Today’s COVID Updates, Marketing Excitement, and Charlie the Unicorn
It’s Thursday … I think.
Let me tell you a little something about marketing …. it’s awesome! Why did it take me 19 years and a pandemic to figure this out? Not that we didn’t do some form of marketing before (mostly SEO and Google Adwords) but what we have jumped into the past several weeks is a whole different world.
First of all, I acknowledge that the health and safety products are in high demand, and unlike some retailers we actually have stock, and … this is a product that applies to a wide audience of both consumer and business customers, so the things we are doing have an amplified effect. But, holy cow. We’ve really stumbled onto something.
We’ve been doing radio ads here in Atlanta for a couple weeks now and that has worked pretty well; so much so that we are about to expand to other stations in other cities. But we also partnered with a company that helps you get your message out to the e-mail lists of other companies that have lots of e-mail subscribers. One of those companies is an “AARP like” company that has a gigantic e-mail list. It’s all opt in and such – their subscribers look for and want these “offers” that come to their inbox. Their list is roughly 800,000 subscribers. We started yesterday with a subsection of the list – about 65,000 of them.
I was at the warehouse QA’ing orders (quality assurance – verifying count and accuracy) for EIGHT hours from 3pm till 11pm. We called people back in to work at 8pm. It was lunacy. We all left good and exhausted.
Even more lunacy? Another email blast is going out tomorrow morning to 170,000 people! We’d better GIRD OUR LOINS (long version) cause tomorrow is going to be rough (I hope!)
I’ll admit that we really don’t know what we are doing when it comes to consumer marketing. (Why would we?). The truth of the matter is that this whole health and safety supplies journey is teaching us a lot … about a lot. I am serious when I say this … if you have any suggestions or referrals to anything or anyone that you think might be helpful to us for marketing, let me know. Since we have a nearly unlimited supply of most of the health and safety items we are selling, we are really trying to strike while the iron is hot. Why wouldn’t we, right?
On the product development front I got more webcam samples in today and tested them. I was hoping to have a “good, better, best” offering fairly quickly but I have got to be honest – most of the samples I have been receiving have been crap! The one I got today literally made me look 10 years older. I am not even joking. Is that a selling feature?? Maybe for underage kids trying to look older online or something …. Hmm maybe it has a market after all! Kidding! I am going to keep at it and get some products launched soon! I am working with a dozen factories to find what I like best. I will not give up!