Paul Fawkesley from newly created,
Treasure Hunt Liverpool, shared his story about how he created a mobile game for those looking to explore Liverpool City Centre.
The first few challenges, like many businesses, is starting with getting a few paid customers. Paul's route to market for this new mobile game was to do all the usual marketing activities. He created a website, promoted it through relevant channels, in this case, tourism-based channels and created social media accounts.
His best success in terms of getting paid customers, however, was through Groupon. This unexplored marketing channel (for us here at the meetup) opened up our eyes on the advantages and disadvantages of using Groupon.
First of all, they take 75% which is a whopping discount rate and at best make you break even, never mind turning a profit! Luckily for Paul, it's a digital product and the cost of creating each game is marginal. The advantages are that it's a constant stream of customers that pay upfront.
The way Paul now plans to use Groupon is so that he can get enough paying customers to be happy with the Treasure Hunt to leave reviews on TripAdvisor so that TripAdvisor starts to rank this activity favourably within their search results.
Moral of the story - Groupon is great for paying customers, but not if you can't afford to give away 75% of the cost. This is a short term strategy but one that is definitely a consideration for getting traction early days.
Table 2 - Etsy & Instagram
For this table we had
Kate Chesters, an artist who sells her resin art on her website,
Etsy and Amazon stores as well as promotion through
Instagram and
Facebook.
It's incredible the amount of social media activity associated with her accounts as it's Kate who does all of it, as well as create the wonderful pieces of art!
She shared some great insights about her journey up to now, how she started, what worked well and how she goes about using social media.
Kate prefers to use Etsy to sell her product over Amazon Handmade, and also uses Etsy ads where she is able to get infront of relevant target audienes because of the naature of her products and the demographic of people n Etsy.
Tools To Takeaway
Table 3 - Growing an Agency
Finally,
Paalan Sood from
Sood Marketing shared a variety of helpful tips on growing an agency and the steps he went through, from big client wins to hiring.
Palaan has had his agency for 2 years now and currently on 3 full time members of staff with a variety of clients.
His agency offers the full suite of digital marketing services, including social media management and ads. Some of the big takeaways he mentioned was the relationship he has built with his local Chamber of Commerce (St Helens).
The Chamber of Commerce has helped him grow, supported him with finding apprentices, graduates, interviewing, business strategy and much more.
This valuable resource has definitely contributed towards the growth of his agency along with being savvy and using resource networks such as
Upwork and
Fiverr.
Tools To Takeaway
Google Forms - Helpful tool to use when gathering detail from Influencers
Key Takeaways
1. The more features you use on Instagram the more likely they reward you with their algorithm
