23 May 2013

So my half court shot for a product I was crowd-funding on Pozible missed. Not by much, but certainly no swish. And over the last 30 days of campaigning, here are seven things I’ve picked up along the way.

1) Niche is tough
As with all products, you want to appeal to a specific market, which makes it significantly easier to generate publicity. However you can’t be so specific that it’s hard for the ‘average’ person to justify getting behind you’re campaign.

I designed a product to fix a problem I have at home. As it turns out my fridge is pretty unique these days, with a type of shelving that is almost obsolete. It was a sticking point, and ultimately I believe the biggest reason people wouldn’t get around it.

2) Shipping is a bitch
It’s tough justifying a shipping fee that costs as much as the item.

Sadly anything bigger than an ‘envelope’ is considered a ‘package’ by Australia Post, irrespective of weight and has a minimum charge of $6.60. More so, this additional cost of fulfillment hugely increased the overall required funding goal.

Particularly when you need to sell a lot of products at a low price (as opposed to fewer products at a higher price), high postage costs really cause headaches.

3) Plan out your PR campaign before you launch
I thought I had a pretty good grip on things prior to launch. I had a rough idea of what the press release needed to say and a rough plan of attack for people I wanted to contact.

But then the campaign started and it got crazy busy. You start playing catch up with people you need to contact, requests for images and more information, interviews and back-and-forths, answering questions, keeping backers updated, promoting it across various social platforms, and plenty more. On top of that I’d have new ideas daily on how to get the word out which just added on top of everything else.

Instead, prior to launch I should have had as much planned for as I could. Have press releases ready, email templates for different audiences and an exhaustive list of friends, family, networks, reporters and randoms you can contact, all before you push the campaign live.

4) ‘Advertising’ did not work
I thought it would be interesting to trial a couple of different means of getting the word out during the campaign, including some ‘advertising’. Sponsored tweets (where a popular Twitter account tweets for cash), advertising on Reddit and Facebook ads all had little to no impact at all.

It probably depends on the nature of your campaign, but for me I would categorise it bluntly as a complete waste of money.

5) Don’t overshoot the funding goal
While planning out the campaign, I determined the funding goal based on exactly what I would need to break even. But what I didn’t consider is that I probably would have been willing to throw in some money myself.

So before your campaign starts, have a think about how much you’d be willing to top it up if the funding goal was just short. If you’re looking to raise $10,000, it gets to $9,000 and you’d be willing to put in the rest, you should really have reduced your funding goal by $1,000 before you started.

All money on successful campaigns generally loses around 7% in fees. So it doesn’t make sense to contribute to your own campaign. (However it would be the perfect means of money laundering. I wonder if Mastercard have thought of this yet.)

You can always raise above and beyond your funding goal, so aim as low as possible.

6) Reddit is untapped potential
As mentioned above, advertising on Reddit did not work. But my number one source of traffic to the campaign page came from a post I put up on /r/shutupandtakemymoney. It’s a risky strategy and I received a substantial amount of criticism and negative feedback, but for the most part Reddit loves a good idea and don’t mind getting behind something they like.

I’d only recommend it if you’ve been across Reddit for a while and have a bit of an idea of how it works there, but the above sub reddit was low hanging fruit for me, and there’s plenty of highly focused communities on there for just about anything you can think of.

7) My family, friends and networks are awesome
I honestly didn’t expect the response I got from the people I know. It’s worth remembering that most of them don’t want to see you fail and will promote the shit out of your campaign for you. And if any of you are reading this who pledged or shared my campaign, thank you.

So what next for me? “Pivot” seems to be a popular word in the entrepreneurial space at the moment.

One of the great things about crowd-funding (other than the fact the only thing at risk is your ego) is that it’s effectively a market research tool. The feedback overwhelmingly suggests people love the idea, but not the execution. So I’ll be taking on board the learings above and tweaking it. For me, that means a product that works in fridges with glass-shelves. And hopefully a cheaper means of postage.

Maybe I’ll even be back on Pozible in six months with the Beerend 2.0.

Posted by Zac Martin

17 April 2013

I’ve already mentioned I’m a big fan of side projects, and today I’m pretty effing excited to launch my next one. Every now and then you need to take a half court shot and I’m really hoping this one goes in.

It’s called the Beerend, it’s like a bookend for your beer.

And I’m turning to crowd-funding to raise the money I need to start manufacturing.

So if you like cold beer, check out the Beerend on Pozible, share it with your mates and make a pledge. I’ll drink to that.
Posted by Zac Martin

02 February 2013

I’m a big fan of side projects. Particularly those that support your main gig, even if it’s indirectly.

It goes without saying that the most successful people in this industry are the ones that do something on the side. Launching a line a bottled water, managing a band, running a resource for Juniors and a building a fashion blog are a few that come to mind from people I’ve worked with.

I’ve tried to have a few of these projects over the years. I built and sold a website which taught me some crazy good stuff and I’m pretty sure my local hockey club is the only one in Australia to have an SEO strategy.

In fact this blog was too once a side project while I was a student that resulted in my first job. Sadly when your side project essentially becomes your full time job it’s hard to keep passionate about a little old blog in my case. Hence why I’m lucky to post once a month these days.

With that said, this year I’ve got two major side projects I want to tackle. Within the next few months I want to launch a product, and after that develop a mobile app. That should be enough to keep me busy, and give me some time to think about what comes after that.

So what’s your side project and how does it support your main gig?

Posted by Zac Martin

27 January 2013

Maybe I’ve been in advertising too long, but I can’t help but feel brands get it pretty tough.

