Platforms & Apps

$5 Marketing, with Fiverr.com

How you market your ecommerce business in 2011 may be different than how you marketed in 2010, or before. Unique sites like Fiverr are enabling edgy, entertaining, and engaging ways to reach new customers.

On Fiverr, individuals post listings describing what they would do for $5. It’s that simple. For example, Fiverr user Madmoo “will write the message of your choice in alphabetti spaghetti on toast, photograph it, and email you the .jpg image for you to use as you wish.”

How to Use Fiverr to Market Your Business

So what would you do with a photo of alphabetti spaghetti? Plenty. Consider this set of marketing tactics.

First, pay Madmoo $5 to write something about your store or a sale in alphabetti spaghetti.

Next, write two posts on your store blog. The first post talks about this cool new site you found, Fiverr, and how you are experimenting with it. The second post features Madmoo’s work, announces the sale — if there is one — and asks blog readers to let you know what they think about the photo.

Individually mention each blog post on your store’s Facebook page, Twitter stream, and other social media outlets. The posts could also be used in email newsletters or as part of mobile advertising campaigns.

Finally, you promote the blog posts, spaghetti photo, and sale or message on your store site, perhaps even on the home page.

Throughout this marketing exercise you have been able to engage shoppers — perhaps even entertaining them a bit — and thereby build a relationship with them. When they are ready to make a purchase, your spaghetti promotion, which cost you $5 and less than an hour of time, will have them thinking about your business before your competitors’.

For another Fiverr example, consider Fiverr user cocacrazy88 who “will write you a quality short story, love note, or blog post for $5.”

It is fairly easy to imagine how an ecommerce marketer could use this sort of a service to promote a special, an event, or the company brand using similar tactics to the ones described above. In fact, Practical Ecommerce actually hired cocacrazy88 to write a post about using Fiverr to market your business. His work is included at the end of this article.

Other Fiverr gigs of potential interest include:

  • tuneman “will record a KILLER [sic] 60 second audio or video, voiceover or testimonial.”
  • theprwriter “will write your personal, business, website, event, or product-related press release.”
  • busy_assistant “will take one photo of a Las Vegas landmark with your message on a sign.”
  • vitojamieson “will make a video introduction to your website or product.”
  • silentgordon “will write and record you a short song with your name.”
  • dafthand “will write and record a comedic rant about anyone or anything of your choice for $5.”

Without exaggeration, there are hundreds of Fiverr gigs that could be used to generate marketing fodder for social media and mobile campaigns.

Request Work

You can also post work requests to Fiverr, offering $5 for some tasks. For example, you might ask for someone to hold up a picture of your logo in front of the White House or at another famous landmark. Or you could ask someone to try your products and write a review. The choice is yours and the possibilities are many.

Some Fiverr Snags

Since you are only paying $5 for each gig, some of the results are going to be sub par. Moreover, many of the Fiverr members speak English as a second language, so you will sometimes have trouble communicating. But then again, given how this article has suggested using Fiverr for marketing, even poor work or strained communications — especially if it’s funny — can be good content for entertaining and engaging your prospects or loyal customers.

Summing Up

This article has outlined how you can use Fiverr to get some edgy or interesting content to market your ecommerce business. This sort of marketing is certainly at the fringe or, perhaps, leading edge of how businesses are promoting themselves. But it is in keeping with current trends.

Social media, mobile apps, television apps, local search, personalized search, and an ever more ubiquitous Internet are causing dramatic shifts in consumer behavior that should be reflected in how an online or multi-channel retailer operates.

cocacrazy88’s Take on Marketing with Fiverr

“Hey everyone, have you heard about Fiverr? No? Well then you’re missing out.

“Fiverr is a community where people do tasks for other people for, you guessed it, five dollars.

“Now this sounds like just a way to pass the time and just make a quick buck, however savvy business owners have seen that it is a great platform to promote your business with.

“What? Great promotion for only $5? That’s crazy.

“Exactly. A lot of people pay too much money to promote their business with ads, but truthfully social marketing is where it’s at.

“For example, a lot of people who use Fiverr are quite attached to the social networking phenomenon, and you can use this to your advantage. For $5, you could get a person with over 10,000 Twitter followers to tweet a promotion about your business, and better yet? It’s coming from a person, not some ad space sitting there on the Internet getting looked over or accidentally clicked.

“Even if only 50 percent of them go? That’s 5,000 potential customers, and that’s a lot.

“Using a Fiverr’s Facebook presence is also a great way to do this as well, as long as they make it seem human and not someone hacking their profile. This works best if you have someone who is part of your niche and/or target market.

“There’s the social network aspect, but of course you can always use that Fiverr user to promote your business in their location, whether through the newspaper, ads on signs etc., the opportunities are endless.

“All of this, for only $5. So what are you waiting for?

“Why spend hundreds of dollars promoting your business in unsure ways, when you could get tons of potential customers for a low price?

“Keep posting the job up on Fiverr? Keep getting more and more promotion in unique and effective ways.”

Armando Roggio
Armando Roggio
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