As with any new business relationship (such as the one you’re considering with us), having similar expectations is critical to getting the discussion started constructively and quickly. For that, it’s important to note that we are not advertising.
In the brave new world of group buying, daily deals, kazillions of clones who do almost the same thing but not quite, some local, some international, newspapers, television, radio, social media ads (on websites, on twitter, on facebook), coffee cup sleeves, and untold numbers of other venues, it seems prudent to point out that we, as a primary mission, are not advertising.
That doesn’t mean you won’t get some of the benefits of advertising at a secondary level, but we do not:
- reach out to an unconnected audience of tens of thousands
- primarily target bargain hunters
- actively solicit unrelated-to-you markets, audiences, or demographics
- build mailing lists for the sole purpose of pushing deals on the subscribers
There is a time and place for these mass market actions and when used properly can be an important part of a marketing/advertising/social media strategy. We are focused on the other side of this coin.
Well, what good are we then? Quite a bit. Instead of relying on brute force numbers to gain valuable and enduring customer relationships, we engage quality rather than quantity. Here are some of the important things we do:
- by design, help you reach your connected audience, not just one degree (immediate connections) but two degrees as well (friends of friends)
- support you in supporting your organically growing audience (what is the value of a “friend of a friend” vs. “random discount hound”?)
- give you tools to compete with larger companies at a price you cannot match in-house such as eGifting and VendorBux™ gift-card-like services
- watch social media trends and incorporate new abilities in to the service to let you find, reward, and retain your customer base
- we put you, your services and products, in front of your customers in places they are (like Facebook) in an unintrusive manner
- by design, you remain in control of your customer experience, rather than handing it off to an agency
- by design, your prospects (and existing customers) are encouraged to strengthen their connections to you through social media, your website, and more
We don’t play the numbers game. We foster long-term connections, trust, and relationships between users and recipients, users and vendors, and recipients and vendors.
What sort of secondary benefits are there? To us, we want your customers to visit your page to get started. When they come into the main application to redeem their coupon, when they get their user newsletter, when other communications go out through internal and external channels (like the IOMG Twitter or Facebook accounts), there is discovery that may happen, similar to a person walking a mall to get to the (rapidly disappearing) movie store and unexpectedly stopping by the video game store along the way. There will be discovery by browsing, by region, by association. While these, in a sense, can be considered advertising because of your presence in front of unconnected visitors, we’re not specifically offering you space “in the mall”, we’re offering you all the connected visitor services; the unconnected (and enticed) are secondary in that they are bonus connections.
