Marketing for $5 a day? As young Kiwi campervan rental company Lucky Rentals has shown, it’s not impossible – if you’re willing to crowdsource.
The one-year old company turned over its marketing to the public for 100 days, soliciting photos, videos, blog posts and other promotional material from fiverr.com, an online market where sellers offer their services for $5. And, as a result, chief executive Nathan Brand said traffic to the company website had grown by more than 50 percent.
“As a young company we need to be smart with how we spend our marketing money. So we created the Lucky Fiverr project: 100 days of fiverr.com gigs delivering content that is 100 percent sourced from the Fiverr site using creative and talented producers.”
Lucky Rentals, which has offices in Christchurch and Auckland, is up to day 30 of the project and has been posting the crowdsourced content on its blog every day.
“We’ve had some hilarious, ridiculous and downright strange results. From the Lucky Rentals rap by esalaah who has had over four million views on YouTube to a half naked obese man (user name Krazyretard) singing us happy birthday, each gig has been completely unique and a lot of fun to see brought to life.”
He said it was a creative opportunity to try something new, engage customers and grow sales.
While putting your marketing in the hands of the public could be dangerous, Brand said getting people to do crazy things in the name of Lucky Rentals was paying off.
“As long as [the content]is not offensive or defamatory or anything like that, then we’re quite happy to put them up, whatever they are.”
Brand said he had not had to reject any submissions yet, although he had received one disappointing entry that failed to live up to expectations.
He said the benefit of crowdsourcing marketing material was that the company could potentially repurpose it in the future.
“It gives us this great big slew of content that we own and can use.”
Even if nobody else got a laugh out of it, he said, at least the Lucky Rentals crew did.
He said businesses always ran into the same issue when planning a marketing strategy – wanting to do something quirky and fun that usually exceeded the budget. But it was hard to go wrong with $5 per day.
He said Lucky Rentals had previously set up a Facebook page and Google Adwords, but wanted to do something that wasn’t “just another cleverly designed banner”.
While companies frequently used Fiverr to solicit designs for logos, Brand said he hadn’t come across any other businesses using Fiverr in the way Lucky Rentals was.
“100 days of blogging is something out of the box,” he said. “The Fiverr community exhibits the same kind of ‘out of the box’ marketing as Lucky Rentals – and that’s what we like.”
