Kick Start: She drives me crazy

• Josh Mehlman
• 23 March 2009
• Page 1 of 2 : single page

Eleni Mitakos. Photo credit: Stuart Leal

 The Panel

• Jonathan Crossfield - Netregistry - Expertise: online content
  
• Stephan Gervois - NRMA - Expertise: automotive andonline marketing
  
• Richard Hack - The Taboo Group - Expertise: youth marketing
  
• Josh Mehlman - Moderator

 

A car culture for women

Where did the idea come from and how did you get started?

Eleni Mitakos: I started Galmatic in December 2007, but had been thinking about it since I was 16; I’m now 37. We call it the ‘car care garage for girls’. It’s a website that sells our Galmatic car care handbook and car care workshops. The market is girls aged 17–27. My long term goal is to help develop more of a car culture for girls, because unfortunately girls either do not like cars, don’t know anything about them or they’re real rev heads; there’s nothing in the middle. So the handbook and workshops are designed to introduce girls to cars and let them know that owning a car and knowing something about a car is a good thing.

Josh: Why did you decide to do it as a website?

Eleni: I wanted the idea of it to be not just a product and not just a book because no-one goes to bookshops looking for car-related things. So I thought a website would give me the opportunity to do a forum and a blog; different ways for girls to get involved in a way that wasn’t too confrontational.

Stephan Gervois: Automotive has never been a feminine topic. However, there are a few specific websites trying to create a community for the female audience, such as hercar.com.au and autochic.com.au. Eleni might be able to use these larger sites and try to link to them to improve her referrals and link strategy.

It’s not all about shopping

What do we know about women in that age group?

Richard Hack: The good news is, they spend a lot of time online. That gives you a lot of advantages with your product and your brand. If you take the time to profile your audience and understand where they’re spending their time online, you can create touch points with those customers. They also engage with brands online, so having a forum is a fantastic opportunity for you to do that, and keeping that blog live and updated is wonderful. At the same time, you need to stimulate conversation; you need to have two-way communication.

It can help to look at some other blogs that also appeal to your audience, such as fashion blogs, and finding people who are part of that 17–27 audience and are already engaging in two-way communications with other brands online. They’re the ones who are most likely to also engage with you.

The other thing is, they can actually be incredibly good advocates for your product and your brand if you are able to win them over.

Stephan: I think there might be opportunities to do some digital PR, seeding content into blogs and lifestyle VIP bloggers. This is a great way to tap into the female market by creating word of mouth and peer-topeer recommendations.

I think another great idea would be to participate in online forums and develop conversations around various topics. I’m talking about other people’s sites, not just your own forums and blogs. It is all about giving away the right amount of information without divulging the full content of your knowledge.

Josh: How can Eleni work with those existing forums to build interest in her site without it being spam or a blatant plug for her business?

Richard: You need to be open and transparent with this demographic, because they can smell a rat quicker and better than anybody else. So I think the best place to start would be to contact the publisher of the forum, blog or website you’re interested in and ask them about doing a promotion, whether that’s in the form of banner advertisements or giveaways of some of your products.

I suggest that you could best spend a lot of your energy asking yourself, “Where is my target audience spending its time?” I would venture to say that a lot of the women in that age group aren’t naturally petrol heads. That’s why places like AutoBarn don’t bother with products that are tailored towards women, because we never sell anything.

On the other hand, if your book was on sale at every Kookai shop around the country, that’s one place where your target audience is. And that way you could stand out among the clutter and be the only product in that category in that sort of environment.

Eleni: I was wondering about service stations.

Richard: Exactly! When you look at the lifestyle of these people and map it out, there’s no reason you couldn’t go to a university book store. A lot of students are just buying their first car and they’ve often got cars that are unreliable.

Kissing in the back seat

What type of content do you have available for your customers?

Eleni: At the moment, we’ve got a newsletter, a blog and a forum. Is that too much? A lot of people keep telling me to get rid of the newsletter, but the people who subscribe to the newsletter do not read the blog.

Jonathan Crossfield: I think it’s horses for courses and all three have a completely different reason for being there. The blog is the best way to frequently update the site, which gives more ways into the site for search engines. A forum gives people the opportunity to swap ideas among themselves as well as with you and build that sense of community that you want on the site. And then you’ve got your newsletter going out to people who may not be regularly coming back to your site. It gives them an extra push and a different sort of information again.

Eleni: I’m very careful with the blog that I don’t just talk about Galmatic. I’ve tried to stay car related but cute, so I do things like tips for back-seat kissing. Don’t laugh, but that’s my most popularly viewed post. But I’ve noticed other automotive sites talk about things like new handbags. I know it’s current to their market, but isn’t that a bit irrelevant to their main business?

Jonathan: A blog is more casual than other formats. Articles on your website have to be specific and on-topic, but a blog can be a lot more stream of consciousness. Whether every post has to be automotive or not is something you can experiment with. Put up a post on handbags and gauge the response. If the same people are responding, then they’re interested. If the response goes down, you know what they’re looking for.