Today we have a guest post from Sheraan Amod. He's from Personera, an interesting South African startup specialising in personalised print products enhanced with Facebook content. Given the challenges faced in this important space he thought it would be good to share some marketing tactics that have worked for him. Enjoy.

In life, it often sucks to be the little guy. You get pushed around. You struggle to get noticed. Many people think the same is true for business, but it’s not. Being small can be an advantage - it forces you to think differently to a large player.

Marketing is all about getting noticed. Enough of that usually leads to success. In this blog post, I share a few innovative marketing tactics that our startup, Personera, used to punch above its weight.

In case you’re wondering what we do: We were the first company in the world to launch a personalised print calendar that automatically integrates a user’s Facebook friends’ birthdays, photos, and events. What follows is a description of how we faced up to the odds on more than one startup challenge.

Image Credit: Personera

1. Hiring.

When we were building Personera in stealth mode, we urgently needed to hire a talented young developer but had no idea how to attract someone brilliant to a company with no formal presence or credentials.

Our solution to this problem was to create a dedicated 1-page website using Yola advertising the position. The page showed a thorough description, quirky imagery, and asked the viewer lots of interesting questions. It made the company advertising the position look real, staffed by humans and possibly fun to work at. It also tried to be inspirational.

Instead of promoting the usual boring two-paragraph job ad on all the usual sites and forums, we promoted the website and received a massive response (over 100 leads in one week). Pretty soon, we hired an excellent candidate. When we were looking to hire a designer some time later, we modified the same page and pretty soon, found someone to join us. (That ad is viewable here).

2. Launching.

Launching a new product successfully keeps teams up at night. Instead of focusing on a press release blitz at the outset, we decided to focus on one massive channel to promote our launch. In this case it was TechCrunch.com.

After getting an introduction to a writer of their blog, we followed up by giving him private access to the site hours before it launched. This led to TechCrunch breaking the exclusive story of Personera’s launch on 11 November 2009. This led to hundreds of retweets and thousands of unique visitors to the site on our first day of being live. By targeting journalists and press outlets specifically, we’ve received over 20 pieces of original coverage in less than three months.

3. Acquiring Users.

Press coverage can often cause a momentary boost to site visitors, but more sustainable strategies need to be adopted for long-term user growth. As Personera is based on Facebook, creating a viral feedback loop was the natural thing to do.

By getting users to publish stories back to their Facebook feeds once they had ordered a product, we tremendously boosted the virality of our website. A user’s friends would see the personalised story, find it interesting, and click on it to get to Personera. We average over six clicks per story post, and most of those users go on to complete projects, thus channeling more traffic from Facebook to our site. (A presentation of our Facebook Connect best practices is viewable here).

Creating a feedback system that drives traffic from Facebook is possible on almost any kind of site - check out their list of supported widgets.

I hope that these three strategies give you some ideas for getting your company noticed! What innovative marketing strategies have worked for you?

If you are interested in a personalised Facebook calendar of your own, use the voucher code "QUIRK" to obtain a 50% discount when purchasing from the Personera site!

Also check out:

• Friday Fact Box: Social Media Small Business
• Creating Creativity