“Tits” for Tinkov, reviews for Lebedev and other ways to promote a startup
Anton Kukhta, co-founder of the Mneniya.Pro feedback collection service, shared five case studies on PR of a startup - standard and non-standard. How Lebedev's Theme helps to overcome the crisis, why Oleg Tinkov ignores his small chest size and other unexpected discoveries - in the material below.
Perhaps our most successful marketing activity of the past year is the PR case with Artemy Lebedev, thanks to which we received additional fame in the IT community, and most importantly, we managed to attract several dozen paying customers absolutely without a penny of the budget. Even now, when almost half a year has already passed, we continue to receive requests for connecting to the service with comments in the spirit of "I read how you troll the topic, I liked it, we want to work with you." To be honest, there was no talk of any “trolling” of Lebedev, but non-standard PR did his “dark business” and this is exactly how some of the clients who are familiar with this case are positioning us now.
If in brief, the background is as follows: every week on Mondays in Artemy Lebedev’s blog, a 300/300 column is published - advertisers send advertising banners with links to Lebedev, and he publishes them for money. We decided to go through all the banners that had ever been posted to his blog and thus collected the base e-mail, which consisted of 234 addresses. Our main competence is to collect reviews through triggered email newsletters, so it was not a big deal using our own Mneniya.Pro service to send an e-mail personal invitation to each advertiser to leave a comment on the placement of the banner on Artemy Lebedev's blog. As a result, we collected 32 reviews, which were sent to Lebedev in the hope that they would publish them in their blog and refer to us.
')
Fortunately, the same thing happened the next day an extensive post appeared in the “cozy zherzhechekka”, where Lebedev published all the reviews we collected from his advertisers, mentioning us: “The reviews are collected by the mneniya.pro service on their own initiative. The guys have done their best, for which they respect. ” It would seem that the effect should not make itself wait and applications for connection are about to come, but reality did not coincide with expectations. Oddly enough, but not the very mentioning on Lebedev's blog, but the way we presented this case to the audience, in the end created a powerful stream of leads.
Describing in detail the process of collecting feedback from advertisers Lebedev, making screenshots and writing an extensive post, we published it at two sites simultaneously - Megamind and Spark. Thanks to a good title (the bait in this case was the name of Artemy Lebedev) and not less successful content - the post in a short time went into the top of the month on Megamind and by the end of the year was one of the most readable on Spark, in addition social networks Requests for connection fell like a bucket, and we still continue to receive a considerable percentage of traffic from the article, although the post was published almost six months ago. Summing up, it is safe to say that Artemy Lebedev, without knowing it, helps us now to overcome the difficult economic situation, significantly reducing marketing costs.
In 2015, we took part in about 10 specialized events in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev. The main part of them - as sponsors (rollapy, flyers, speeches). We read our reports on reviews a year 5 times to different audiences (both for money and as invited experts). Sponsorship of conferences is an image component and it is very difficult to estimate in real numbers the real impact of this marketing activity. It works well for recognition, but in terms of money, it is almost impossible to determine if this or that event “got out”. It is rather an investment in a brand that can bear fruit only in the long term.
The only offline event that can be said with confidence is “strayed” - this was the annual exhibition of online trading technologies in Moscow in Sokolniki, where at our booth of 4 sq. M. (and not in the most successful place in relation to hundreds of other stands) we almost without interruption told potential customers who were approaching us about the benefits of the service and in two days managed to collect several hundred business cards from online stores, some of which eventually became our paying customers . This year, the mandatory participation in this exhibition is scheduled, while the stand area and its placement will already be more interesting.
There were also attempts to find customers at exhibitions where participants were, and we were only visitors (major exhibitions of electronics and digital equipment manufacturers), but this was not a great success - the decision makers rarely attend these exhibitions, and managers at the stands give standard business cards with common Contacts of the company through which it is very difficult to “reach out” to decision makers.
“Just imagine, you get a steady stream of leads that your KP has read and are already ready to test the service!” Said a sales manager of a St. Petersburg call center. “And most importantly - you pay only for the result!” Well, how can you resist such a temptation? Our main pain is insufficient demand for service due to consumer ignorance of its existence. And here the call center manager offers to heal our wound and is ready to bill not for the fact of making a call (like other call centers), but prescribes conditions on the basis of which we pay only for a “warm” customer who is ready to become “hot” ". An interesting scheme, it sounds tempting and we decide to try. In the contract, it sounds like this:
"3.1 To determine the cost of services provided by the Contractor, the possible results of the work of the Operators of the Contractor are divided into the following categories:
3.2. The cost of services of the Contractor is estimated based on the following logic:
List of questions and the cost of answers to them:
We start the project, leave a deposit in the amount of several tens of thousands of rubles, and already 2 days later, the satisfied call center manager calls and informs in a joyful voice that the deposit amount has been spent, simultaneously sends an e-mail report on the work done, the list of accomplishments . We start working with “warm” leads, listen to calls, and as a result it turns out that none of the contacts received is in principle ready to become our client. The call center worked its money according to the contract and legally difficult to “find fault” for them, but in fact it turned out to be a drain on money “worse” than any context or targeting combined. We sign the act, fix the loss and make a decision to continue to try to avoid outsourcing, especially in such important areas for the project as sales and marketing.
