A few weeks ago I pleasure of grabbing a quick lunch with my buddy Dave. He’s a founding partner at Anchor, Inc 500’s 16th fastest growing company, a former client, but more importantly a friend. As we do, we sat down at Westville on Hudson St ordered some grub and got to talking about a bunch of industry things. What is and isn’t working in the ever-evolving marketing game, and wound up talking about building an inbound content marketing engine for a professional services company. How agencies could capture additional revenue, and a bunch of other topics that would be of no interest to anyone. Like how our families are doing, in case you did care, the general sentiment is – we’re all well.
One of the topics about growth had to do with something that I’d seen be a pivotal part of my career as an executive first at Carto where I was head of growth, and later at my product studio.
How do you send out a press release? Established companies have large PR agencies to do their PR work, medium-sized firms will hire small PR agencies or PR freelancers. As a startup that may have just closed a small seed round, or if you’re bootstrapping, then it can seem challenging to get press. Don’t worry, however, it’s not all that complicated.
Once you hit product-market fit, one of the most important things to set up is a solid marketing foundation for your startup or small business. In my time as a consultant, I’ve worked with startups where it was a complete breeze – the company provided me with fundamental product and marketing, we would have a comprehensive chat – everyone was on the same base, and we would easily get to work.
Yet other times, we would run into companies who as I like to call it, have a misunderstanding of self, or an identity crisis, if you will.
They don’t know what their mission is, what their long term vision is, they lack their base marketing fundamentals.
Hopefully, this post will help remedy that. Reasons being two-fold.
I have to say, I effing love these things, I think they’re phenomenal and what you can do with them is really only (to use a cliche) limited by one’s own imagination. But how to use QR codes?
There’s a saying. Innovate or Die, and boy has it rung true in the past few years. Barnes & Noble, AOL, MySpace, and you have to wonder who’s next? Hollywood? Your global Advertising behemoths? Could be. What happened to innovation at major agencies? Why have product shops won? Or will Management consultancies come out on top?
Believe it. Google has more recently than not launched a new service allowing for next to anyone to buy ad airtime on TV, and it’s part of AdWords. Google TV Ads works very similarly to the current AdWords, you log in with your existing Google account, upload an ad 15, 30 second, etc… name your price, place it in a network and time slot, and boom there you go. Your home made ad is now on TV.
Of course getting your advertisement during a top rated show such as the Simpsons, South Park, or similar is going to cost you a heavy penny as you’ll be competing for airtime with large advertising companies, multinationals brands, etc… and in all as a startup, it’s probably not the most effective manner in which you can spend you ad dollars, but nonetheless, an ad during off peak may be just what you’re looking for.
Though we can’t really vouch for the effectiveness of the service, in the video that we’ve included from from SlateV on using the new service, they explain that from the one million people who saw the advert only about 1000+ actually typed in the address, making a click through of 0.1{abb65e2b6815f549a727af2ea9f3a377a727ddc064972a198a74f88a6b766686}, and for the $1300 they spent on the ad campaign, that makes a potential customer acquisition cost of $1.30. Worth it? Perhaps not for SalteV, but all the same it was just a test ad, and I’m sure that if a company were to offer a service that the TV viewer could use there and then i.e. price promotions, etc… the customer retention would in fact be higher.
Do note though, that “Google TV Ads are available only to advertisers located in the United States who pay in U.S. dollars. We can’t take advertisers from outside the U.S. just yet, and we can’t offer direct debit or prepay as payment options. In addition, advertisers must set up billing prior to initiating a TV Campaign. – Google“
