Over the past few months I had to find the best ways to advertise Flabell, our start-up, online and offline. In this article, I’ll briefly present some of the solutions we chose.
Offline
When you want to bring users to your website, to a niche such as ours (Flash Components), there aren’t many ways of doing it offline, because the products we offer don’t exactly fit everyone. :-)
So we did two things:
- We went to a conference for start-ups, called Webstock 2009, where we did what every start-up would do, and that is draw as much attention as possible, so we dressed in our Flabell branded t-shirts! This was a conference for nerds, so we fit perfectly!
- We published an ad in one of the most targeted magazines we could FLASH & FLEX DEVELOPER’S MAGAZINE. We also got two copies, which we keep at the office, to show-off! :-)
The bad? We don’t know how many users we brought to Flabell, because there’s no way of tracking them.
Online
This is the interesting part! We started with a 9 months long advertising campaign, on the biggest website in the Universe dedicated to Flash, which is theFWA. Then, we also advertised on the second biggest website dedicated to Flash, and on some more blogs for Flash, which I will disclose in the second part of this article, with real data. I don’t want to make you click on the ads, because that won’t help us track down every real user. :-)
We also used Google Adwords and SEO. Search for xml banner rotator, xml image slideshow, simple flash mp3 player (to name a few) in any search engine you wish. Flabell is on top of those lists.
Having all this data, I dare to say that the current advertising model is broken. From almost one million targeted visitors, one would expect a better click through rate, and a better conversion rate. Is there nothing we can do to make the CTR higher?
My answer: yes, there is.
What’s the Solution?
Innovation. Both on the publisher side, as well as on the advertiser side.
The publisher needs to create outstanding content, in order to attract as many users as possible. (can’t complain here)
The advertiser needs to have exceptional products, as well as presentation websites, for not only attracting the users, but also for keeping a potential customer on the website. (can’t complain here either)
But there’s another side, which needs to be mentioned, and that’s the bounding side. Whatever tool is used to connect the advertiser and the publisher, that’s where the innovation is needed. The tool should allow the advertiser to be interactive, and the publisher to reach as many users as possible, without creating a negative impact on any of the two parts. This is where we have to innovate!
Such tools are Google’s AdWords (for search), or BuySellAds.com for blogs. We used these both, and we are unhappy with the results. There’s a need for an innovative and better tool, to help both advertisers and publishers get better conversion rates! We don’t need a tool that only connects both parties (AdWords, BSA), but a tool that does more than that, a tool that makes the first impressions on the user matter, a tool that will send the user on the advertiser’s website already engaged by their brand.
Lucky Advertisers!
My company, as an advertiser, needs more than just luck, and the tools we have today, make advertisers get new users through luck: the users see the ad or not, they click on it or not, they sign-up, or not.
Let me tell you that we, as advertisers:
- Don’t want to pay for luck! We want to pay for efficiency, and targeted users.
- Don’t want 1% conversion rates! We want the users that come to our website, to know what they will find when they get there.
- Don’t want below 1% click through rate! We want to know that absolutely every user saw our ad, and they saw it without being distracted from the way they used to interact with the publisher’s website. The user needs to enjoy our ads, to understand them and relate to them, and then decide if they should click on the ad or not.
On Part 2, I will share some real numbers of our latest campaign, so you can see how the current advertising model works.