This Little Piggy Goes to Market

By Michael Cole On May 28, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Today was a weird day at RightSite. Something was missing. Everything seemed changed.

After eight weeks of daily meetings, we have now finished the planning stage of our site development. So today was the first day since April 7th that we did not have a conference call with our web development vendor. No need to spend one hour jawing over the phone. No need to spend three hours preparing materials or reviewing documents.

Now that the planning is done, the work starts for the actual web developers (as opposed to the Project Manager, Art Director, or some of the other team members that I have been meeting with). This week we are starting to build, which means there is less need for input from the RightSite team, at least until the developers have something to show us.

We currently expect the site to be ready for testing for July 5th. That doesn’t mean that our team will be playing scrabble each day while we wait for the site to be done, but it does mean that we will be interacting with the development team only once or twice a week, rather than daily.

So now we can turn our attention to marketing.

RightSite marketing is going to be driven by a few basic tools:

Events
Email marketing
Press releases
Partnerships with other sites
Search engine optimisation

While we are confident that we are building a great site, all this smart design and clever code won’t do us much good if no one visits the site. So now we are working on plans for using the tools outlined above to drive traffic to RightSite.Asia.

Events –We will be partnering with manufacturing related tradeshows to be able to let potential buyers or lessees of industrial property know that RightSite can help in their site selection process. Getting a booth at these shows will be an important first step in building recognition.

Email Marketing — Using some lists we have already assembled, plus by working to build new lists, RightSite will be able to distribute email newsletters to people interested in industrial property. By following these newsletters to the site, the users will become famliar with what RightSite has to offer.

Press Releases — We think RightSite is big news, so we will not be shy about holding press conferences and sending out press releases for the launch of the site and for significant developments thereafter

Partnerships With Other Sites — A big part of our marketing team’s job (once we hire them) will be to identify non-competing, but related sites that could become effective partners for us. For instance, a site that helps business travellers find hotel rooms might be a good partner with our site that many executives will need to consult before making trips to find new manufacturing facilities around China.

Search Engine Optimisation — Since voodoo doesn’t seem to work over the Internet, we will have to rely on the more complicated magic used in search engine optimisation. By structuring our page and article headlines correctly, and carefully tagging our content, we aim to get ourselves on the first page of the google rankings for industrial property in China within the first six months after launching the site.

Now I just have to find the team of superheroes who will accomplish all this, and everything should be fine. Until next time, I hope you are enjoying your job as much as we like putting together RightSite, and see you soon right here on Mingtiandi.