We’re attacking on all fronts

It’s been about marketing from all angles this week.

Last Saturday I attended another Baby Show, but this time we didn’t have a full stand because we found out about it too late to book a space. And what a massive difference it made – not a single member has joined, and I can guarantee that 99% of them received a card and a pack of crayons in their hands (from me, stood near the exit all day!)

So that proves something for us, that we’re going to have to exhibit properly in future, and show our website, to get the same reaction we had at Bambinos, the first baby show we attended. Of course, it may be that it’s a slow burn, but like for like, we’ve just not made the same impression. We’re still getting new members from Bambinos now, but we also had lots on the days we actually exhibited and in the few days immediately after. An interesting experiment, and very useful information. Thankfully it didn’t cost us much to find this out!

One of the best things about the day was meeting up with other business owners, swapping contacts and bouncing ideas off each other. In particular Lara from Babytastic (antenatal classes for pregnant couples in Hertfordshire) and I, spent most of the day talking because we were stood opposite each other. There was a lot of banter and it was great to see that we could both help each other out because we’d had experience of different things. There’s sometimes a lot of hesitation when business owners talk about their strategies, ideas and plans. When there’s no commercial risk (ie you’re not talking directly to a competitor), I can’t see what the problem is and the secrecy often does more harm than good. And let’s face it, if I was nervous about giving away private commercial information, I wouldn’t be writing this and broadcasting it to the world, would I?

I’m regularly emailed by an anonymous website business owner, who is generally criticising my approach or strategy. Not enough information to be helpful, just critical. It’s a shame that he doesn’t feel he can be open enough to disclose his email address directly to me so that I can actually reply to his emails, and then maybe something constructive will come out of this.

We finally got ourselves a mention in Alison Cork’s Really Useful Column in the Evening Standard on Wednesday evening, after us expecting it for the last couple of weeks. A cracking review, and she’s finished it by calling us ‘Pure Genius!’ Well we can’t ask for more than that, but I was really surprised to find that the number of members joining, stating the ES as their ‘heard from’ reason, was really low. It’s only Thursday evening as I write this, so maybe they’ll trickle in, but still…

We’re still waiting for our feature in the local paper, and I’m expecting quite a lot of interest from that, we shall see!

Crush Communications have been sending out our press releases this week, giving details of our competition - a luxury spa weekend courtesy of spabreak (see our website for full details!). I'm expecting some feedback tomorrow about how successful they've been with that.

Plus we’ve been busily printing, sticking and posting in our direct mail campaign. Very targeted and over quite a small area, but this is proving quite successful already. Maybe there’s a message here for us. Of course, the advantage with getting editorial press coverage is that it doesn’t cost anything, apart from a lot of time (assuming you don’t have a PR agent charging you for their service), and the costs of a direct mail campaign can be significant. But we’ve managed our costs really carefully, so this one should pay off. However I’m certainly looking forward to the day when we can afford to pay administrative staff to do our mailshots! You wouldn’t believe how much of a workout you get stuffing envelopes and sticking labels and stamps all day!


Wendy has been busy arranging the family travel reviews for the holiday pages. We’ve got 6 reviews to be posted in April, 4 lined up for May and 3 already in place for June. So those pages are going to be quite impressive soon, and quite varied. But it’s going to get more difficult to get any agreement for press trips in July/August as all the best family resorts are fully booked anyway, so I guess it will go pretty quiet after that until September.

We’re also now working on going further a-field for some European holidays, but we needed to wait until the pages were more substantial before we approached companies for these more expensive press trips. Let’s see how we get on, I expect many will have to be booked well in advance and we won’t be offered any reviews until 2007 – something that didn’t occur to me to do last year before we launched! That would have been impressive planning ahead! We need to tackle various modes of transport too – travelling with kids on a plane, boat/ferry, train and by car will all have different elements for the feature. We’ve got to provide as many useful tips as we can!

I’m looking at getting some partnerships for some of the other content too, more about those later if I get anywhere. And contact me if you have any ideas!

Talking of ideas, I’ve had a brilliant one from another business owner, Louise Parr who makes handmade wedding stationery - www.somethingbeautiful.biz, she suggested we should offer a gift option for anyone who wants to purchase a membership for someone else, she said it’d make a novel gift for a new mum in particular. What a fabulous idea and why didn’t I think of it before? Anyway, it’s in the pipeline now, so I’m very grateful to Louise (who received a complimentary membership for her sister-in-law as a thank you from us!) for telling us this. Aren’t there some nice people around?

There’s a possibility that we may be featured on a TV documentary on channel 5, for which I’m being interviewed next week. Not sure if it will go ahead, but a nice opportunity and one that I’m not going to turn down!

So more about that next week too!

Kirsty