Advertising on a small budget....do these work?

earley15

Hello,

I have just set up a new website and I have a small budget for promotion. I have promoted my website using the methods on this forum and the uk business forum. However, I now want to physically advertise. My website is a comparison site for people with big feet (12-18). I have a list of the top ten cities with the biggest feet and have done the following bits of advertising. I want to know whether the items I have looked into are worth the morney and has anyone used them in the past.

What I have done
Advert in a Birmingham paper.
Full page advert in a basketball magazine.
I have written a lettter to all the kit managers of all the football,rugby and some running teams in the country.

What I want to do
Giving out cotton bags with my logo on at a London train station (thats where im based)
Advertising in the toilets of motor way stations
Sponsoring an athelte or team.

Do the latter ideas work and are they worth the money,

Many thanks for any advice on these methods. If anyone is intrested the site is monsterkicks.co.uk

Many thanks in advance

James

ukbill69

Right maybe see some popular websites or forums related to your website and offer products as a competition for the users of that site and then get them to sign up to a mailing list and then you can email them your products.

paulwf

Very targeted advertising is likely to be the way to go not handing out things at random at train stations. Firstly your core audience is only male, only teenage and above, and even in the adult population perhaps only 5% or so (do you have accurate stats for us to help us?) are size 12 and above. So in the general population it would work out you are targeting about 2% of the total audience.

You didn't ask for feedback on your website so tell me to get lost if you like but I'd hate to see you spend any more money on advertising until the website is 100%. The header doesn't have a relevant picture or logo (it all comes across a bit like a generic wordpress template...sorry) and your logo underneath looks out of place and looks like a quick photoshop job (again sorry for criticising).

The front page lacks any "wow factor". Personally I'd put any sale bargains on the front page or something to draw people in, a lot of people might not stick around beyond the front page.

I would probably go for the classic 3 column layout...a menu on the left hand side so you can shop by brand, by size, by price, by retailer...those sorts of things. Your main body of the site in the middle, then useful info or featured products (maybe affiliate with some Ebay listings) on the left.

Could you link up with some other products? Just think of what they do in the tall and wide shops. Maybe womens shoes is an area to expand into later, think of what Long Tall Sally do.

I hope my post isn't taken the wrong way...I have size 13 feet and know there is a need for this type of thing and commend your efforts. It's just I also know advertising can be a shorthand term for a big pit that you throw endless amounts of money into for little return, especially if the product (your website) isn't optimised first.

paulwf

Two other things when I used your site:

- Your link opens in the same window rather than a new one, it would be very easy for someone that found your site to navigate away from it and not be able to get back to it.

- You only link to the homepages not the actual product. This means the customer still has to do a lot of legwork to find the product (especially as they've now forgotten the product name because the window has been overwritten).

ukbill69

paulwf wrote: »

Two other things when I used your site:

- You only link to the homepages not the actual product. This means the customer still has to do a lot of legwork to find the product (especially as they've now forgotten the product name because the window has been overwritten).

No the easier the person finds the products they are searching for is better!, so I disagree with this, I run some very successful ecommerce website and been doing this for over 10 years, so I know what im doing.

All you have to do is look at amazon's website and that is the way to go. Its such a good platform they have done, other websites use there software e.g m&s and usa retailers Target, Toy 'R' Us and Borders.

earley15

Don't worry I don't take anything as critcism. Defnitley some good points and I am working on a a new header. The problem of linking to the product, is that the code I am giving in the banners track whether anyone has come through my website. I would link to the actual product but dunno if this would affect the trackers as such.

There is defnitley a market for this. I am just trying to figure the best way of getting it across. Due to is being a small business I don't have the money to get the website how I want it yet. So currently can't search by product or price etc. But I hope to make it better the more the site develops.

