John Linton Fibre services, while still a tiny component, of total residential services, continue to evoke more interest where they are available. While the Tasmanian 'experiment' (a cynical election 'winner' ploy by that bunch of crooks posing as a federal government) remains a disaster other areas are showing much better take ups. The 'NBN2' locations are still very slow but Telstra's Point Cook, South Brisbane and some of the Opticom locations are beginning to generate a slightly more positive order flow. Still very small but noticeably increasing and enough for us to try out some different 'marketing' ideas this weekend in Townsville by running the first ever newspaper 'ad' in Exetel's 'history'. It is only one of some different ideas for promoting ADSL services in regional Australia and perhaps my liking for that particular city contributed to the decision.
The trouble with NBNCo services is that they are so patchy in the places they are now available that 'advertising' is impossible and the fact that there is no NBNCo provided availability look up tools makes it very difficult to do any sort of 'general' promotion. Looking in to the future across 2012 nothing gets any better in NBNCo terms with, despite all claims to the contrary, very little additional coverage becoming available. So it becomes quite a challenge to promote fibre services in any meaningful way other than to contact our own ADSL customers whose details are obviously known to us....and even with a free install/free trial not a surprisingly low percentage of those took up the offer. So more widely 'promoting' NBNCo services to residential users poses a real problem over the coming months and the real target marketplace, small business, verges on impossible to promote to.
At the moment the only NBNCo orders we are getting are coming from our own web site or from the NBNCo web site that simply lists Exetel as an NBNCo re-seller. The challenge is to find a way of promoting NBNCo fibre to other ADSL users in the limited areas of the various towns where fibre is available. So we will now and try, for the next month or so, to work out whether or not we can successfully promote NBNCo and other fibre services in the areas where they are available from Exetel by print advertising and perhaps radio advertising as well. It's almost 20 years since I have used such advertising to promote products in regional Australia (and New Zealand and South West England) and, although that was successful over several years I have no current knowledge and nor has anyone else within the company.....
....so we are going to have to learn very, very quickly about print and radio advertising and also other more esoteric promotion media of which we have less than zero knowledge. Quick learning curves are OK - we have learned to do so many new things over the past almost eight years. We will use Townsville as the base for trying out these new ideas because (ignoring my personal affinity with the city) it is an ideal size and has NBNCo infrastructure as well as a large ADSL user base and, more importantly, a large small business base with a realistic number of competent companies providing IT services. It will give us the opportunity of trying out various promotional ideas with some reasonable prospects of 'success' while also giving us the opportunity of closely analysing the results and being able to work out the financial practicalities of extending the coverage areas based on real data.
Who knows - we might use adverting to promote Exetel residential and business services in 2012?
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