Smart Companies, Smarter Marketing

In creating a new brand to recruit undergraduates, and taking as many speaking engagements as possible.

These are a couple of methods employed by this year’s Smart 50 to market their businesses. Marketing technique is far from simple but the best companies are those thinking outside the box, innovating and putting their names out there. From something as unpretentious as putting money into AdWords, which PaperCut Software did, or creating physical display ads to place in stores like Amazonia, Australia’s fastest growing companies recognize that placing their image out and about is the first step to maximum profit accumulation.

There are many methods practiced by innovative companies to advertise what they are and what they stand for. Some associate their brand name with someone famous; to get a company into the spotlight can be tricky, especially for new business. However, within the website marketplace Flippa did just that, after attaching itself to some well-known brands and selling high profile sites including Facemash, which was created by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg. The concept is quite simple. Associating with well-known brands all the time can get tedious, but done well it can get you a lot of free publicity.

“The most successful thing we’ve done is sell some really high profile sites, which meant viral PR piling into the site, driving new visitors who saw the opportunities,” Mark Harbottle and Mark Mickiewicz of Flippa.com say. “From Mark Zuckerberg’s old site facemash.com, made popular in the box office hit ‘The Social Network’ through a couple of local ones in mactalk.com.au and Duncan Riley’s inquisitr.com, to Twitter-related service retweet.com, we’ve made some big sales.” “These have been massive boosts for us and they keep coming in, given the volume these days often we don’t even notice them until we see the traffic graphs”.

”Don’t skimp on AdWords, Plenty of businesses put money into flashy marketing technique but forget about the basics. The people behind PaperCut software say “it’s the simple things like AdWords that will deliver consistent results.” “Without a doubt Google AdWords has been our most successful marketing effort,” says Chris Dance and Matt Doran from PaperCut Software International. “In addition to our already strong organic presence AdWords has complemented our sales, generating more and more downloads of our software for trial and purchase”.

Another successful marketing initiative has been to strip down our software to the bare minimum and offer it completely free to all users. Discount isn’t necessarily a bad thing, on the contrary, with all the discounting that’s been going on during the past year it’s easy to dismiss lowering prices but Anytime Fitness has found that offering limited offers instead of continued lower prices has resulted in some of its best sales. “We have had various successful marketing such as a 12-hour sale, where our clubs offer great discounts to join,”

Justin McDonell and Jacinta McDonell-Jimenez of Anytime Fitness say. “Our promotion saw some 1600 members join, which saw an extra $1.2million being added to our overall revenue. This has been well received and we now run them four times a year.” Improve your webpage for search engines it’s no longer a question of whether your company needs to be on the internet or not, an online presence is vital towards any successful business endeavor.

By creating appealing media content and using SEO marketing you will not only increase your overall exposure to the general population, but more importantly you increase the amount of revenue your company will receive, which is always a good thing.