When it comes to promoting your business online, it takes much more than a slick website. In fact, a website is the minimum you need. Savvy small business entrepreneurs are using blogging and viral marketing to score new customers and add to their bottom line. I was impressed with the efforts of Victorian-based business Rentoid.
Rentoid is an online portal where you can rent anything – as long as there is someone else on the portal who is willing to rent it to you. It’s kind of like ebay for renting. You might want a ladder and someone in your area may be willing to rent it to you for the weekend for a couple of dollars. The site gets 5 per cent of the transaction.
Obviously, they only make money if people use the site, so it’s vital to get traffic and sign-ups. I chatted with founder Steve Sammartino about the online marketing strategies that worked – and those that didn’t.
Blogging
No stranger to the internet, Sammartino already had a blog going for a year before he launched Rentoid. He says that readers of his blog about entrepreneurship helped him spread the word on Rentoid. “The result is 50 per cent membership and usage rate from loyal readers of my blog and many links to Rentoid in launch phase,” says Sammartino.
Viral marketing
Understanding the potential of viral marketing, Sammartino also experimented with cheeky campaigns to get noticed, trying to get them talked about in online forums.
“We undertook a viral campaign which leveraged recent controversial umpiring decisions in the AFL, and cheekily listed ‘umpires for rent’,” he says.
He then posted it on online football forum, Big Footy. “Because the idea was fun, it spread among AFL fans who were commenting on whether the site was real … and all decided it was legitimate,” he says. “It really got a conversation going, and it gave them exposure to Rentoid.”
He says the result was 7000 hits that day and hundreds of new members. “Our average number of hits a day is approximately 1000. Hence it is a 700 per cent increase in web traffic but, more importantly, awareness and new users and listings.”
However, cheeky campaigns don’t always work if people don’t create buzz around them. “We also did a similar campaign with the recent George W Bush visit and offered for rent his 747 Airforce One,” he says. “It was seeded on many political anti-Bush blogs. This also resulted in a spike of over 1000 incremental hits that day – and a handful of new members, but the lack of one forum to seed it in made it harder to get traction.”
Sammartino says this is a key factor in viral marketing. He says: “We learnt that you need a good ‘seed garden’.”
Don’t forget life offline
I’ve found Rentoid an interesting case study because they are conducting a marketing assault on all fronts. They’ve also done things the old-fashioned way – a letterbox drop in the local area of Maribyrnong. Combined with posters in shop windows, pamphlets in cafés, and a story in the local paper, Sammartino’s focus was on “leverage growing community spirit and the savings potential for mortgaged-stretched households”
He says: “It worked very well. We had 2000 hits from the local newspaper article and a 10 per cent joining rate from the letterbox drop. A usual take-up rate is 2 to 3 per cent. So it’s a cliché in action! Start local think global.”
What innovative strategies have you employed to get noticed?
Source: My Small Business
