On Saturday, I posted an article about my new baby registry website, and a few people had follow up questions about the development process and marketing the site. This morning, I want to discuss how I plan to market and promote the website.
I have quite a few projects/websites on my plate that I actively market and update, including this blog, DogWalker.com, DogGroomers.com, and Lowell.com. This takes up a fair amount of my time. I believe that with BabyRegistries.com, my marketing efforts will be quite a bit different, and they will be less time consuming.
My main focus will be on grass roots marketing efforts to let parents know that the website exists. This will be done in a variety of ways:
Social Media: I set up a Twitter account, and I will be getting in touch with and follow people who mention baby registries in their updates. I will encourage them to sign up for a free account and stress that setting it up is easy. I will stress the idea that it makes it easy for friends and family to find and buy gifts that are needed.
Networking: Â Although it would probably be most effective to do in-person networking, I don’t have the time or desire to do that. The site wasn’t a huge investment, and it will be more of a passive time investment. That being said, I plan to introduce myself and the site to mom bloggers and pregnancy websites. I had quite a bit of positive feedback from friends who recently had children, and I think the service will be something other bloggers will want to mention.
Word of Mouth: This is going to be the biggest driver of traffic. New and expecting moms love to discuss tips and helpful websites, and if they find the site beneficial, they will tell friends. In addition, as more participants send out emails to friends and family to let them know about their pages, others will sign up.
Search Engine Marketing: I will be making ad buys on Google and possibly Bing to drive traffic to the site. I will also try to buy advertising on some of the leading mom websites to let them know the site exists.
Contests: I may run a few contests to get people to sign up and post their registries. For instance, I may do a drawing for a $100 gift card to Babies R Us or Diapers.com for people who sign up. The tough part of this will be spreading the word about the contest and knowing legalities of running a contest like this.
Most stores are only focused on their own baby registries, and they likely won’t be interested in co-marketing efforts. Similarly, many baby websites offer similar (albeit different approaches) services on their own websites, so it will be difficult to forge relationships with the larger sites.
BabyRegistries.com is a much different type of site than my other websites. I won’t be responsible for driving traffic to the baby registries contained within the site. Since random people won’t be buying gifts, it’s up to the expectant parents to send their friends and family to their page. This means my focus needs to be 100% on awareness so expectant parents sign up and create registries.
I feel that this should lead to somewhat of a snowball effect. The more people that learn about and use the site, the more it will grow. I think it’s easy for expectant parents to create pages, and it certainly is easy for friends and family to see all of the registries. If friends and family find it easy to use, they will likely use it themselves. As such, marketing this site is far different than my other sites.
What are your thoughts on my next steps and marketing ideas?
“Most people tend to over-estimate what they can accomplish in one year and under-estimate what they can accomplish in ten years.”
– Wildly Attributed Quote that is absolutely true.
Look into FB ads. You’re better off advertising a baby related website on social media rather than the engines, since every prospective mother is going to be blabbering like hell about her pregnancy experience and you’ll get a shitton of free chatter.
“Giveaway Contests” are the amoeba in the marketing evolutionary scale. You have to engage them with stuff they sincerely care about. That isn’t one of them.
Your core profit model is what- off-paging them to the larger retail registries via an affiliate link?
But maybe experiment with engine traffic too and see what returns better. The reason I suggested to perhaps start with the socials is because I know you’re working with an indy budget and intuitively, you’ll probably get more bang for your buck. At this phase, generating buzz is important and you do get that on the socials, not the engines.
Plus- I’m totally convinced of this- inbounds from the socials weigh heavier than other ‘types’ of inbounds. You get SEO and SMO for one price. Probably a good idea for kickstart marketing.
@ LS
Your core profit model is what- off-paging them to the larger retail registries via an affiliate link?
Yes, that’s it for now. When people buy gifts via the links, I earn a small affiliate commission. When traffic grows, I will seek out direct ad deals.
Good call on FB ads… I need to set up a FB page when I get a chance and target pregnant moms.
The best marketing is you are in the action.
Live in Lowell and you know what to write
OWn a dog and you know what it takes to take care of her
GET a BABY and you will know what it is like
Get a bird and you know how to take care.
I love GrowingJadePlant.com (largest jade plant in the world) and selling jade plants…plain and simple
I love wine and I have washingtonwinemakers.com and my own winery called PacificWinery.com
Plain and simple..$$$$ will come in when you love what you do!!!
Facebook page just launched:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/BabyRegistriescom/222297731116516
Wow, BullS actually provided some excellent advice for once. Way to make a constructive contribution! Hope to see more posts like this. 🙂
@ Chuckie
I agree with BS and you.
You ALL can make fun of me all you want but I can see the future.
Go read my “BULLS” site and you all will agree with me.
Our population is aging and they don’t need to buy “s*hit”, all they need is food,shelter, medical and a sense of security.
May be social networking with companies and websites, FB related with baby shower parties, baby gender parties etc…Just a thought.
Hey Elliot,
Just wondering why you didn’t want to shore up the brand by snagging the .co for $10. I think it’s still available. I saw someone commenting on a different site and asking if it was worth registering. It was shortly after you posted this. It might be an interesting experiment to compare stats and see how well each would rank if you mirrored the site on two different extensions.
@ Christopher
Unnecessary and I would be happy for someone else to develop the .CO.
I also have no interest in creating more work for myself 🙂
Although not an idea I’d suggest for any 1st wave of marketing/promotion (…but rather, something to keep in your back pocket), you might consider some sort of money-back offer based upon sales made via your affilate links.
So, if your commission is 8% (as example) you might offer 3-4% back as a bonus to the BabyRegistries.com account holder. The % rebate/bonus would be based on the total sales booked via that individuals’ BabyRegistries.com account. You might even offer a choice — such as 2% if they want a cheque/cash, or 4% if they choose to take it in a gift certificate (from one of your suppliers; so you recoup some of the payback).
This sort of rebate might be especially useful if you were to discover (one of) the main barrier(s) to people opening an account was due to an aversion to ‘affiliate-links’ based sites.
Steve
The site looks good, and congrats on getting a great name at what sounds like a good price.
A couple of small suggestions/thoughts on the design: 1. I would left justify the “Choose a Baby Registry” menu for more of a normal eCommerce look. 2. I would also bring down the “Find a Baby Registry” copy down a line or two so that it is spaced like the rest of the page.