Case Study | PR and Brand Awareness

Salesvu

We helped this fintech startup take on a well-known payment processor and establish brand awareness.

Overview

SalesVu, a fintech startup focused on mobile payment processing and POS, had to build a brand from scratch in an emerging market. At the same time, it had position itself against established competitors like Intuit, Square and PayPal. SalesVu began as a mobile payment processing application that let small business owners and freelancers accept credit cards anywhere they do business. Eventually, however, market opportunities led the company to enter the mobile POS, eCommerce and ERP space for small and mid-sized businesses.

Our Challenge

Swyft was tasked with designing a media launch strategy in order to complement the startup’s overall launch campaign. With the goal of increasing awareness of SalesVu and driving new traffic to the company’s website, we determined that media outreach targeting mainstream technology and business media had to take precedence. We also had to help differentiate SalesVu from other competitors based on the deeper levels of functionality and ease-of-use that it offered to SMB customers.

Our Answer

After studying the SalesVu’s key features and the distinct business advantage it provided SMB customers when compared to the larger competitors, we created launch campaign emphasizing the startup’s funding announcement and hard launch. After conducting research on recent media coverage of the competition, we determined which messages resonated among the media outlets we had targeted. We also began a social media campaign to flank our traditional media outreach approach, which involved following the key journalists, dropping value-added messages around the journalists’ articles and making soft overtures to them via social media even as we emailed them our pitches.

Media Outreach

We targeted one influential technology writer at TechCrunch, negotiated an embargo timed to a wire distribution of the launch press release. Later in the engagement, we helped SalesVu announce an updated version of the app that allowed it to integrate with QuickBooks in addition to allowing seamless online and in-store inventory management, which was a common problem plaguing brick-and-mortar retailers who also sell online. Other media outlets targeted included trade, small business productivity, entrepreneurs and general business.

Brand Awareness

As a result of the broad coverage in key media outlets, SalesVu gained greater brand awareness, more website traffic and increased visitor conversions. Most notably, website traffic spiked after SalesVu was mentioned twice in TechCrunch.

Proven Results

Swyft helped establish SalesVu as a highly recognizable mobile POS and ERP application for the hospitality, retail and independent professional services industries. Media mentions were numerous and included: TechCrunch (twice), Inc., Entrepreneur, Numerous retail and restaurant trade publications, Accounting Today, and numerous local media outlets.

Website traffic rose over 1,000% after the TechCrunch article and a second mention in TechCrunch resulted in a similar traffic spike. Traffic continued at an elevated level for two weeks after the second story in TechCrunch before leveled off at a significantly higher average daily rate. Mentions in Inc. and Entrepreneur resulted in comparable traffic increases. Since, SalesVu, has enjoyed a consistent stream of application downloads from the iTunes app store.