Showmybuy is a word of mouth marketing’s platform, which ensures better and more trustworthy marketing by utilizing the social media, and the power of personal recommendations.
Traditional banner marketing is being highly neglected by internet users and banner marketing is in a negative trend. Swedish startup, Showmybuy, has created a social shopping service, which take advantage of customers’ use of the social media and the potential of personal recommendations.
Trustworthy promotion through social media
It is not something new that you receive a form for payment, if you help promote a company. Companies have been paying bloggers for a long time, for promoting their products in their blogs.
Showmybuy is using this method, with their social shopping service. Showmybuy is giving customers the opportunity, to show their friends on the social media, what they have bought in return for a reward from the webshop, which they bought the item from.
The way it works, is that the customer share their purchases from a webshop, with their friends on the social media. This benefit both the customer as well as the webshop. The customer gets some kind of prize for sharing, which could be free shipping or a discount, and the webshop gains better and more trustworthy promotion.
“We believe that customer-to-customer communication is the strongest form of marketing possible. Customers love our service, and Showmybuy makes the process of spreading that word to friends and family very easy,” said Rune Risom, CEO of Hungry.dk.
Online marketing done different
The idea for Showmybuy came up, when the two co-founders, Mats Bengtsson and Niclas Lindberg, were questioning how the future of internet marketing would work.
“We were wondering if there was a possible way of placing top-quality advertisements in the middle of users’ social network feeds, without being disturbing,” explained Mats Bengtsson, CEO and Co-Founder of Showmybuy.
The real question that the guys behind Showmybuy was asking themselves, was how online marketing could be done different, than what people were used to.
“We understood that the users of the social networks were holding the keys to the kingdom. When we got the idea for giving customers an incentive to open up their digital living rooms, we decided that the idea was good enough to be tested.”
Proof of concept
The first thing that the two entrepreneurs did, when they realized that the idea was worth spending time on, was to create a minimal working solution. This was to get proof of concept, that people would actually share their purchases as well as what the incentives of doing so was.
“We had some e-shop owners in our network, so the first thing we did was trying to convince them to add our service to their end of purchase flow,” revealed Niclas Lindberg, CTO and Co-Founder of Showmybuy.
Showmybuy already had proof of concept after the first pilot test, and decided to adjust their service, to incorporate all the things they learned from the pilot testing. Shortly after the pilot testing, the team added a designer and a copywriter, to help make Showmybuy a reality.
“Our very different backgrounds proved to be a perfect match for creating a simple, beautiful and powerful marketing tool, which can be a help to any e-shops out there.”
Two fundamental truths
One of the cool things about Showmybuy, is the price. Everyone can try Showmybuy with no initial investment, and you only pay for the clicks you obtain through Showmybuy.
Showmybuy also provide support for many different languages, making customers from all over the world, able to benefit from the use of the marketing platform.
Niclas Lindberg states that the main purpose of Showmybuy is to provide an honest marketing spread, by only allowing buying customers to spread their purchases.
“We work with two fundamental truths, a purchase is the ultimate proof that a customer likes a brand, and that people tend to socialize with other people from the same target group.”
The founders of Showmybuy believe that social media, sharing and personal recommendations are here to stay, and that businesses need to embrace it or fall behind.
“It is not a question but a fact that word-of-mouth marketing will continue to gain momentum in the future. New grassroots powered business models, are truly challenging many traditional businesses, and the traditional marketing model is no exception.“