10 marketing secrets of the Smart50

This article first appeared October 6, 2011.

Selling Mark Zuckerberg’s first website, creating a new brand to recruit undergraduates and taking as many speaking engagements as possible are some of the methods this year’s Smart50 are using to market their businesses.

Marketing will never be easy and the best companies are those thinking outside the box, innovating and putting their names out there – and as the Smart50 have shown, they get results.

From something as simple to pumping money into AdWords which PaperCut Software did, or creating physical display ads to place in stores like Amazonia, Australia’s fastest growing companies recognise that getting their name out and about is the first step to turning a profit.

Here are the top 10 marketing methods used by some of the companies on this year’s Smart50 list:

Associate with someone famous

Getting your name in the spotlight can be tricky, especially when you’re a new business and no one really trusts you, but website marketplace Flippa found success after attaching itself to some well-known brands and selling high profile sites including Facemash, which was created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.

The lesson is 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 famous in 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 methods but forget about the basics and the people behind PaperCut software says it’s the simple things like AdWords that will deliver consistent results.

“Without a doubt Google AdWords has been our most successful marketing effort,” say 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 a dirty word

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 1,600 members join, which saw an extra $1.2 million being added to our overall revenue. This has been well received and we now run them four times a year.”

Optimise your site for search engines

It’s no longer a question of whether your company needs to be on the internet – you need to have an online presence. By creating rich content and using SEO marketing you can help control your corner of the web.

“Most recently we increased our investment in SEO and engaged an external firm to assist with a specific campaign for our PeoplePulse online survey product,” says Paul Quinn of Quinntessential Marketing.

“To date the campaign has directly resulted in a number of sales and the campaign ROI has been greater than seven-fold.

“I love the transparency of a targeted SEO campaign – seeing the leads coming in and hearing the sales team convert them – often within the space of a few days, really reinforces the direct, measurable impact that your marketing budget can have on your sales efforts.”

Position yourself as an expert

It’s becoming more and more important to be seen as a thought leader in your industry, specifically when you face steep competition.

Whether it’s through blog posts or speaking events your company needs to be seen as the ultimate authority.

“We have participated in quite an aggressive campaign to raise our profile in the industry through speaker engagements, editorial profile pieces and networking,” Grace Chu of First Click Consulting says.

“We are now in a position where we are regularly invited to speak at the country’s most significant search and digital marketing industry events and stand up next to some of the most prominent brands in the country and the world.

“Our business has been built purely on referrals and recommendations and this marketing activity has had enormous impact on the level of referrals we have received.”

Display advertising goes a long way

It’s good to get back to basics. Physical display advertising can go a long way, especially when used effectively with bright colours and snazzy branding – don’t discount the power of print.

“I need to mention our adoption of our display stands, both counter top and at shop level,” says Amazonia’s Dwayne Martens.

“We invested a lot in them and they have paid off big time. We have seen in stores that put up a display stand an increase of sale between 40% – 50%.

“So we have been able to get our top 20% of stores to sell even more than before. Our strength as a brand is the standout purple colour and sun. We realised this and really worked at a shop level to get the purchase.

“We have capitalised on this very well. Our impulse displays allow every customer that enters the store to see our vibrant brand. This is invaluable and has been a really good tool for us.”

Get the word out through social media

If you aren’t using social media to market yourself you should be. Plenty of businesses, including struggling retailers, are finding good business by promoting specific deals and offers online.

Facebook and Twitter are now some of the fastest ways to get the word out about your business and plenty of the Smart50 are finding success by doing so, including Fidarsi Furniture.

“We ran a competition on Facebook to build interaction with our fans resulting in a $3000 prize package given away to the winner,” say Fidarsi’s Neil Singh and Candida Stephens.

“This allowed us to directly communicate with our clients, digest their feedback and refine our product offering.

“We continue to use Facebook as a testing ground for new concepts and designs. If they are well received, they are introduced to our online store.”

Cultivate good relationships to create word-of-mouth buzz

Contrary to popular opinion word-of-mouth buzz is hard to generate unless you do what you do very well.

“Honestly, the newspaper ads and word of mouth referrals work best for us,” say Kaylee Boccalatte, Stephen Trail and Wesley Boccalatte from Nu-tank.

“To do this we always have a call to actions in newspaper ads and good branding.

“Word-of-mouth comes about due to our service and products, with many customers going out on their own to inform others in their area about our company.”

Target your most valuable prospective employees

Plenty of the Smart50 use recruitment companies to find new employees but SEO and web marketing firm E-Web Marketing has taken a different approach – going straight to universities to speak to prospective graduates.

That explanation has a second part, with E-Web Marketing ranked as one of the best places to work in Australia.

Using those two elements it created a strategy called Paid to Learn and used that brand for an entire recruitment campaign.

“Armed with branded promotional materials the P2L team has featured at numerous university recruitment fairs and career talks,” Gary Ng of E-Web Marketing says.

“P2L is represented in the online space via its resource-rich website, active blog, e-newsletter with steadily growing list of subscribers, Facebook page, Twitter updates, Flickr stream and promotional videos.

“E-Web is growing too fast for us to be constantly working through piles of resumes without a proper qualifying process.

“P2L has succeeded in becoming that qualifying process, allowing people who embody our company vision of happiness, success and fun to know about E-Web, and seek us out instead of us having to hunt for them.”

Trade shows are worth your time

A lot of businesses tend to neglect trade shows, thinking they can be a waste of time, but as some of our Smart50 have shown, if you use trade shows to your advantage you can end up getting some great business out of them.

“Every year we exhibit at Australia’s largest IT tradeshow. It’s a highly competitive event,” says Nicole Kersh of 4Cabling.

“This year we booked the largest stand we could afford and built the best exhibition stand we could. We wanted to make our mark in the industry.

“We found a rubber factory that made us minature server racks out of stress toy material and our tag line was ‘taking the stress out of server racks’. It was a hugely successful event for us.

“Our competitors seemed to think that because we are an online company we don’t really have a share of the market, we wanted to take this opportunity to show them who we are, what we do and that we are serious about it.”