How to market stuff that’s hard to market

Transcript:

Have you ever tried to market something that’s really hard to market?

What about something you can’t use Facebook or Google for?

I have… and it’s hard. REALLY hard.

Hey, my name’s Alex Cleanthous, and I’m Director of Strategy and Innovation, and co-founder, at Webprofits, and today I’ll be talking about how to market stuff that’s hard to market.

About a year ago, Webprofits expanded its offering to include premium marketing solutions for blockchain companies.

Now, if you know anything about that industry, you know that pretty much all of the major platforms banned any form of blockchain and cryptocurrency advertising.

So imagine you need to use digital marketing but you can’t use Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, Bing, Adroll, Criteo or ANY OTHER MAJOR platform. What do you do?

Well, that’s exactly what we had to deal with… and here’s what we did.

1) Email capture

Without being able to use the major ad platforms, you can’t actually retarget anyone with ads. So the #1 goal of the website for us is to capture emails so we can follow up with email marketing.

2) PR

What you probably don’t realise is just HOW effective Facebook Ads are for getting a message out in front of millions of people. So what we did instead is to use an aggressive PR strategy that integrates press releases, pr newswire, email distribution lists, and one-to-one outreach… and we focused on it every single day.

3) Influencers

We used influencers to get the message out at scale, especially because they aren’t bound by any advertising policies because their content is distributed organically.

4) Podcasts

We organised interviews on industry podcasts, which often get tens of thousands of people tuning in to each episode. We also ran ads on podcasts as well.

5) Industry-specific ad networks

We used industry-specific ad networks. With blockchain, for example, there are ad networks that specialise in blockchain advertising. So if your industry has a lot of news sites and blogs, there will likely be a way to advertise on them, either through a direct ad buy or through a niche ad network.

And 6) Organic social

We use social media platforms where we’re guaranteed organic reach so that anything we post is seen by our audience. For us, that meant Twitter and Telegram.

So yeah, what I think most people don’t realise, is just how good we have it being able to put a message in front of pretty much anyone using Facebook and Google.

And when you don’t have that option, you really start to see just how hard marketing can be.

The good news is that if you’re prepared to do the work, this stuff really works.

But if you don’t have the time, feel free to reach out to us to see how we can help.

I hope you enjoyed this episode. Thanks for watching and have a great day 🙂

Alex Cleanthous

Director + Co-Founder at Webprofits

Alex Cleanthous is an entrepreneur, writer, technologist, and marketing leader. He is Co-Founder of Webprofits, Australia’s largest private digital consultancy. With more than 20 years experience in the digital space, Alex stays at the forefront of digital innovation, strategy, and execution identifying new markets, platforms, and tools to keep pace with the exponential expansion of technology.