Divorce-Online, the online divorce service, has recently expanded its marketing from a purely web based exercise into television and online video marketing.
We find that the problem with pure web search advertising is that you only present yourself to people who already want the service. We decided at the end of 2006 that in order to expand the reach of our message we needed to market our services to people who were not just searching for an online divorce service at this moment but who still might be interested in it, if we could catch their attention.
We decided that we would look at television to target people in this way, and once we had created a good video advert, the same advert could be used for online video marketing on YouTube and other video sharing websites. We believe, incidentally, that this is the first time that a niche divorce service has been advertised on national television and also that it is the first time that an advert relating to divorce has been used on a video sharing website.
The advert was created by Direct Response Television Advertising. Our “angle” for the advert is that you don’t have to use a traditional solicitor service if the divorce is amicable and uncontested and, of course, that you can save yourself a lot of money if you use our service.
For the TV advertising, we are using Sky channels including History, Discovery Home and Leisure, True Movies, Movies4Men and Ukstyle. These channels have been chosen for their historic response rates against the profile of the consumer we are seeking to target.
For the video sharing websites, we obviously chose YouTube (the biggest by far) as well as the video sharing sites of Google and Yahoo; all these sites allow content to be uploaded and shared without cost. The advantage is that these sites encourage their users to share content they find interesting or useful which creates a viral effect. The more people who see it and share it, the wider the knowledge of our service response will be. You can see the video at www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3Iw51j592A and of course it is also on our own website.
The initial run of one week on television was a success and the PR we received from running the advert has been phenomenal. We have seen enquiries and sales double since the advert went live on 21May.
The response from the online video channels has also been very good and of course the cost of actually delivering the advert in this particular way has been virtually zero. As long as the video continues to be shared with others, the more people will know about us and consider the service in the future.
The cost of the campaign overall has been in the region of £30,000.
We are also going to introduce a video blog to our website which will be posted monthly dealing with some of the most frequently asked questions that we get from our users and also a password protected video guide for our DIY clients to help them through the process. We will choose a popular each month and provide the answer using resources we have in house, so the cost will be minimal.
Divorce-Online is part of Online Legal Services Ltd, founded in 1999 to provide low cost commoditised legal and other services to consumers. Based in Swindon, the company has 6 in-house staff and outsources work to solicitors and other legal professionals.
