Our marketing plan was a GREAT success, well sort of..

Hi - new to this forum, thought I would share our marketing story before I ask for advice..

I started developing a new company about a year ago and a month or so ago we started our marketing strategy. Our company specializes in voice and message broadcasting and to demonstrate the technology we developed a "gimmick" site and posted a few links on a couple of sites (Digg, LifeHacker, Gizmodo etc.). Well, less than 5 days later we had 100k hits, were on the front page of every blog site, were interviewed by local TV news stations (we were on ABC 7 in DC last night), were on a multitude of radio stations, two major South Florida newspapers and are now ranked number 1 in Google with over 520,000 links to our site.

I would say that was a success, right? Well, not quite. The problem is that while our site got all the publicity our "actual" site and company got very little exposure. We carry banners and a link to our company on the popular site but that's about all we did.

What we would like to do now is get some PR going for our main business but also leverage the success of the other site to help drive it forward. I have looked at Prweb and it looks like a fairly good idea. Apart from that the only other thing we have done is use Adwords.

Any advice appreciated.

Thanks.

 

Link to it on your "gimmick" site? I'm assuming you did that already...
But a press release would work well, stating that you were behind it.

What are the 2 sites by the way?

 

You are targetting the wrong places. Example, how many Digg users are actually going to get their credit card out and buy your product? I would guess zero!

What you want is to get your foot into trading portals that deal specifically with voice and message broadcasting and is read by those who purchase such services. Advertise in business magazines and sites that again aim towards companies that use such a service.

Advertising on radio and TV is good but your auidence is too broad so you might not get the best ROI.

Adwords is another great platform but your company needs more sources for business to really drive profits.

 

Mr Loofer,

Classic mistake happened here. You already had all the exposure you would
need to take anything off the ground and you failed to make your 'best' visitors
"raise their hand" to stay in contact with you.

This goal can be achieved in multiple ways, especially in your specific case,
and will result in an open channel to your most desired prospects to follow up
with them over time, to finally filter out the actual buyers of your services
and products.

I'm at least theoretically willing to look at your sites and give you a detailed
recommendation and an actual plan you can implement to recoop the lost
ground, however my time is limited and I would need to be compensated
for my involvement.

In case you would send me a PM please include an offer in exchange
for my time and 20 years marketing expertise that built a very nice house
and multiple ones for my clients and business partners.

 

Have you thought about moving your business site over to the gimmick site?

 

www.call-in-sick.com is the gimmick site.
www.group2call.com it the real business.

 

Live links for us lazy people

http://www.call-in-sick.com
http://www.group2call.com

 

I love call-in-sick.com; what I great idea! I can see why it's worked so well for you!

Unfortunately, as you've no doubt already realized, it targets a completely different market to the one you need for group2call.com. You're managing to reach the employees, whereas you really needed to reach the employers!

My suggestion would be to embrace the new business opportunity, and stop trying to tie it into your "main" business!

You've managed to create a very popular service in it's own right, and you should look at ways to build a separate business from this;

• Monetize the service through advertising,
• Build your list and market to them,
• etc.

As for group2call.com, treat this as a learning experience and try creating another gimmick service that targets the right audience this time.

 

I agree with Dan - you have two choices:

1) Market Group2Call as a platform, and hope people come along and use it.

2) Use it as a platform yourself, and invent the various uses yourself, such as
Call In Sick - then turn these into the money makers.

If your services become popular enough, you will very quickly get noticed by
others who want to license out the platform technology. Look at Skype as a
good example of a platform that is commercialised.

 

These are all good ideas. We are already developing a weather alert system that uses the technology to broadcast alerts to people's phones (currently the only companies that do this can use SMS messaging) and we are building a complete new Sports oriented site dedicated to sports teams and groups that have a need to communicate to the teams and parents. Obviously, I welcome any ideas on where the technology can be used.

Thanks.

 

OMG that site http://www.call-in-sick.com/ is one of the best ideas ive ever seen, brilliant.

 

Thanks! We also did www.ubreakup.com.

We finally got our press release out through prweb, have to say I was pretty impressed with their service overall. I'd post the link but it won't let me.