Marketing Strategy

Does somebody really know how to launch a new site like raff.me? I am really tired of listening to the "specialists", the ones who theoretically are the gurus of this 2.0 universe. We have been working with different agencies and what is a sacred rule for one, is a fatal error for another. You finally end up with a nice guy who admits that there are neither sacred rules nor fatal errors. There are growing trends in certain directions, but no one can tell that something that has worked well with other sites will work fine for you. It is a game of test and error. Good.  I didn't need gurus to get to this point.

If you have a huge budget and you can play the game until you find your own recipe, you are lucky, but that is not our case. We need to guess where our balance between online & offline marketing, viral marketing, brand building, SEM, SEO, SMM…and a long series of other acronyms is. Too many variables in the recipe to get the right flavour in the first try.

Viral Marketing

The first serious proposal from the agency was a viral campaign based on a video. They worked on a good script. The main character was a funny freak that blurs the line between fiction and reality. Augmented reality gags made it spectacular and the result would surely be a good video. Probably a viral one, in fact they guaranteed more than 500K views. Spectacular! But is it really what we need? If 500K internet users enjoy 30 seconds of a good video, will this drive them to my page? And what is even more important, will they register? Or it will just make some branding and they will get familiar with the brand and will recognise it the next time they listen to it? That's not worth 70% of my marketing budget. Nice but not worth it.

Social Marketing

Besocialmyfriend. The next agency was a hyper-social one. The secret lies in being social, creating communities and living in facebook and twitter. They are probably right. Social Media is the present and the future, but to draw a strategy you cannot be obsessive. There is life offline and you can't ignore it. There is an old saying that states "When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail".

Our Strategy

We're back to our initial thoughts. We are launching a raffle platform, how can we promote it? Through raffles! We are creating promotional raffles, some of them free raffles and we are designing a banner and advertising campaign based on some massively visited sites, facebook and AdWords. We are creating focused campaigns to filtered targets, pointing to free raffles of their interest in music, technology, cooking, sports… .

I will go into further detail in future posts.