What is the biggest challenge for any new website? In my opinion, it is, by far, customer acquisition. How to get your message out, how to get customers to visit your site and now to keep them once they are there are the most important questions any entrepreneur should ask himself/herself before even starting to build a site. I’ve been pondering a lot on uCareer’s marketing strategy recently. In addition to reading about three online marketing books in the past month, I’ve spent quite some time talking to some of the marketing gurus in the online space. Here are some of my thoughts:
#1) How to get your message out (branding): it’s hard and easy. You should have a very clear message: what is the problem you are going to solve and why are you different from others trying to accomplish the same thing. I like to talk directly to my audience, so for now I am using my blog as my communications platform to let people know what uCareer is and why it is different. I also did some interviews over the past couple of weeks, and there are still more coming. In my previous experience, Revver was pretty successful in terms of branding. It really set itself apart from the rest of the online video pack and was perceived as cool, revolutionary and somewhat rebellious, something that fit well with Revver’s targeted audience.
#2) How to get people to talk about your site and, better yet, actually visit the site. In order to do that, you need to take advantage of viral marketing and find some creative ways to communicate them to your targeted audiences. The Coca-Cola and Mentos video created a million views within days and attracted thousands of new members to Revver. At Thoof, our Thoof vs Digg video also drew in more than 20 times new traffic than average from Digg within one day.
#3) How to make visitors become members and stay with you, in other words, how to make your site sticky. This is, in my opinion, the most challenging of the three. In my previous two ventures, we were able to generate buzz in both cases. In the case of Revver, we successfully kept most of the traffic generated by the famous Coca-Cola and Mentos video. But in the case of Thoof, we were not very successful in keeping the traffic generated by the very funny Thoof vs Digg video. One of the reasons for that is that Internet users are, in general, very fickle. Another very important reason is that even though Thoof has a superior technology compared to Digg, it is very difficult for new viewers to see and take advantage of that cool, personalized technology during their average two-minute visit. For most of them, Thoof was just another Digg-like site with similar features and functionalities. So, at uCareer we’ve learned our lesson. We are not only architecturing a set of applications which are far better at the back end, we are also designing some very distinguishing, first-in-industry, features and applications that users will find different and refreshing from the start.
