Christmas is just around the corner, so this weekend Dan Leo and Michael of RateMyRomeo, accompanied by Agne and yours truly decided to spread a little love, hitting the busy shopping streets to do some cheeky PR & marketing and try to pick up a few users and sign ups along the way.
If you caught a glimpse of the pic I’m sure you have a pretty good idea of whats going on. So even though our fingers and toes were frozen, we still managed to spread some christmas cheer to all the single ladies and gents this christmas, with free cupcakes!
So with marketing on the mind, I thought it would be an idea to hear about what kind of PR and marketing strategies the other teams have been up to over the past few weeks.
When they’re not playing office football, Carhoots, have focused heavily on online marketing. James told me ‘Our strategy has been very SEO focused,we write 4 blogs a week, and pack them with keywords’. Along with this Lee and James are best known so far for their phenomenal marketing feat of 1.3 million followers through Pinterst, a story recently picked up by SkyNews. James explained, ‘we got onboard with pinterest in the early days, wanting to explore uncommon and under-utilised channels. We liked the fact that we could market an experience to the customer ’. They are now exploring different strategies for Google AdWords and Facebook.
Myna have been working to identify several promising customer segments, Noel explained. The goal being to raise awareness with the most influential people in these segments, start interactions with the influencers and as a result get Myna included in their discussions. ‘It’s almost certainly, much better to get a single high quality post featured on an aggregator like Hacker News than write five posts that no-one reads. This means our brand can reach a much wider audience with a badge of approval from the big players! ’.
Dee from Wewana explained that they have taken a ’3 pronged approach’ to their marketing campaign. ‘The first being talking to people at events. Showing our faces regularly at midnight launches can be tough but it pay’s off when someone we made the effort to speak to makes the effort to come to one of our events’. Connecting with gaming communities is the second prong of Wewana’s strategy, holding tournaments, land centres and connecting with gamers on YouTube and forums sparks discussions and raises awareness. And the third is ‘Big Marketing’, talking to journalists, magazines, and those big and elusive gaming companies. It seems this approach has paid off, since their Beta launch last week, downloads have been flying out the app store!
And the marketing genii that are Team Sorted understood that in order to successfully market their app they would first need to educate the market. ‘We are providing a new type of service which means working to come up in any natural google searches would be fruitless. We decided the best marketing strategy was to plug things the old fashioned way; entering competitions like TEW (which we won btw) has been great pr for us and off the back of this we managed to get into Tech Crunch which was amazing!’ If that wasn’t enough yesterday James popped off to his spot on BBC West Midlands where he had another opportunity to plug the app to their massive audience. And they hit the press again yesterday, featured in the Birmingham Mail. Is that all guys? Honestly, pull your finger out!
On Tuesday Walter and Gabrielle from UpCloo held a presentation at BSP to generate customer awareness and engagement. This came in two parts, firstly why use UpCloo and the benefits the software brings. The second part for the techies in the audience, was about the technology behind UpCloo. As well as this Gabriele and Walter have used AdWords to target customers. ‘We tried Linked In too which was well targeted but too expensive for our requirements. Another strategy has been working on getting specialised websites to review our product’.
EatSocial have been working to target specific groups of people, testing different approaches to find the most successful way to market to these networks. They also work on blogging and SEO but they told me the best marketing materials tend to come from their customers, who are encouraged to blog and review their experience. ‘Its a much easier sell when customers can hear about what a brilliant time one of their peers or friends had at an EatSocial. It also provides reassurance to those a little daunted by the idea of eating with strangers as well as useful feedback for us!’.
So that was a nice little marketing round up for you, hope you enjoyed it!. Until next time.
