Jean MacDonald, SmileOnMyMac

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:31:39 -0800

I met Jean MacDonald and the crew from SmileOnMyMac at a developer gathering at Chaat Cafe in San Francisco a few years ago during Macworld Expo. She is a partner at the company and primarily handles marketing and PR. Prior to joining the SmileOnMyMac, she operated Well-Tempered Web, an independent web design and online marketing firm. She also taught web design and online marketing at Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland, Oregon and as a member of Geekcorps in Ghana, West Africa. Smile is one of the few indie companies that I know of to have somebody on staff dedicated to marketing, so I thought it would be useful to pick her brain for how they do it.

DW: What kind of marketing activities do you handle?

JM: Our website is the locus of our marketing efforts. We are continually refining and enriching it so that it's easy for site visitors to learn how our products can help them. We work hard on driving traffic to our site, via search engine optimization, advertising, and PR, but we also know that it's not enough to get lots of traffic. We constantly ask ourselves "Is it easy to find what you need on our site?" We have things like Feature lists and FAQs, but we also have video screencasts: different people need different things to give them a compelling reason to click the Buy button.