With the organic reach of Facebook pages continuing to decline, Australian startup Recomazing is building a platform to help businesses and startups generate new customers.
Founded by Marc Cowper, who has a background in the digital advertising industry, Recomazing is a platform that allows businesses to discover and analyse their customers that give recommendations, and lets users see what brands their friends recommend. The startup is targeting service-based businesses outside of the travel and hospitality industries.
Cowper began work on the startup eight months ago and has been boostrapping it since. It’s in talks with 57 large brands the startup hopes will sign up to the platform before public registration opens in June.
“I’ve been working with brands on their social media strategy since before Facebook, since Myspace and they all started seeing the same challenge,” Cowper says.
“They all know they’ve got people, customers out there that are recommending their products. Generating a lot of brand love. But they need their customers to tell their social contacts.”
When the platform launches, it plans to scale rapidly by leveraging the large databases of customers. Brands will encourage customers to recommend them on Recomazing. Once they’re signed up, those users can then discover brands their friends like, or recommend other brands they’re particularly passionate about.
Cowper says there’s a huge amount of distrust of marketing campaigns amongst consumers and what they really want is recommendations from friends.
“We know that people are asking their friends. What we want to do is make it so that all their friends are able to use search and make their opinions available 24/7,” he says.
Businesses can sign up for free, which gives them the ability to create a page with viewable recommendations. For $60 per month they gain access to some analytics and can view some of the comments being made by reviewers. For larger corporate customers it offers a $2000 per month subscription, which provides detailed analytics around who’s referring their products and which referrals are leading to new customers.
“Who’s recommended your brand and how influential those recommenders are. We can actually stipulate to brands you’ve created this ROI (return on investment) from our platform,” he says.
“Social ROI is very difficult, almost impossible to state.”
Of course valuable analytics really requires a large number of users signed up and recommending brands. Recomazing won’t be incentivising them, outside of making it as easy as possible for them to sign up and recommend. In addition to the customers of the large brands on the platform, Recomazing has partnered with charitable fundraising site GoFundraise and Musicoz – which represents a large number of independent Australian musicians.
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Kye began his career at a Fairfax daily on the North-West Coast of Tasmania. He has since taken his belongings, and keen interest in technology, to Melbourne. He has a bachelor of Arts majoring in Political Science from the University of Tasmania and a Graduate Diploma in Journalism from RMIT University.
