Case study: Getting 10,000 people to download an unknown product with no budget using only social media.

Introduction

This latest social media marketing task has been one of my biggest challenges to date but I’ve really enjoyed testing my abilities to their very edge. How do you launch a product with no budget? I could have some answers for you below.

The Challenge:

Launch a new, unknown product into an over-crowded global market place with a marketing budget shrunk to pretty much zero by the recession.

The Strategy:

Drop all costly, untrackable offline marketing and go online, which was later refined to drop all costly traditional online marketing (PPC, banner ads etc) and concentrate on social media.

The Social Media Strategy:

Create numerous online properties to engage with a wide audience and give them the opportunity to interact with the product and other users creating a community and positioning the images created with Play With Pictures as social objects.

These properties include:

• An email list – not social media but you know what I mean!
  

• a blog

• a Facebook group

• a Flickr group

• a website

• a Twitter Feed
  

Social Media Tactics:

• Leverage valentine’s Day to give away 10,000 copies of Play With Pictures using funny pictures of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to help spread the message virally.
  

• Launch give away on the blog.

• Encourage viral spread of the post across stumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter and Facebook by tapping into my established networks.

• Encourage downloaders to try out the product and post to the Facebook Page, spreading the word of Play With Pictures to their friends across their Facebook profiles.

• Comment and encourage across all our platforms.

• Active blogging and commenting across blogs carrying posts about Play With Pictures and blogs within our target niches.

Results

• 10,000 download mark achieved on the last day of the promotion. Phew!

• 55k+ page views on the website in one week.

• 12k + highly targeted email addresses.

• 110 fans on the Facebook group after only a few days.

• Close to 100 followers on Twitter and growing rapidly.

• Active, growing online community using the product.

• Plenty friendly comments and buzz.

• 1 potential PR disaster (a small bug in the product) which was quickly averted!

• £0 spent, excluding of course salaries and PR agency retainers.