Yesterday, at a panel I moderated in San Francisco, Donna Wells, Mint.com's chief marketing officer, stunned a room full of digital marketing pros by noting that she really didn't have much of a marketing budget. Mint.com has gone from zero to 1.5 million users in two years with no ad campaign, save a mid-five-figures sum spent on search engine terms. Rather than purchase traffic, it has pursued the same type of strategy that food trucks and online magazines do: Using free social media and piggybacking on popular new communications technology. Mint.com has more than 36,000 Facebook fans and 19,000 Twitter followers, a well-trafficked blog, and a popular iPhone application.
It's not true, Mint.com did pay for advertising costs, that spending on "search engine terms" was through companies like PayPerPost where bloggers were paid to write material in the form of written ads to boost their search engine terms in a manner that Google took issue with and ended up spanking those who worked for PayPerPost while companies like Mint.com were not penalized.
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