sale within 3 days, but focused almost entirely on the branding, the e-commerce system and the delivery options. Mid-way through day three we attempted to set up some Google Adwords, but it was too late. Our first actual sale (other than to our sympathetic parents and friends) came a few days after the event, and the purchaser had found our site through a blog that had written about us. Clearly our marketing was not very intentional or thorough!
YuppieChef.com went live about 2 weeks ago, and again we’re at the start of a project that is going to require consistent and pervasive marketing efforts in order to get off the ground. Here are some lessons we have learnt with previous companies:
- Press releases are an excellent source of (practically free) advertising. We estimate that about half of our total Bug Zapper sales have come from press releases in Popular Mechanics, Mens’ Health and Getaway magazines. There are companies that can write and submit press releases for us (usually with a fee per published item), or we can attempt it ourselves. Magazine editors (like most people) are lazy, and so if you can provide them with content that is valuable to their readers, they’ll happily use it to fill the gaps between advertisements. We’re hoping that some magazines will appreciate the unique trendiness of our product range, and write regular reviews of them. Or we could use some of the content from Cooking Good (recipes and tips) and sneak YuppieChef.com into the bottom of each article.
- We love Pay-Per-Click advertising (for example, Google Adwords) because it is easy to set up, very focused and highly trackable. We can target South Africans only, who have searched for a relevant phrase like "Cooking gadgets", and we get to choose how much we are willing to pay for that person to click on our advert and visit our site. Then we can track how much money that type of visitor tends to spend on our site, and only keep the profitable parts of the campaign running. Do you now understand why Google has quickly become one of the most profitable companies in the world? The only downside is that we can’t actually give Google enough money, because there just aren’t enough South African’s using search engines. For YuppieChef we’re going to experiment for the first time with Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCentre.
- Last week we sent our first monthly newsletter called Cooking Good (subscribe for free here). We have teamed up with a real chef to provide good quality content, and we slip in the odd promotion of some of our products. We appreciate that not everyone is going to buy something from our site the first time they meet us, but after a few months of receiving our newsletter a trust will develop, and hopefully that will make skittish South African shoppers happier to part with the credit card details online. Yesterday we created some Google Adwords that pointed to our "free newsletter with recipes and cooking tips", and we’ve gained 5 new subscribers in under 24 hours, at an average advertising cost to us of about R3 per subscriber.
- We would like to experiment with this year’s massive craze of online videos via YouTube and Google Video. As with newsletters, this strategy is about providing valuable content for free, with some subversive advertising thrown in. We are thinking about short cooking lessons and tips that coincidently show off how brilliant our products are.
- We would like a full-time person dedicated to marketing. All of the items I have written about require consistent care and attention, and the current YuppieChef team doesn’t have the expertise or focus to do a good enough job (I nearly wrote, "doesn’t have the time", but that would be a lie). We believe that this is one of those areas where spending money makes money, so if the right person comes along we will do everything possible to get them on to the team. Contact us if you have someone in mind.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
Karin
Sep 8th, 2006
Other idea that brings in visitors (buyers) to your site: find a lively forum about cooking (and/or gadgets), frequently give out free advice there and try to include links to your own site in your posts/answers.
We’re doing this almost daily: http://www.diynot.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=16 and http://www.ebuild.co.uk/cgi-bin/forums/discus.pl.
Also a great way to become known as ‘the expert’
Simple
Andrew
Sep 8th, 2006
Great idea. Once again proving that marketing requires consistent and dedicated work!
Perky
Sep 10th, 2006
I love the video idea. The best place for it would be a site I read about in the Indendent on Sunday a couple of weeks ago. Its called http://www.videojug.com and its basically a how to site. Perfect for cooking demonstrations. I just refined my golf swing by watching their how to video a couple of times.
steve
Sep 14th, 2006
i’ve also tried the whole adwords thing, great in theory, way too thin in practice. As for videos… guys this is south africa, where broadband means 1 megabite per minute, much better off with a community strategy – what about a recipe competition or something
Andrew
Sep 14th, 2006
Sorry Steve, have to disagree – Adwords works brilliantly for some sites.
We have a swimming pool website that gets a few thousand visitors per month thanks to Adwords. Those visitors are all from South Africa, and have all searched for something relating to pools. That means that about 1 in 10 of them make an enquiry (ie give us their contact details). Each visitor costs us about 50 cents from Google, so we’re getting enquries for R5 a pop. Find me another source of advertising that could do that predictably and in a statistically trackable way.
We turned on Google Adwords for YuppieChef.com last week, and we’re currently able to get visitors (all South African) to go to the Cooking Good page (http://www.yuppiechef.coom/Cooking_Good.htm) for about 60 cents. 1 in 3 of them signs up to our newsletter, which means it costs us about R1.80 per subscriber. We got 22 new subscribers today.
We’re selling about R20,000 a month worth of flags on flagkit.co.za from about R200 worth of Adwords.
Granted, it doesn’t work for every site, but it’s definitely the first thing we try.
Regarding videos – current statistics show that 50% of visitors to YuppieChef are on dial-up, while the other half have ADSL/iBurst or connect from their workplace. iBurst and Telkom are both on a huge drive to flood the market with always-on internet. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s certainly growing. We watch videos all the time with our iBurst connection, and we’re certainly not alone.
David e
Nov 23rd, 2006
“I nearly wrote, “doesn’t have the time”, but that would be a lie”
Weird how you know you can do something, but don’t?
People like to “do what they do” and only that?
Amith
Jan 11th, 2007
Andrew,
I found your story very inspiring – R200 for R20000 worth of business, wow! I recently opened a new business that, incidentally registers new businesses online.
Yeah yeah, I wanted to try the whole internet e-commerce thing out – Haven’t really made use of my education yet lol Hmm it seems that Adsense really really works. I got R1300 in business in just 1 day from R6.66 worth of adverts. Positively chuffed! Orgasmic.
Of course, there is alot of competition, even in adword ranking and within business registration providers itself. But I guess that there’s one factor to success..
The bottom line is : content is king.
jonn1
Mar 11th, 2011
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