As a start-up, Snap’s marketing philosophies needed to reflect the company’s economic realities as well as the massive competitive environment of launching a new search engine. Snap came up with five guiding philosophies before setting out to create a marketing and launch plan for 2006:
From the background came a multi-phased marketing plan, including among other things, a launch contest, a user-generated campaign, and aggressive advertising testing.
Pre-launch outreach was conducted to more than 50 influential technology journalists with roughly 30 phone and in-person briefings booked. Post-launch outreach continued during the contest time period with calls to more than 730 media and analysts in 10 vertical categories.
Snap was featured in an Associated Press article that reached more than 1,700 newspapers with an approximate print circulation of 100 million and in a Reuters article (written by their chief technology correspondent) that was directly sent to more than 330,000 financial market professionals and with a syndicated reach of approximately 40 million.
More than 130 online publications posted the Snap news including the online versions of the Associated Press and Reuters stories.
Search and advertising trade publications such as ClickZ News and InternetNews.com covered the announcement.
New York’s ABC affiliate’s technology correspondent included Snap in his May 27th segment entitled “Top Three New Search Ideas.” Advertising rates for this station in the number one market are $15,000 per 30 seconds.
The majority of the articles written have focused on 3 main points: the way in which Snap displays sponsored results intermixed with organic search results, Snap’s unique, visual approach to displaying search results and the Cost-per-Action business model.
The Snap blog contest had generated over 3,200 votes on 174 submitted launch contest ideas.
There were over 1,000 blog sites linking directly to Snap.com.
Traffic to search engine increased 30x over previous weeks.
