Openr is a disruptive online marketing tool that lets you add relevant promotional messages onto any content that you share, making that content sharing get the action you want – whether its driving traffic, boosting email sign-ups or taking purchases. We all know there is so much sharing activity, especially on social media, with 278,000 tweets and 2,460,000 Facebook posts every minute, all in the name of engagement. But businesses care about traffic and sales, not fans and followers, and it is really challenging to tie all this activity back to these desired actions. With your own content there is limited capacity to self-promote and when you’re sharing all that third-party content you’re just sending traffic away to other people’s sites – so businesses and their marketers are left fuelling newsfeeds and engaging fans with little or no payback. Openr changes all that. Now, you can add your own promotional message and a direct call-to-action onto every page you share. So with Openr, you can drive action from the content you share.
Openr was created by two seasoned entrepreneurs on a mission: Christina Richardson is the marketer – she’s worked on brands like Nescafe and Robinsons, while Vitaly Yakovlev is a techie with 15 years of software development expertise. Put the two together and you get Openr. The co-founding team had been working together on various ventures for nearly 5 years, having first met when they were recruited to be part of the newly-formed management team at a 3-year-old start-up that was turning over £2m. Vitaly was in the CTO role and Christina was in the CMO role, and together with the new Financial Director, they were responsible for creating and implementing the plan that would deliver the next phase of growth for the company. After 2 years delivering this plan, the duo united on their first business together – Brand Gathering. This developed into a multi-award-winning socially motivated business where we learned a lot, often the hard way.
What would become Openr started out as just another crazy discussion, late on a Wednesday night. Vitaly had been mulling it over for weeks before throwing it out there for Christina to ‘pick apart’ as he says. The ‘problem’ was the effectiveness of the online marketing which they did for Brand Gathering: With limited budgets, their focus was on sharing great content, it is after all the life-blood of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn news feeds. Their team plugged away and got great levels of engagement on these channels – but what they really wanted was direct action from this sharing – sign-ups, not chit-chat. Yet you can only push this in your news feeds so much before fans unfollow. What the team behind Openr wanted was a way to promote signing up to those already engaging with their content.
Sharing is now simply huge. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn news feeds are all filled with content that people and brands are constantly sharing. Yet few are sharing for the sake of sharing. From hobbyists, professionals, and thought-leaders, right through to global brands, this sharing is largely done to drive an action from an audience they’re engaging with. So really it all comes down to what sharing can do for you. Does sharing an interesting article from the Huffington post let you push your own message? No. At most, by association your credibility is improved because you shared it, but that’s about it. And even sharing your own content needs to be useful and informative rather than overtly salesy otherwise it won’t get read. Now tweet about that same article using Openr, and the audience who click-through to read the interesting article also see your Openr, with your message, your image, your call-to-action button – all branded the way you want it and ultimately driving the action you want – whether that is traffic, email sign-ups, feedback or sales. For businesses and brands, using Openr drives ROI on all the sharing activity they’re already doing. For publishers it means their content is shared more, since sharers have an incentive to share. And customers are seeing promotional messages that are more relevant to them, since the message added is usually linked to the content shared. So it’s win-win all round, which really shows in the results – as the average click-through rate on a Openr is 4%, and some of the best performers are as high as 43%!
By closing the gap between content sharing and direct action Openr is already being used by global brands like Vodafone, Neteller and agency giants in the WPP group – despite only launching publicly in December 2014. And they’ve been lucky enough to be named a Must-Have Marketing Tool for 2015 by Entrepreneur Magazine; be accepted into the leading London-based accelerator programme Accelerator Academy; and be selected by a secret global panel as one of the ‘world’s hottest start-ups’ and invited to present at the Global Festival of Media.
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