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The only easy day was yesterday.

by Richard White II December 06, 2016

How do you convey a message effectively? We are still figuring it out. In our case we make a customizable bundle of essential outdoor gear for programs and parents to ensure participants are prepared for outdoor education and adventure experiences. That's a mouthful, but before I'm not sure I had a concise statement of what HMWOutdoors does. Sure, I knew we built a kit, I spent a couple of years formulating the idea and more than a year after that designing, testing and assembling everything. But how do I summarize that into something I can say in a sentence or two before the elevator door opens.

Part of our issue is we offer a complete kit for outdoor adventure. No one else does that. That means we are mowing down new opportunities we have to create a new buying construct for our solution in the minds of our partners and customers. Normally people purchase items found in our kit as individual items from multiple vendors using multiple brands. The only other places to get the individual items we include is from big box stores, or national outdoor retailers.

Instead of that we have pulled together all the essential items a youth would need in one place, under one brand.

So we started out with FB, Twitter, Pinterest, Adroll, and Google ads, I've developed a few campaigns that get a good click through rate, but don't convert to sales. I think my opinion of FB and all the other platforms is to create an awareness that we exist. I'm good about getting our ads to follow you around the internet. I changed the site, but still didn't convert.

Things that seemed to work were running a location based campaign for a specific conference we were attending and pressing the flesh with outdoor educators.

In the case of the conference my purpose was to get people over to our booth and enter a drawing. This worked well
I identified local program and outdoor educators and demonstrated the YAK to them.

So going forward I'm focusing on domain specific conferences and local school. I'm excited. What I'm learning is everything you are doing, everything I'm doing is preparation for the next step. Then you take that step and then the next.

I am still developing our voice. All the best on this journey. Talk to you soon.

Richard