Part 1: The launch, marketing campaigns and ROI

Hi Adam, can you tell us the story behind Magicalia?
The original site, BIKEmagic.com, was started by Robin Tapp, our founder-technologist. His brother Jeremy was a colleague of mine, and we put together a business plan to turn BIKEmagic into a commercial operation and then to roll it out into other niche sports areas.

Has the growth of the site exceeded your original expectations?
It's way exceeding the growth we expected over the last few months, as we have been very careful with our marketing and not really pushed the sites too hard while we were raising capital for the company. We have been very surprised to see how the sites grow organically, by word of mouth and by drawing in users because of the usability and interest of the sites themselves.

And are you employing other more systematic marketing campaigns to drive people to the site?
We are now embarking on a more systematic marketing drive. We will be promoting in niche magazines, sponsoring events and working on some innovative on-line promotion. We also engage all the thousands of clubs and shops in each sport, and provide them with marketing material, to work as catalysts for growing the community amongst their existing membership/customer base.

Are there ways to maximize the ROI (return on investment) from marketing campaigns?
In a marketing driven environment, it is key to have a high quality set of users. We are pedantic about ensuring that our registered users are indeed enthusiasts of the sports we cover, rather than people who have signed up for some prize or to gain benefit points in a loyalty scheme. Only with a highly targeted user base can you offer the sort of promotion opportunities and direct campaigns that we do, and charge a sensible CPM.

In addition, our technology and working with a group of retail partners enables us to drive users right to the point of transaction, which clearly increases the value we offer to partners.

Are you making additions or changes to your advertising model since the downturn?
We are continuing to offer the highly targeted promotional opportunities, and are supplementing it with capitalizing on our industry-leading technology platform. For example we are able to license out at a very competitive rate any part of our content management system, or any of the features that drive users to retail opportunities.

How do you use your email list to further market Magicalia and its offerings?
We are pretty careful about cross-promoting our sites, as we believe that if you are a keen mountain-biker, you will not necessarily be a keen golfer. We are careful not to alienate our audience by swamping them with other offers, while at the same time ensuring they know about our other sites just in case there is cross-over.

Continued...