Hello Olivia, Brief info about me. My name is Hendro and I run group buying website targeting Indonesia market (Medan, specifically). It is www.sumosave.com. While my company is not as huge as LivingSocial or Groupon or even Australian Spreets, the size of my customer base is reasonable. All very specific to my target market. In addition, I also run a spa (http://zengarden.co.id/en). I also have few of my own failed ventures back when I was way way way more naive in terms of starting-up.
I am telling you brief information about me, just to demonstrate that I understand what you went through. It can be frustrating, but, I wish you can keep going and learning and hopefully there will lights at the end of the tunnel. Here are few of my advices. I wish it is helpful. 1. Your value proposition and target audience are not clear. People have ridiculously short attention span. If you don't catch their attention within 3 seconds, they will hit a 'Back' button. When I visit your website, the question that is in my head is: "What will I (ME, ME, ME) get?". Currently, it says: "Get up to 90% off beauty deals", "sign up today" and "Are you a business?". That means you are targeting both consumers and merchants at the same time and dilute the messaging. It is better to show people instead of telling them. That means, instead of saying 'Get up to 90% off beauty deals', it is best to just show people your great deal. 2. Re-think your product / website. I think you are right in terms of moving away from group-buy and more on online store. Group buy model requires you to keep finding new merchants to partner and if you are entrepreneur by night, it could be tough to keep the model going. I have few staffs just to approach / discuss / negotiate with merchants now and it requires some work to keep filling the pipeline. The conversion rate between your database size and sales is not linear in group-buy. Great deal means WAY WAY WAY more sales and vice versa. It resembles Hollywood model. Great deals (Pirates of Carribean) will ended up with a lot of sales. Whereas Zyzzyx Road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zyzzyx_Road) could mean very low sales / no sales. If you are going to do online store, please don't build your own website (especially it seems to me, you are not a programmer yourself). Instead, use http://www.shopify.com/ or Australian-owned http://www.bigcommerce.com (http://www.bigcommerce.com/). I am not affiliated or in any way associated with them. They are turn-key solutions. They should be good enough for your first year or two. Once you have sales / revenue, you can afford to hire programmers or your own staff or do fancy stuff. For now, let's focus on sales. Sales cures everything. 3. Work on short term and long term marketing strategy. Facebook Ads and Google AdWords are good to keep things going in terms of short-term. It validates your idea. It helps you fine-tune your landing page. It helps bring in sales in the short-term. Blog / content generation / inbound marketing take longer time to yield results. Participate in forum, ask people to register their emails, etc. Read http://www.amazon.com/Start-Small-Stay-Developers-Launching/dp/0615373968 and http://www.amazon.com/Inbound-Marketing-Found-Google-Social/dp/0470499311/ . The authors explain few things in more detail there. 4. Optimize, optimize and optimize. Getting 100.000 people to your site is pointless if nobody buys / interacts / return. It's all about the funnel (how many people on the top of the funnel, and what % ended up on the bottom). You could have 1000 people, but if 100 ended up buy something, that is already 10% conversion rate. Check out http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version. Read up and educate yourself on more concepts concerning optimisations (like, AB testing, funnel analysis, retention etc). In terms of tool, I see you have installed Google Analytics in your site. Also, check out http://optimizely.com/ , https://mixpanel.com/ or http://www.kissmetrics.com/ . They have been useful to me in terms of optimisation work. Here is one of my landing pages: http://zengarden.co.id/landing/family-spa-terbaru-di-medan . The conversion rate is going up by five folds compare to the initial version simply because I continuously tweak, AB-test and shorten the funnel. 5. There is a typo in the homepage. "Receive alerts on new deals". Not "Recieve". Spelling conveys professionalism. That's it from me. I wish you well Olivia. -- Hendro Wijaya On Friday, December 14, 2012 at 9:02 PM, Olivia M wrote: > Hi all, > > I am looking for some advice on how to drive traffic to my website > www.snatchadoo.com.au (http://www.snatchadoo.com.au) . I launched the site in > Feb this year, it's a group buying website dedicated to the hair and beauty > industry. In the beginning I engaged the services of a search engine > marketing company. Whilst I understand this sort of marketing takes time to > perfect, it was just too expensive for me to continue and with little to no > conversions I had to give it away. I then had a guy doing landing pages to > get sign-up's to my website. This was far more productive, I was getting > around 10 new members a day, which was pretty good for my little, unknown > site. But once again with me not turning over many sales, I could only keep > this up for so long. I decided to stop all marketing and have a re-think. The > customers that were visiting the site weren't always interested in the deal I > was promoting so I decided to create an online store, containing products > relating to my target aud ience, in the hopes of getting a sale from another angle. My online store launched today. I am currently doing my own thing when it comes to marketing (which proves to be pretty amateur, as I am a public servant/hairdresser by day, entrepreneur by night!) snatchadoo is on Facebook and Twitter, I do mail campaigns to around 450 members through mailchimp and a little bit of cross promoting with other businesses, but that's about it. > > When it comes to doing SEO myself... I am hopeless. I get that I will have to > put my hand in my pocket if I want my business to grow, but I don't know > which type of marketing I should focus on. Landing pages, Facebook or SEO??? > Any advice would be welcomed. > > Olivia > > > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach > Australia mailing list. Vist http://siliconbeachaustralia.org for more > > Forum rules > 1) No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself. > 2) No jobs postings. You can use http://siliconbeachaustralia.org/jobs > > > To post to this group, send email to > silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com > (mailto:silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com) > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com > (mailto:silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com) > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Silicon Beach Australia mailing list. Vist http://siliconbeachaustralia.org for more Forum rules 1) No lurkers! It is expected that you introduce yourself. 2) No jobs postings. You can use http://siliconbeachaustralia.org/jobs To post to this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to silicon-beach-australia+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/silicon-beach-australia?hl=en?hl=en
