Melanie Notkin, guest on this week’s episode of the Marketing Smarts podcast, launched SavvyAuntie.com in 2008. The site quickly garnered media attention, interest from sponsors, and, most importantly, thousands of engaged visitors.
I asked Notkin how she accounted for the site’s success. She attributed it to three elements: a strong product; a focused, powerful niche; and social influence.
1. A Strong Product
SavvyAuntie.com is a lot of things, but first and foremost, it is a resource for “savvy aunties”—women who do not have children of their own but have children (nieces, nephews, godchildren, etc.) in their lives. (Notkin sometimes refers to these women as PANKs: Professional Aunts, No Kids.) The site is filled with suggestions for activities, gift ideas (along with an online store), and community-generated information on the many issues and questions faced by women who are not mothers in a society that equates “woman” with “mother.”
In addition to being a content-rich homebase for a thriving movement (one that boasts over 80,000 fans on
Facebook), the site started with at least two other distinguishing features, which Notkin pointed out to me. First, she said, “It wasn’t another mom website, parenting website, mom blog, or beauty blog or anything like that. There was a differentiator [the focus on aunties].” Secondly, the site was very well-designed, so when visitors arrived, Melanie explained, “They saw that this was something sophisticated. This was something I’d invested time and resources into.”
2. A Focused, Powerful Niche
Even a strong product is meaningless without an audience. So, what makes SavvyAuntie.com a special case is that the product and the audience are inextricably entwined. Savvy aunties are the audience that SavvyAuntie called into being and serves.
The genius of Notkin was to realize that there are women out there who are working professionals with plenty of discretionary income and an interest in lavishing gifts on their nieces and nephews—and that these women were neglected by marketers. Being a savvy auntie, she had first-hand experience with the sort of dilemmas savvy aunties face (“What do I buy a two-year-old boy?”). Being a marketer by vocation, she knew connecting interested consumers with companies that were ignoring them could be the basis for a business.
Putting two and two together, she built her site around this niche (“a place for the niche to live… to exist… to communicate”) and found she could have the best of both worlds: a product that spoke to the deep-seated needs of her audience and at the same time aggregated that audience in a way that attracted advertisers and investors.
3. Social Influence
Before there was SavvyAuntie.com, there was @SavvyAuntie. Notkin used Twitter to share the “savvy auntie” idea before the launch and build momentum. She also started a blog that focused on “telling the story of how I was building this website and this brand and what it meant and why I was doing it.” Through the blog, she explains, “I was hopefully enabling people to root for me and support because I was alone in this.”
Her tweeting and blogging paid off. “‘SavvyAuntie’ was the most tweeted word on the day of the launch, so that worked,” she says. She also got immediate mention on Mashable, TechCrunch, and elsewhere. The train had officially left the station, and soon she was talking about SavvyAuntie on such networks as NBC to NPR and eventually even landed a book deal. (As a side note, the article on TechCrunch was quickly removed for unknown reasons, but that led to further press attention on Huffington Post, ValleyWag, and Technosailor.)
Though Notkin says she has not maintained the blog, she has actively continued her social media efforts. She still tweets regularly to her 19,000 followers and, as I mentioned, has over 80,000 fans of her Facebook page. The relative size of her audience on these two platforms says a lot about their differences. While a tweet has a lifespan of two hours (if you’re really lucky), conversations on Facebook can “continue over a day,” she points out. One reason for this, she believes, is that you can quickly see “how many people have shared before you share” something and thus become part of the momentum (and also avoid being “the first person at the party”).
Your Turn
Notkin insists that her successful launch of SavvyAuntie.com would not have happened if she had relied on only one of these elements; you really need all three working in concert. When you put it all together, she told me, “You’ve got a great story. You have something different to write about and people hear about it.”
What are you doing to make sure people hear about your new product?
You can listen to my entire conversation with Melanie Notkin here, or download the mp3 and listen to it at your leisure. Of course, you can also subscribe to Marketing Smarts in iTunes and never miss an episode.
