advertising

Otaku Marketing Plans

Otaku is a Japanese term, now used throughout the marketing world, to mean a person or group of people obsessed with a particular topic/problem/or interest.  Recently, I was astonished to learn that there is an Otaku group who are obsessed with a specific kind of ice – nugget ice.   I learned this from doing a deep analysis of what causes IndieGogo campaigns to succeed or fail.  You see, there is an Opal Ice Maker, which does 1 thing ~ makes nugget ice ~ that recently raised $2.5 Million dollars on indiegogo.  And this got me thinking….

Who in their right mind would PRE-ORDER a $450 ice machine?
Clearly, I’m not an Otaku for nugget ice.
But also as clear, this marketing plan worked.  And it was a pretty simple plan really, and had almost NOTHING to do with advertising or promotion.  I’ve written extensively in the past about marketing plans, and how marketing is SO MUCH MORE than just advertising.  This Opal Ice Maker is clearly a perfect example.   So, what made this successful? And how can you build a marketing plan just like it?
  1. The Opal Ice Maker is targeted specifically and exclusively to people who love nugget ice, and would die to have it at home… Clearly, there is a passionate following of nugget ice, and this entire product was built EXCLUSIVELY for that audience.  (I would never buy one, for example).
  2. The Opal Ice Maker ‘completely’ solves the problem of making your own nugget ice at home…. it does exactly what it says it will do, and most people cannot even imaging using 24 pounds of nugget ice at their home, even at a party!
  3. They went after and got people who love nugget ice, targeting people who ‘like sonic drivethru’ (who have the nugget ice), and other chains where people frequent just to get their ice fix.
  4. It’s not a low price, but a high price… because Otaku people would pay it, and a high price signals quality.
So, to replicate this marketing plan all you need to do is:
  1. Find a problem that a very specific small Otaku group have, and are extremely passionate about.
  2. Completely solve the problem.
  3. Target and reach out to that group directly (ads, PR, gorilla marketing).
  4. Charge a high enough price to signal quality.
Now, go out and market!

7-Step Results-based Marketing for Startups Harlan’s 2014 Captivate Conference Slides

I hope you enjoyed my talk this year at the Captivate Conference on Marketing for Start-ups (and specifically game startups).

Here are my slides from the talk, and as always feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn (see sidebar) or Twitter ( @harlanbeverly ).

Comments, email, and feedback welcome.

Slides Follow:

7-Step Results-based Marketing for Startups by Harlan T Beverly from Harlan Beverly

All of marketing should be about results! When you are a startup this is even more important, because you have no money to waste on “brand”… you certainly don’t have the time to waste. Harlan T. Beverly, 3-time Start-up Founder & CEO, will present a 7-Step process to create an effective Results-based “marketing engine” that will drive results for your startup. Harlan will give specific examples from marketing campaigns he has created from: Bigfoot Networks, Harlan’s video game hardware company, Night Owl Games, where Harlan developed marketing that attracted more than 1,000,000 players, INGZ games, where Harlan created marketing campaigns to drive users to install mobile games, and Key Ingredient, where Harlan is currently CEO and drives 3,000,000+ visitors/month to http://www.keyingredient.com

How to do Facebook Marketing – a Primer for Engineers

Dear Engineers and Other People who Think Logically,

Here is how to “do” Facebook Marketing.  It’s pretty simple, and it also explains the fundamentals of Marketing.

The analogy I use in the presentation is that of a Fair or Carnival…  it’s a good analogy, use it forever to explain marketing.  Imagine yourself selling a product or service (cotton candy or a carnival game) on the streets of a Fair!  How can you be successful?

See the presentation to learn:  How to DO Marketing on Facebook.  How to use Facebook Insights (e.g. Facebook Analytics).

Enjoy!

Facebook vs. Google. Direct Internet Marketing (Advertising)

Which is better for Advertising?  Facebook or Google?  Hell if I know!  What is better anyways?  Different… would be a better way to explain Facebook vs. Google, so here goes how I see them as different from a Direct Internet Marketing perspective.

Here is the main difference: The Targeting is Different.

  • Facebook lets you target Age/Gender/Location/Likes, and more,  because it knows “who it’s users are”.
  • Google lets you target Location and “Search Term Keywords” only.
From a direct marketer’s perspective Facebook might seem better. Marketers usually think of segmentation in terms of “demographics” and “psycho-graphics’, and with Facebook’s tools, you can really target a “market segment”.
The problem with Facebook Targeting is that you have no idea of “buying intent”.  You don’t know if they are interested or care about your offer.
For Google, you target the key words that a person is searching for AT THAT MOMENT.  There is some kind of intent implied in the act of searching.  While this doesn’t jive with Marketers view of segmentation, it certainly does have an impact on relevance to the user.
The difference in the CTR and CVR between the two platforms shows what I mean.
  • “Averages” from some of my own Facebook campaigns:   CTR: 0.025%   CVR: 0.012%  (yes a tenth of a percent)
  • “Averages” from some of my own Google Adwords campaigns:   CTR: 0.6%  CVR: 0.06%  (yes 6 tenths of a percent).
Meaning Google is between 20x better at click-through-rate, and at least 6x better at CVR.
Another big difference is the “Ad Frequency” settings of the two tools.
  • On Facebook, the ads are shown in smallish quantities until one of the ads in an ad group takes off… then the others get virtually no traffic.
  • On Google, you can SET the system to show ads evenly (when you are A/B testing, this is really really important).
So doing A/B testing on Facebook is almost impossible… (I havn’t figured out a way to do it in a statistically meaningful way).
Instead, on Facebook, I do “Survival Testing”… ads that Survive (get impressions and seem to keep working at a decent rate) go into my “good group”  and ads that do not get enough testing, stay in the testing group until I have enough data to “kill them”.   It’s a very slow and tedious process.
I’m sure there is more differences as well… what differences do you think are key?