Archive for October, 2010

Another halloween comes and goes around

Its been one hell of a crazy month. Halloween means Halloween Costumes and that means TheCostumeShop.ie goes into full swing. This year I was really chuffed to have crossed into the Top 200 websites in Ireland on Alexa and place 194th at our peak in the Irish listings. And more surprisingly high in the UK listings – and we’re really not optimized to be featured there at all.

The Costume Shop Alexa Rank

The Costume Shop Alexa Rank on 30/10/10

During this month we created 64 new jobs in the Portlaoise Area, something that i’m really proud of in the current climate and I have to say the Irish work force has some incredible people being under utilized. We also had a lot of fun along the way – Did anyone see Deric reading the weather on TV3 dressed as a mad hatter?? Classic.

One of the great forums of marketing that I finally got around to learning was Facebook pages, I have to be honest and say i really hadn’t been keen on the idea of formalizing a role for someone to look after social media as part of their duties, but I was completely proved wrong. Michelle and Stephen did such an incredible job of The Costume Shop facebook page and by the months end, we had gone from 100 likes (fans) to 6250 likes in just a month with decent conversion rates. At least for Ireland that has to be some sort of social media record.

Quick word on facebook marketing, we didn’t spend any money on facebook ads to get fans. Buying ads to get likes on facebook is simply retarded, you wouldn’t buy friends for your personal profile so don’t do it for your business. When running FB ads, always land on your own domain and at an optimized page. Also there is a huge difference between an active facebook page and a stupid facebook campaign. While the I like tatyo crisps on bread campaign was considered by a few a success (currently with 17,700 likes) – I’m not sure how many (if any) conversions / packets of crisps sold, they made as a result of the campaign. And having acquired all those likes, which is really more of a statement about the person than an interest in the business, what else can they say other than “I still like…”. I digress. Facebook marketing only works when you engage and share things of interest with people who already are interested in your products. There’s no point in shoving your product down peoples throats. Find your tribe and stick with them as Seth Godin would say.

So I’d love to say the next few weeks should be a chance to calm down and catch up on the non existent sleep we’ve been getting, but the plan is to get two new businesses concepts investigated and hopefully get off the ground before 2010 is out. As they say create a tight timeline and a mammoth task to focus on to let peoples true potential out.