Master class – how to open your
digital doors
This is a guest post by @andygauk, digital strategist for Freestyle Interactive.
“I’m going to sell stuff, but how!”
The business process of yester-year would say you buy the stock, you rent a premises, you kit out the shop front and you open the doors and start selling.
Businesses that are launching today are online and often they don’t have a bricks-and-mortar shop to open the doors of. The businesses of today still need customers but those customers have a much highly likelihood of being online. So how do you open your online doors and get customers in to buy?
1. Pay for advertising
If no one knows about you, you won’t get customers. Advertising is the quickest way to build awareness. Using PPC (pay per click) advertising means that you only pay for a customer who actually clicks on your advert and you can be very specific who sees the advert by picking targeted and relevant keywords. Targeting keywords that people are using to search will help you generate traffic and gain understand of the types of words customers use when searching for your products.
There is a couple of good free tools for planning your paid advertising campaign. The Adwords keyword tool and Double Click Ad planner.
2. Find the community
Who is out the social web that should buy your product? What do they look like and how do they speak? By finding people to engage with you can build your awareness and drive not only customers but potential advocates!
Use a tool like Hootsuite to search Twitter for hashtags or keywords people type in when writing about your product – follow these people and send them a message (not too saley though).
3. Get on Google
This is actually the most important and PPC advertising and community management will give you the tools you need to be able to do this well.
Google is the world’s biggest search engine – they work by creating formulas to measure the best content on the web. If a user finds your website when searching Google they are significantly more likely to respect and trust your website – thus making them more likely to buy from you.
Getting to the top of Google is a long process but well worth it! Start by asking every customer you get to mention you on Social Media, blogs and forums. Then start spending 20 mins a day searching for your competitors and comparing their online shop to yours – figure out why they are ahead of you – and improve what you do. After you’ve dove this check out SEOMoz. It’s a great website for teaching you how to improving Google rankings and developing content marketing plans.
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Mopapp
In the Spotlight this week: Mopapp. Lil’Shares provide a platform for startups like this to get the essential funding they need to launch, join the private beta launch now.
Why are Mopapp in the spotlight?
When you build an app for the iPhone or other mobile device, you want to be able to track your performance from all angles. With basic numbers, you only see how your app is performing on a very high level. Mopapp gives you the power to change all that. You can now track app sale performance that shows how you are doing on a daily basis, and target your analytics right down to specific markets and customers. Look at your revenues, profits, performance of ad networks, and even watch what users are saying about your app. Get real-time data from Mopapp, along the option to track in-app purchases.
Introduction from Mopapp
What Seedcamp say?
Mopapp tracks & analyzes your mobile apps’ sales, generating easy-to-understand reports. Know more about your market and customers.
Contact them:
- Website: www.mopapp.com
- Twitter: @mopapp
- Founders: Federico Sita, Alessandro Rizzoli, Marco Bellinasso
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Famigo
This is a review of Famigo. Lil’Shares provide a platform for startups like this to get the essential funding they need to launch, join the private beta launch now.
What we say?
It’s time to be able to protect your children from being exposed from inappropriate games and apps on your mobile phone. Famigo is a review site that gives you full reviews about software you or your child are considering downloading. Apps are sortable by both free and paid versions, as well as sorting by age, so you can customize your search results depending on how old your child is.
Additionally, Famigo offers Sandbox for Android, which makes your phone completely child-proof. Now you can block purchases, texts and more with one click, simply by installing this easy to use app.
What Crunchbase say?
Famigo’s vision is simple: mobile technology should simply work for families.
Famigo provides a platform for families to safely discover, manage, and enjoy content and apps on smartphones and tablets. We want everyone from toddlers to grandmothers to have successful interactions every time they use a smartphone or tablet in a family setting.
Famigo creates a better mobile experience for parents and kids by providing them with the tools to discover, manage and enjoy content & apps on smartphones and tablets. They simplify app discovery through reviews and recommendations on Famigo.com and make Android devices kid-safe with the free app, Famigo Sandbox.
Famigo executives comprise a unique blend of experts in child entertainment as well as family behavior, giving it a keen ability to market and deliver compelling and fun products designed specifically for families.
Company Vitals:
- Website: www.famigo.com
- Twitter: @Famigo
- Email: info@famigo.com
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Minimum viable product –
a lean startup strategy
What is mimimum viable product? It’s an approach to launch a product which allows a business to quickly get to market and then in market iterate their product development based on market data.
Market research had long been the back bone of product deployment – go to the market, ask people what they want and build it. Problem is time and money. Time from asking people to building can, in some cases, cause people to beat you to market and then you lose your advantage. Money because it takes a lot of money, upfront, to survey people as to the products they want to see in the marketplace.
Really that approach was the best of a bad situation, the alternate being launch a product and find there was no audience (just ask these guys)!
Lean startups need to blaze a different trail today – understanding audience need doesn’t have to be expensive and time in the Internet sense is not in your side – first to execution is better than a great idea.
Iteration is the lifeblood of the digital ecosystem. Products that stagnant are disposed of in days not in months anymore.
So if iteration is so powerful, why launch a “complete” solution on day 1. Try it, test it, improve it… Repeat!
Some examples of early products that you should try out are: