In 2012 we were approached by one of the biggest baby stores in Australia to help them with their online marketing strategy – We did the research, we came up with the strategy and we presented one of the best presentations of our lives and we won the job. After a month of planning and getting contracts signed the company fired their marketing manager and put a hold on all spend that hadn’t started yet, guess who lost the contract, yep, us… we were shattered, we had already spent hours on end coming up with a strategy and had done all the SEO and AdWords research to make sure this client was going to triple their yearly revenue.
A few years later, after a bit of domain trading, we somehow captured the domain www.babyproducts.com.au – Now we still had the strategy, and now we had a URL, but we didn’t know the first thing about the baby industry, all we knew was that over 250,000 people every single month were typing in baby related searches and the average cost per click was less than $1, a good market by any standards!
Fast forward to 2015 when we became older and wiser, we were expecting our first child and started doing the rounds of baby shopping. We realised that all first time parents cared about, was ‘the best for their child, no matter the cost’.
Remembering about the previous research performed – every shop we went into I spoke to the managers to see what their online strategies were, all of them giving me the same answer, “online is too hard” – “we have too many products” and “we don’t understand how Google works”. Even with my 250k search volume sales pitch, no one was biting. Until I met Catherine, she was extremely switched on and like us, knew the potential in the marketplace, she had a separate budget for SEO, AdWords and Social Media as she knew all 3 working together would be the ultimate online strategy to grow her business.
Come 2016; We now have a marketing strategy, a URL and a supplier, what does this mean? It meant it was time to build a website, join forces and create a joint venture where everybody wins!
What is the aim of this story? Well, www.babyproducts.com.au now has a website on it and is selling products all over Australia – From what started as a potential customer has now turned into a business.
Lesson Learned
Never delete old proposals and strategies, you will never know when someone in a similar industry or a family member decides to start a business and wants to you help – hours, even days can be saved just by keeping an old record of your work, especially in an industry with high search demand.
We would also like to thank Vikram Jayaprakash for the inspiring talk he gave that lead us to believe in our business venture and that a joint venture is sometimes better than trying to do things alone. We would also like to thank Shelcom Business Registration for sorting us out with our ABNs, Trusts and everything else needed to start a business.
