IN a rapidly changing market, success isn’t just about bringing the right product to market at the right time but charting the correct course through the shifting media environment.
For Geoff Hunt, who spent four years working on the launch of online print-on-demand photo book service Momento, his advantage in 2004 was that he was among the first in Australia. As such he was able to capitalise on the novelty of the service in promoting it to the media.
At the time, the company outsourced all its printing and postage. It was the culmination of years of development that brought the first iteration of Momento’s prototype software in 1999. When the company launched, the plan was to outsource everything it could. “It came with an enormous cost, not only financial cost but operational cost, with the logistics of running a business entirely outsourced,” Hunt says.
The product’s novelty resulted in plenty of publicity on television, including programs such as Today and Sunrise. Hunt says this TV exposure helped launch the product, as the concept of the photo book is hard to sell in words alone.
“There is nothing like moving pictures to do the job for you. I guess we got a bit of a shock, the response was so good. We realised very quickly we’d hit on something that everybody wanted,” he says.
The company also segmented the market, targeting its service to mass-market consumers and professionals. The professional market is offered a wider range of products and given discounts. “For the pro market we have to ensure that we always reserve a range of our products for them exclusively so they don’t feel we are selling direct to their market,” he says. “It is a fine line we have trodden for several years now, but it seems to have settled.”
The company also started feeling its way around internet advertising, at first using Google’s targeted advertising as well as a mix of websites. With Google, Momento was able to target people searching for photo books by using relevant key words. “We tried more traditional banner and flash advertising but it didn’t get the results. I don’t understand why,” Hunt says. “The only one we really got traction from was Google.”
Then came the exponential growth of social networking and Facebook in Australia. Its appeal wasn’t just the huge volume of users but that it could target a specific age or sex based on user profiles.
Facebook also allows targeting by location, education, workplace, relationship status, keywords and language. To date, this type of advertising on Facebook has worked best for Momento, better than Google.
The company also has a Facebook widget that allows customers to display an online version of photo books ordered. This is where the power of viral marketing kicks in. “That allows us to get our market to help us do the advertising,” Hunt says. Facebook users are placing the widget on their pages and thus helping promote Momento.
Such was the company’s growth that in 2007 Momento raised $1million privately to fund its own on-demand printing plant, which opened in March last year. “There was a threshold that we passed where it all made sense to get it in-house,” Hunt says. “We are now able to provide outsourcing to other companies. We’ve seen it from both sides.”
Unexpectedly, the future includes growth of overseas licencees in Brazil, New Zealand, Hong Kong and, soon, North America, despite no promotion in this area.
This brings new priorities to develop applications and widgets that can feature on a wide range of the market-leading social networks abroad, as well as specialist photography networks including Flickr and Picassa.
The average order is 1.5 copies. The aim is to increase this by allowing groups to collaborate in producing books through social networking sites. “It means that group books and group products are going to be a pretty exciting thing of the future,” Hunt says.
But the glory days of free PR on TV are over. “Publicity comes less from PR or that kind of appearance. You have got to pay for it now,” he says. “We were very lucky because we were the first nationally and very early internationally, and we got a lot of attention because of it. That helped establish our brand and that is a very important part of who we are now.”