Curly Hair rides Groundswell

Naturallycurly.com is an Austin based online community. It’s a designated online community for people with Curly hair to share their story, get information and make friend. The business model for the company is very simple –bring in traffic to their main site; monetize the traffic by selling advertising space to curly hair related product company such as P&G.

Since the creation, the site has attracted 15K registered customers, however, the company did not have a strategy for social media and they expect a higher growth rate potential if they use social media to market themselves.
That’s why me and 3 other MBA students were hired as consultant. Although curly hair is not a common thing in China, I am inherently interested in the topic and with a strong passion to use our business knowledge and social media experience to help a start-up company in need.

The first step we did was to interview the Employee and observe the website, because in order to bring in more traffic, especially quality traffic, we have to understand who the targeted customers are. After all these interviews and analysis, we realized female customer has a significant higher percentage in the customer base, what’s more, according to the social Technographic profile, there are higher percentage of Critics, Joiner and spectator in their customer base. But the next question is where are these potential customers in the groundswell, how to bring them to Naturallycurly?

Identify where the potential customers are:
Knowem.com is a very popular website, it provides list of popular groundswell sites organized under different category. Because we know critics, joiner and spectator are more likely to become the customer, and joiner prefer SNS such as Facebook and twitter to update with their friends what’s going on; Critics has higher tendency to use forum to express their opinion while spectator prefer to read instead of create and react to content, such as Blog. Our strategy was to use Knowem.com to identify a list of 50 sites under these 3 categories (SNS, Forum, Blog) where naturallycurly.com should focus its marketing effort to.

Assess the quality of each sites:
Right now we have a list of 50 sites where our potential customer are, but which has better quality? With the limited marketing budget, which sites should the company put higher priority?
Luckily we have some very popular web analytics tool such as Google analytics, alexa.com and compete.com. Google analytics is probably the most sophiscated tool among three, however, it requires the targeted site to preload a tracking code which is not the case for many sites. So we used alexa.com and compete.com as the traffic data for most popular sites are captured in real time. These 2 sites provide very detailed traffic information such as how many people visit a particular website, what’s the average page viewed, viewers’ demographic. We use these information to evaluate the quality of 50 sites we chose early, the criteria were site traffic(potential customer size), relevance to lifestyle topics and likelihood the customer will be interested in naturallycurly.com. we use these criteria to grade 50 sites. Meanwhile, because we don’t have high confidence in the quality of the free resource, we use both compete.com and alexa.com grade the list and did a weighted average of the result. Based on our assessment, we gave a list of 20 web sites where naturallycurly.com hasn’t made a proactive presence but should. The rest 30 sites are good to market to only if they have extra resource. In terms of how to market to these 20 websites, it requires a variety of approaches such as creating fan page, add advertising, participate in discussion with the objective to raise the awareness and increase the point of access. Because the time constrains for this project, the implementation was not part of our delivery.

Now we identified where the creator, critics, collector, joiner and spectator are and approach them with the right techniques. However, this effort to engage the right people, Marvin, connector and salesman will not guarantee a success in viral marketing. According to Tipping point, we also have to make the product sticky. That’s exactly what we did in the next step -we tried to increase the stickiness of naturally.com main site to achieve 2 objectives: retain the traffic therefore increase the quality of the user base; build a solid base for the word of mouth effect. Again, how to make the product sticky depends on the understanding of the targeted customers – critics, joiner and spectator. Natuallycurly.com has a forum, but somehow it hasn’t been a highlight. Knowing critics is a major customer base and they love quality forum to express their opinion, we recommend the company to streamline their current forum page to be more user friendly; meanwhile, add a daily top 5 forum topics in the prominent position on the main page. Besides, we also recommend the company to frequently launch small scale rating and survey on the latest news because Critics love these activities. For joiner, we recommend to add a SNS icon at prominent place on the main site, so when joiner find an interesting information on naturallycurly.com, they can instantly click the icon and share with their friends on facebook. For spectator, we know we have to increase the quality of the content, noticing the company used to hire famous blogger generate content, we recommend continuing this effort, besides, once a new blog is generated, the spectators should easily notice.

During our final presentation, the management team was very excited about our finding and recommendation, they were also eager to have us for the next phase – strategy to monetize the traffic.
For me, the sense of fulfillment comes from the ability to apply what I learn from reading the Groundswell to solve a real life challenge. Online Marketing is very complicated because there are so many moving parts, but the social technographics profile provides a very good framework to systematically analyze the business.