One of the big challenges that young companies face is how to let the world know about their great product or service. When the company is well funded and the founding team has the wisdom to plan for their big marketing push, there are generally funds available to run all sorts of marketing programs. Most often, though, the lion's share of the money invested in the company is used for the creation of the product or service and there never seems to be enough left over to make potential customers aware of it.
Recently, a company that I am an investor in and director of, AccuRev, invested a couple of thousand dollars into creating a series of short videos that they placed on YouTube. The videos mimic (rip off may be a better term), Apple's "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" commercials. As you'd expect, AccuRev is the ever-so-cool Mac and AccuRev's biggest competitor, IBM's Clearcase, is the stodgy, slow, un-hip and very un-cool PC.
The first video in the series has already had almost 3,000 views. The company is tracking the lead data closely and will attempt to correlate leads and sales that are initiated by the videos. At the very least, exposing 3,000 sets of eyeballs (clearly not all those of existing customers) to singular competitive messages, clearing stating a specific advantage of the company's product against its biggest competitor raises awareness of the product and company and can lead to being considered for purchase later.
Pretty nice way of leveraging a small marketing budget.
