Zephrin Lasker of Pontiflex said that the most important issue to him is 'to make the mobile advertising experience 100% opt in." (credit: Lauren Keyson)
Produced by 500 Startups, Friday’s SMASH summit explored the strategies, tactics, and tools needed to acquire and retain customers on platforms such as search, social, rich media, video, mobile and email. The event featured startup founders and tech geeks who are actively using and refining new techniques. A recurring theme throughout the day was that marketing is no longer a traditional “just go out and buy customers.” Now it takes a lot of different pieces coming together to make it work. Speaker Robert Phillips, marketing VP for SendGrid summed it up by saying,” You have to have a great product, a great customer experience, and you have to look at all avenues – socially and paid.”
Another conversation running throughout the conference was that people are increasingly spending more time on their phones. Zephrin Lasker, CEO and co-founder of Pontiflex, a mobile advertising company said, “If you can’t reach them there on their cell phones it’s going to be very hard to reach them anywhere. The biggest issues around mobile security are related to privacy. And making the experience 100% opt-in is the most important piece. Right now is the problem of people having their data collected without their knowing it – so you need to make sure that you are always transparent about the data you are collecting. As for Pontiflex, you can’t participate with our ads without opting in.”
The final presentation was about the future of customer acquisition. Lori Anne Wardi, VP of .Co Internet, talked about how the new top level domain company so many customers in its first year. “It’s about focusing on having a great product and making sure you have high impact, highly visible partners early on. This way you gain early adopters early on, and so you gain social proof that you’re product is a good one.”
She also spoke about the need to target the right customers, explaining that all customers are not created equally. “You want to make sure you market to the best customers who are going to evangelize your product for you and are going to become part o your sales team. Know what your sweet spot is – who are the people that you really want? In our case we wanted to get people that would not only buy .Co domains but would also build their sites on them. Every time a new business is built on a .Co domain, it’s actually marketing the extension for us.
“Now the dynasty of .Com is subject to disruption. Empowered customers continue to disrupt every business model and every industry – even the ones you least expect it to touch.”
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