Now more and more often (especially in the western Internet) you can see a lot of infographics on almost any topic. It is no secret that the creation of a “branded” infographic and its further distribution on thematic sites is one of the most popular promotion methods. We decided to try out this channel and ordered an infographic in our corporate style on the topic of “reviews and likes” from the designer, partially translating the Western competitor’s data into Russian and adding it with case studies from our own practice, and then began writing to the thematic publications with a request to publish it from our name.
As a result, we were pleasantly pleased with the number of publications that were obtained. Infographics relished almost all publications to which we sent it. Separate attention is deserved by organic distribution of infographics on social networks. Again, it is difficult to assess the effect in numbers (more image component), but at least only on free publications and references in thematic media we saved not a single ten thousand rubles, which means the game was worth the candle.
And finally, another small case. We love non-standard PR, and Oleg Tinkov is close in spirit to us. While last year everyone was following Twitter on his squabble with Rockettbank, we learned about a new, quite interesting way of communication that was offered by the startup Tittygram, namely, a message on the female breast to attract attention (in the common "signal"). Since the events took place at about the same time - we thought that it would be great if Tinkov, at the time “energizing start-ups”, would also pay attention to us by making a “retweet” of the picture we prepared for him. Unfortunately, Oleg Yuryevich didn’t pay attention to the snapshot (possibly due to the model’s chest size), but he noticed a large thematic public Vkontakte by reposting the images, which led to the site additional typ-in traffic. Hence the conclusion that you can create an info server almost from scratch, you just need to turn on your wit.
I really hope our experience will be useful for you and you will be able to apply something you heard in practice. In the comments it would be interesting to read your case studies on non-standard project advancement.
Case with Artemy Lebedev
Perhaps our most successful marketing activity of the past year is the PR case with Artemy Lebedev, thanks to which we received additional fame in the IT community, and most importantly, we managed to attract several dozen paying customers absolutely without a penny of the budget. Even now, when almost half a year has already passed, we continue to receive requests for connecting to the service with comments in the spirit of "I read how you troll the topic, I liked it, we want to work with you." To be honest, there was no talk of any “trolling” of Lebedev, but non-standard PR did his “dark business” and this is exactly how some of the clients who are familiar with this case are positioning us now.
If in brief, the background is as follows: every week on Mondays in Artemy Lebedev’s blog, a 300/300 column is published - advertisers send advertising banners with links to Lebedev, and he publishes them for money. We decided to go through all the banners that had ever been posted to his blog and thus collected the base e-mail, which consisted of 234 addresses. Our main competence is to collect reviews through triggered email newsletters, so it was not a big deal using our own Mneniya.Pro service to send an e-mail personal invitation to each advertiser to leave a comment on the placement of the banner on Artemy Lebedev's blog. As a result, we collected 32 reviews, which were sent to Lebedev in the hope that they would publish them in their blog and refer to us.
')
Fortunately, the same thing happened the next day an extensive post appeared in the “cozy zherzhechekka”, where Lebedev published all the reviews we collected from his advertisers, mentioning us: “The reviews are collected by the mneniya.pro service on their own initiative. The guys have done their best, for which they respect. ” It would seem that the effect should not make itself wait and applications for connection are about to come, but reality did not coincide with expectations. Oddly enough, but not the very mentioning on Lebedev's blog, but the way we presented this case to the audience, in the end created a powerful stream of leads.
Describing in detail the process of collecting feedback from advertisers Lebedev, making screenshots and writing an extensive post, we published it at two sites simultaneously - Megamind and Spark. Thanks to a good title (the bait in this case was the name of Artemy Lebedev) and not less successful content - the post in a short time went into the top of the month on Megamind and by the end of the year was one of the most readable on Spark, in addition social networks Requests for connection fell like a bucket, and we still continue to receive a considerable percentage of traffic from the article, although the post was published almost six months ago. Summing up, it is safe to say that Artemy Lebedev, without knowing it, helps us now to overcome the difficult economic situation, significantly reducing marketing costs.
