Powwownow brings humour to a dry subject

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Powwownow are a little company with a big ambition. To put it simply they wanted 'To make Powwownow the most recognised teleconferencing brand', yet conference calling isn't the most interesting or easily marketable subject matter.

Yet Powwownow utilised a marketing strategy that grew the site traffic by over a 100% in just two months.

How did Powwownow take the dull boring subject of conference calling and make it into a fun, interactive campaign?

Powwownow offer a greatly reduced price conference call service – in effect it's free.

Offering customers low-cost conference calling facilities with the convenience of no booking, no billing, no fuss (the customer does not need to book a conference room, never receives a bill from Powwownow, just the cost of an 0870 call added to their bill). Users pay only the national phone call rate (7 pence per minute).

A one-hour conference call involving six people costs £74.40 less with Powwownow (BT Meetme: £79.20 / Powwownow: £4.80). So, it is no surprise that the service is proving very popular amongst SME and medium sized companies.

Powwownow was founded in 2004, turnover for 2008 is expected to reach £5m. The company operates in 12 countries including the US and major European markets. Powwownow employs 25 people and is based in Richmond, Surrey.

Campaign objectives:

• To raise awareness
• Bring humour to a dry subject
• Increase usage and traffic to site

The campaign: Powwownow's out-sourced integrated marketing agency more2 opted for a mix of marketing tools. Brand to hand activity, market research and a radio campaign.

The first element; brand to hand was conducted at seven major London commuter stations; including Liverpool Street, Waterloo and Victoria. The brand to hand activity consisted of 100,000 of their new unique free hands-free kits, fully waterproof, no batteries required and Bluetooth compatible.

And this is where the humour came in, the 'kits' were in actual fact big elastic bands to wrap around your head keeping your mobile in place! A comical approach to a 'giveaway' enticing the consumer while creating an amusing platform for discussion in offices.

The radio campaign script was written after PWN conducted some market research to target a new audience, for some fun they decided to uncover the interesting, and somewhat surprising things that people do in meetings. The results were funny and shocking and PWN quickly came to the conclusion that meetings should never be conducted face to face! The radio adverts to warned people about the hazards of holding business meetings.

The ads were strategically placed to target business workers on their daily commute and an accompanying survey revealing some highly salacious facts about the behavior of UK business workers whist conference calling.

PR director Louise Rowland said, "This three pronged approach has created great brand awareness with unique visitors to the website rising by around 120% over the campaign period, it also fitted very well with PWN's irreverent personality!"

The results: Since the activity Powwownow has seen growth of 15 per cent, this has added about 10 per cent to monthly profit. Powwownow has seen over 120% increases to the site with numbers going from approximately 750 to 1650 visitors since the campaign activity. Turnover for year ending 2008 is expected to exceed £5m.

Powwownow founder and MD Andrew Pearce said: "We are seeing an average increase above our planned growth of 100 per cent over last year."

Powwownow received feedback from happy and amused members of the public, Tim mused: "Haha. Very funny. Loved the "hands free" joke this morning. I saw one lady grabbing three, thinking she was onto a real winner. I must admit you fooled me pretty good too. Passed on to my boss - Thanks for the laugh."