What software does amazon use?

earley15

I asked the statistics office for the number of people with size 12+ but they had no records. There are more people with size 13 than size 7.

fuzzball172

Treat your website like the supermarkets treat their stores... PRODUCT as you enter, make sure you have some form of product, specials or promotions on the front page. This may be the ONLY page they see, you have to make sure you grab their interest enough to ensure they look around.
Your strap line 'Value and variation for people with big feet', not the most memorable phrase and doesn't roll off the tongue. Think of any name brand and I bet you can recite their tag line without thinking. I would work on that. Also I don't know if your header has changed since the first posting, but it looks nice but doesn't add to your brand or help the user. How does it translate onto marketing material, stationary? I'm not saying you need a giant cartoon shoe with a monster face, but this is your brand / identity and it needs to be unified over all possible mediums you can think of using it. While I'm on the subject, what is the pale green footprint with illegible writing underneath for?Is it was an old logo that doesn't quite work, but you spent a lot of time on, so don;t want to get rid of it? Where it is now is confusing? Because it is so different in style it seems to be indicating it could be either a link to a different site, or an advert. Unify your brand image so you have a single coherent look to the whole site.
You need to get product on your front page. Web users don't like to work for their information and having to read a whole paragraph to see what the site is about could cost you a few visitors. Better to us images go look at a few shoe shop websites and see what I mean. There is no doubt that nike or barretts sells shoes whereas I need to read (boring) your site to see what it does. I know I'm over doing it a bit, but there have been numerous studies with various people claiming you have xx many seconds to catch you visitors attention, its true. We are now a web savvy population who know what we want and would rather not have to wait to get it (hence the credit problems in the world).
Do a quick survey, take a screen shot of 10 websites that sell any old product, some good and some bad, slip in a shot of yours and print them out. Stand in your local shopping center with the printouts and ask people what they think the site sells after a quick glance. Then show them again slowly asking them a second question, would you buy from this website if you needed their product? This will give you a little insite into what works and what doesnt. If you don't fancy doing this, then look at half a dozen name brand products web sites and see how they present their image and product. You should see a common theme running through most of the sites. These guys spend £1000's on market research, brand testing, consumer review etc... You have to think the websites they produce work well for them, so copy thier formula as your business is the same as theirs.

I hope this helps a little

Lee

chuckyhen

Hi James,

Before you spend you cash on advertising - why not get in contact with England Basketball, Sports Focus, British Basketball league - plenty more, all I did was type in 'UK basketball teams' to search engine - and let them know what you're doing with MonsterKicks. Ask also about rates for advertising in their game programmes etc. If you can strike up a good relationship with a person/club you can ask them for a testimonial on your site etc. and also get the local press involved - write a press release and get some photos taken - even if your local basketball club never visit your website and buy from you, ask them for help with a photoshoot in promoting your new venture as they'll get coverage from it too! Try not to spend you cash on advertising until you've exhausted all the 'free' stuff that you can do to promote your website. Good luck with it all!

Horace

I too am a small business so I know all about advertising on a budget. I know that i am useless at building my own website although I know how to do it I don't have the time nor the inclination. I actually used Printing.com to design and host my website - I get free hosting for 12 months and free content management for 12 months - my site cost me £399 plus VAT which is considerably cheaper than the folks that I used previously who charged me over £500 plus VAT and then charged me for every alteration at £30 plus VAT:mad:

With Birmingham newspapers and probably the same is true for other newspapers it is actually cheaper to have a flyer inserted into the paper as opposed to a printed advert. Negotiate the advertising costs down - never pay the full amount that they want and be prepared to walk away if they don't charge you what you want to pay.

Have you thought about setting up a group on Facebook (its free) and then add your weblink to other groups offering similar services and products, that gets your name out there and helps push you up google rankings. Have you considered having a blog on blogspot.com? You can talk about large shoes etc and if you put a link to it from your website then that may bring you some more interest. Also ask about reciprocal links.

fuzzball172

earley15 wrote: »

The problem of linking to the product, is that the code I am giving in the banners track whether anyone has come through my website. I would link to the actual product but dunno if this would affect the trackers as such.

I had a quick look at your affiliate manager page and the tracking is done with a time limited cookie. That means the users is tracked as coming from your site, and will be tracked every time they return to the site, even if they don't come from your site, for the next 30 days. This means that the link should be able to go anywhere once you work out how your affiliate manager site configure their links.

Lee