Especially brands that actually contribute toward a customer’s life. Some of them meaningfully.

Yet all we see is brands being criticised and abused. Particularly on social media.

But what would happen if consumers thanked the brands they liked? Or recognised the role they played?

Turns out most people are pretty skeptical. Although my posts did generate some ‘random’ likes.
I don’t think we’ll be seeing ‘Thank The Brands You Like Day’ anytime soon. But I think it’s an interesting concept.
Posted by Zac Martin

08 November 2012

Last month I wrote about how I think email is not used enough by brands. This month I’ve been thinking about other channels and platforms marketers don’t leverage enough.

And the big one that keeps coming back to me is why have we never seen a brand use torrents?

Yes it falls into a gray area that not a lot of brands could get way with, but we need to remember of course that torrenting itself is not illegal, only the torrenting of illegal content.

Although most media usage reports seem to ignore it, we know video consumption through torrents is prevalent, and in many demographics ubiquitous. So why don’t we see any brands playing in this space?

Even if they don’t have quality branded content to release through torrents, why are no brands leveraging torrent sites through display media? Surely the lack of competition makes them fairly cheap placements and I imagine a “real” banner ad would stand out among the rest of the spam.

It would be pretty ballsy for a brand to do either of these, but it would be pretty effing awesome.

Posted by Zac Martin

07 October 2012

We regularly talk about the distribution of content through YouTube, blogs, social networks and other digital bits and pieces. But I think we often overlook a hugely under appreciated platform; email.

Take this example sent around a few days before the Brownlow.

Philip Brown, a Quantitative Strategist at Commonwealth Bank, put together a report with a model and analysis on who he believed would win the Brownlow Medal using a few seasons worth of data (which you can download it here if you’re interested). He emailed it to a few of his colleagues where it was quickly forwarded on around the industry and then on to broader audiences (where I received it).

It’s well targeted, interesting and shows how smart the brand is with data. And it doesn’t even matter that I dropped $100 on it and lost my money because the predictions were wrong.

And if you’re even remotely interested in footy, you probably received the  ‘Red Carpet Analysis’ PowerPoint the day after the Brownlow from a friend. Another piece of content distributed very successfully via email.

Email has this crazy potential for amplification (and sometimes longevity) being forwarded again and again and again. As a platform it’s ubiquitous, not going anywhere and cheap to leverage. And personally, I think it’s way underused by brands for distributing content.

Posted by Zac Martin

26 September 2012

Clients are increasingly getting better at digital. It’s taken some time, but we’re now at a point where most clients understand digital’s potential role, importance and place. And this is only going to get stronger (particularly as younger marketers step into decision-making roles).

As a result, many brands now have the basic digital hygiene factors covered. They’re in social media, creating content, leveraging video, thinking about SEO and search, using analytics and are across mobile.

And I think a lot of people who call themselves “Digital Strategists” are going to start sweating when they get asked what to do next. What happens after a brand ticks off the digital basics?

Because once they play the “Let’s use Pinterest” card, I think they’re going to start running out of answers.

Dare I say it’s time for Digital Strategist 2.0s.

Posted by Zac Martin

23 August 2012

Yesterday I finished up at George Patts.

I started my first day as an intern with a mohawk doing community management. Two and a half years later I leave as a Digital Strategist, with a lot more on my head, and hopefully a bit more in my head.
And on Monday, I start a new gig at CumminsRoss.
Posted by Zac Martin

16 July 2012

For quite a while now, a mate and I have been homebrewing. We’ve had varying degrees of success ranging from exploding bottles to pouring entire glasses of head to great (drinkable) beer.

It’s great fun and a cheap way to drink. But one of the frustrating things about it is how slow the process is. From step one to drinking a cold beer you’re looking at two to three months, more than enough time to forget the small things you’ve done along the way to improve/ruin the beer.

So on a recent batch, we decided to do something different. Instead of brewing twenty bottles of the exact same beer we brewed ten variations in one batch.

Normally it would take two months to know if putting in an extra spoon of sugar has a positive or negative impact. This time, we put one spoon in a bottle, one and half in another and two in a third. Then we tried the same with raw sugar. And again with brown sugar. Then we tried one bottle with honey.

In two months, we’ll be able to easily analyse ten variations, which under the previous approach would have taken ten times longer.

And you should take a similar approach with your highly trafficked website. I’ve been doing a lot recently around split testing and optimising and here are a few things I’ve picked up:

  • Every visit is an opportunity to learn something (big or small)
  • Never make assumptions (there’s no need with so much data)
  • More often than not, change is incremental (there’s no such thing as a silver bullet)

Without even realising it, I massively improved my “test and learn” process and inadvertently started split testing my beer at the same time.

Funnily enough, those bullet points above apply to homebrewing too.

Posted by Zac Martin

17 April 2012

Last night I gave a group of Monash students a tour of our office. Funnily enough, exactly three years ago I was the student walking through George Patts hoping to one day get a job there.

It reminded me of how after my tour as a student I bumped into Russel Howcroft shortly after and he told us during a presentation that sometimes marketers needed to “build things and they (the consumers) will come”.
I didn’t quite understand it at the time. But today I can’t help but think it’s a completely underrated and underused digital strategy. This idea of building something rad that’s relevant to your target audience and then using them to spread your idea.
You don’t need to stress about amplification strategies/sharing user journeys/going viral/influencer seeding and all that other nonsense. Instead you be awesome and the rest comes naturally.
Intel did it here, and Coke are trying it out with things like this.
And of course, it makes an amazing brief for the ad agency.
Posted by Zac Martin