Sponsorship of offline events and participation in exhibitions
In 2015, we took part in about 10 specialized events in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev. The main part of them - as sponsors (rollapy, flyers, speeches). We read our reports on reviews a year 5 times to different audiences (both for money and as invited experts). Sponsorship of conferences is an image component and it is very difficult to estimate in real numbers the real impact of this marketing activity. It works well for recognition, but in terms of money, it is almost impossible to determine if this or that event “got out”. It is rather an investment in a brand that can bear fruit only in the long term.
The only offline event that can be said with confidence is “strayed” - this was the annual exhibition of online trading technologies in Moscow in Sokolniki, where at our booth of 4 sq. M. (and not in the most successful place in relation to hundreds of other stands) we almost without interruption told potential customers who were approaching us about the benefits of the service and in two days managed to collect several hundred business cards from online stores, some of which eventually became our paying customers . This year, the mandatory participation in this exhibition is scheduled, while the stand area and its placement will already be more interesting.
There were also attempts to find customers at exhibitions where participants were, and we were only visitors (major exhibitions of electronics and digital equipment manufacturers), but this was not a great success - the decision makers rarely attend these exhibitions, and managers at the stands give standard business cards with common Contacts of the company through which it is very difficult to “reach out” to decision makers.
Buying warm customers from a call center
“Just imagine, you get a steady stream of leads that your KP has read and are already ready to test the service!” Said a sales manager of a St. Petersburg call center. “And most importantly - you pay only for the result!” Well, how can you resist such a temptation? Our main pain is insufficient demand for service due to consumer ignorance of its existence. And here the call center manager offers to heal our wound and is ready to bill not for the fact of making a call (like other call centers), but prescribes conditions on the basis of which we pay only for a “warm” customer who is ready to become “hot” ". An interesting scheme, it sounds tempting and we decide to try. In the contract, it sounds like this:
"3.1 To determine the cost of services provided by the Contractor, the possible results of the work of the Operators of the Contractor are divided into the following categories:
- Category 1 - decision makers agree to test the system
- Category 2 - the decision maker requested a specialist call
- Category 3 - Interview, includes feedback on KP
3.2. The cost of services of the Contractor is estimated based on the following logic:
- Results Category 1 - 1100 rubles per piece.
- Category 2 results - 700 rubles per unit.
- Category 3 results - the cost of answering each question depends on the content of the question, but does not depend on the content of the answer.
List of questions and the cost of answers to them:
- The response to the quotation of the customer - 125 rubles for the answer
- Do you think reviews affect sales? 50 rubles
- Do you collect feedback from your customers? 50 rubles"
We start the project, leave a deposit in the amount of several tens of thousands of rubles, and already 2 days later, the satisfied call center manager calls and informs in a joyful voice that the deposit amount has been spent, simultaneously sends an e-mail report on the work done, the list of accomplishments . We start working with “warm” leads, listen to calls, and as a result it turns out that none of the contacts received is in principle ready to become our client. The call center worked its money according to the contract and legally difficult to “find fault” for them, but in fact it turned out to be a drain on money “worse” than any context or targeting combined. We sign the act, fix the loss and make a decision to continue to try to avoid outsourcing, especially in such important areas for the project as sales and marketing.
Promotion through infographics
Now more and more often (especially in the western Internet) you can see a lot of infographics on almost any topic. It is no secret that the creation of a “branded” infographic and its further distribution on thematic sites is one of the most popular promotion methods. We decided to try out this channel and ordered an infographic in our corporate style on the topic of “reviews and likes” from the designer, partially translating the Western competitor’s data into Russian and adding it with case studies from our own practice, and then began writing to the thematic publications with a request to publish it from our name.
As a result, we were pleasantly pleased with the number of publications that were obtained. Infographics relished almost all publications to which we sent it. Separate attention is deserved by organic distribution of infographics on social networks. Again, it is difficult to assess the effect in numbers (more image component), but at least only on free publications and references in thematic media we saved not a single ten thousand rubles, which means the game was worth the candle.
Promotion through the female breast
And finally, another small case. We love non-standard PR, and Oleg Tinkov is close in spirit to us. While last year everyone was following Twitter on his squabble with Rockettbank, we learned about a new, quite interesting way of communication that was offered by the startup Tittygram, namely, a message on the female breast to attract attention (in the common "signal"). Since the events took place at about the same time - we thought that it would be great if Tinkov, at the time “energizing start-ups”, would also pay attention to us by making a “retweet” of the picture we prepared for him. Unfortunately, Oleg Yuryevich didn’t pay attention to the snapshot (possibly due to the model’s chest size), but he noticed a large thematic public Vkontakte by reposting the images, which led to the site additional typ-in traffic. Hence the conclusion that you can create an info server almost from scratch, you just need to turn on your wit.
I really hope our experience will be useful for you and you will be able to apply something you heard in practice. In the comments it would be interesting to read your case studies on non-standard project advancement.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/298394/
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