Quantifying Online Promotion Efforts?

udhay asks: "Hi -- I'm with a startup that has what we think is a hot new product (it's a downloadable desktop app). We got some venture funding in, and are looking to outsource some of the stuff that we need to do, such as online promotion. "Online Promotion Agencies" are a dime a dozen however, and we were wondering how one would go about rating them, and how one would quantify the results they produce. I figured /. is a good place to ask - any ideas?"

VC Relationships

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you get VC funding from a VC company or friends, family etc. The reason I ask is that most VC firms have relationships with PR and marketing companies to help with this sort of thing.

If you do engage in some sort of banner campaign, do not expect to generate many sales that way. The real utility of banners is brand awareness. You really need to get your product reviewed or mention in print or one of the computing shows like cnet or zdtv. Remember that print reviews generally have a lead time of 2-3 months and time your campaigns to converge.

Make sure that you plan your marketing efforts. Have you identified your market? Have you found your apps utility for this target market? Have you identified competing products and disected their marketing efforts? Have you written a press release?

In the developer area of Be's website [be.com] take a look at the articles on marketing. They will help. There are also resources online which help with press releases and contacts. Make sure you send your info to specific people and not a department or company.

Good luck.

Quick free tip!

[Ratface]

Banner advertising, love it or hate it, is one way of getting people to link to your site and discover your product.

Banner advertisers offer all sorts of mechanisms for showing you how many click-thoughs you have had etc. How can you tell though if they are telling the truth? One way of checking is to use a different URL to your site from each advertising site.

Use a URL like this http://cookstour.org?slashdot

The ? marks the beginning of a query string and should not cause any problems in your pages unless you have a dynamic first page, expecting query string arguments. (In this case build your own tracker!)

So what does this do? Well those different querystring srguments will show up as different entry pages in your log files, allowing you to tally the agency's click-through figures against your own.

You can of course also use this technique for any time you place a link to your own pages and want to know where it came from.

Hope this little tip helps.

Online

[KimmBadd]

Ask one of them to send you a proposal and do it yourself. I was able to get our website on 15 sites that review and list bookstores. It is free to add your URL to most search engines. A company we actually gave money to to give us exposure had an awesome proposal, but could not produce almost everything they said they could.

Re:pirst fost fevahhh...

[KimmBadd]

Do you have a problem with how tall you are? Do you feel that you are short? Are you out of grade school?