Livescribe Smartpen Marketing – Almost Brilliant

(Alternate post heading could be “Yes, Twitter Does Work In Getting Your More Business – Here’s How”)

I’ve been thinking about buying one of those cool Livescribe pens for a while now.

If you’re not familiar with them, the pens are “a pen and a computer.  You’ll never miss a word because it records audio while you write.

Later you just tap on your notes and it replays back exactly what was recorded at the time you were writing. Once you’ve captured your notes, you can transfer them to your PC so you can organise them and even search for words within your notes.”

Anyway, I saw a Tweet from my online mate MerlinFX (Daniel Doherty) who mentioned it, which reminded me to buy it.

I tweeted him back and asked him how it was and where he purchased it from.

Daniel Took More Than 5 Seconds To Respond

Daniel took 31 minutes to reply which, to my mind-is-everywhere brain, was far too long (!): so I did a Google search, found an Australian supplier and bought the pen for $341.

An hour and a half after that reply of mine to Daniel I received a reply tweet from Smartpen, Australian distributors of the Livescribe Smartpen, saying they’re here to help and that they’re based just up the road in Brisbane.

I replied back to Mr Smartpen and he offered me a sweetner to buy from them.

Unfortunately I’d already purchased from these guys an hour before.  We had a brief Twitter conversation and that was that.

Almost Brilliant Marketing

What brilliant marketing that almost was by Mr Smartpen.

Let’s take a look at what he did.

1.  Mr Smartpen has set up a function to find mentions of the terms related to the Livescribe Pen. That’s how he would have first seen my tweet replying to MerlinFX (I use this same function to look for mentions of me of The Web Design Business Kit – it’s a feature in Splitweet).

2.  Mr Smartpen then tweeted me direct and made an offer.

That’s great.  Relevant.  Timely.  Personal.

That’s very smart marketing.  And bloody easy.

Mr Smartpen has set up his system so he can quickly see mentions of the product he sells.

Then he responds with a friendly offer.  Brilliant use of Twitter.

3.  Mr Smartpen has now started a relationship with a person he knows has/is getting a Smartpen.  So I’ll be far more likely to buy from him.

4.  I’ve also noticed Mr Smartpen active on the Whirlpool forums and that he has a blog, as well as the twitter account.

He seems:

• friendly,
• receptive,
• responsive,
• professional and
• knowledgeable.

Everything you want when dealing with a business.

Okay, But What Did He Do Wrong?

I don’t know if you’d call it “wrong”, but Smartpen didn’t make the sale.

He didn’t make this sale because he didn’t have any Google AdWords showing.

Here’s what I saw when I did the search for “Livescribe”.

A Wrong Assumption From Me (Customers Are Often Stupid)

I have to confess, I assumed that because there was only 1 advertiser, that was the only place I could buy it online.  Turns out it wasn’t true.

I clicked the ad, went over and purchased the pen.

Only after all that did I get the follow up tweet from Mr Smartpen and then his excellent follow up.

Here’s an important point: Even you have have a great ranking in Google, it can pay big dividends to also take Google Adwords.

You want to dominate the rankings and having a couple of listings on the first page of results will help with that – it’s all about being visible and getting branded.

The Upside For Mr Smartpen

There is some nice upside for Mr Smartpen.

• I’m sure I’ll buy accessories from him in the future.
• Smartpen get a blog post written about them, with a couple of nice links to their Livescribe Smartpen page.

Great work Mr Smartpen.  Even if you didn’t make the sale, you still get some benefit.

Cheers

Brendon