Two things that I took from Daft’s Eamonn Fallon’s talk at last week’s iQ guru session at our bootcamp were the importance of word of mouth marketing and innovation.
Eamonn Fallon, managing director of Daft.ie gave an open and honest talk on the Daft.ie story. Incidentally, Eamonn is speaking at the 2006 it@cork National Technology & Business Conference on Wednesday 29th November. Definitely worth a visit.
Eamonn defined what “word of mouth” marketing meant to Daft.ie. Having spent little or nothing on advertising or marketing, Daft.ie is Ireland’s most trafficked website (apart from Google). How did they achieve this? What is their secret?
The “Big Secret”: Create a truly great product or service
The secret to a truly successful word of mouth “marketing campaign” is to simply create a great product, service or user experience. It’s not something you can buy from a new “ultra cool new media” PR/Marketing firm and it’s not something you can sell. Once you’ve created greatness, people will just want to talk about it. Letting the masses know it’s available is the main challenge, I suppose.
Innovation is the key to success
The second key message that I took from Eamonn’s speech was the need for innovation
The success that Daft.ie have achieved thus far is even more remarkable when you consider the level of competition they face from the likes of MyHome.ie, Nicemove.ie and, of late, Propertynews.com, all property websites funded with near unlimited resources.
Underpinning the success of Daft.ie is consistent innovation. For example, take their new mapping facility which is based on Google Maps which Brian blogged about in Daft.ie vs. MyHome.ie: the user experience. It’s through this kind of innovation that has inspired an “Apple Mac”-like loyalty to Daft.ie in their fans.
Long may it continue. Daft.ie, never seek home without it
October 30, 2006 at 8:50 am
Thanks for the it@cork conference plug Lar!
I’ll be doing a podcast interview with Eamonn this coming Wednesday for the it@cork pre-conference podcast series – if you have any questions you’d like me to put to him, feel free to send them to tom@tomrafteryit.net
October 30, 2006 at 3:50 pm
I think there might be two more important factors to the success of Daft.ie.
1. Right place / right time advantage. This doesn’t detract from their achievements. I suppose they were innovative enough to do something different at the time.
2. Strength in popularity (or, they’re popular because they’re popular). Daft.ie is so effective precisely because they’re the second most visited site in the country. Likewise, Bebo is so popular in Ireland, despite it’s massive shortcomings, because it’s so widely used.
October 30, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Having said that, their map search feature (which I’m just after seeing for the first time) is fantastic! Truly innovative.
October 31, 2006 at 2:15 pm
Thanks for the feedback, Eoghan. They certainly were in the right place and at the right time.
However, it’s relatively easy to get in on the act nowadays. What’s not easy is getting a loyal audience.
One really interesting anecdote that Eamonn talked about was that daft.ie was hosted near the twin towers when the September 11th attacks occurred. They lost their whole site and all their data. They were down for a whole two months and still managed to maintain a loyal audience. All this without advertising in print or radio. Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/) should be talking about these guys.
November 5, 2006 at 1:44 pm
“One really interesting anecdote that Eamonn talked about was that daft.ie was hosted near the twin towers when the September 11th attacks occurred. They lost their whole site and all their data. They were down for a whole two months and still managed to maintain a loyal audience.”
Wow, I didn’t know that. That’s amazing.
November 7, 2006 at 1:39 pm
Hi Eoghan,
you can hear it straight from the horse’s mouth, Tom Raftery has a podcast with Eamonn up on enn.ie
December 4, 2006 at 2:45 pm
Yeah, daft certainly tops the list but myhome.ie has gone downhill lately.. Keep an eye on http://www.firsthome.ie