Coupons.com: In many ways, it's a story about redemption

We really did pitch that angle, and had a story printed with that as the headline. Atomic signed with Coupons.com to raise awareness in ad/marketing media about the value of online coupons, support business to business sales and drive consumer traffic to Coupons.com.

ComContext research at the beginning of the engagement revealed little coverage of online coupons companies, that coupons were seen as popular mostly with traditional housewives, that the character of coverage consisted mostly of shopping tips and "what's new on the Web" blurbs, and that most features included a "mom-friendly" personality. A degree of difficulty was that despite the many excellent brands that ran campaigns on Coupons.com, few, if any, were enthusiastic to talk about the role coupons played in their marketing mix, let alone endorse the company.

Atomic created a 4-part strategy: a) leveraging Coupons.com's business growth as a proxy for the growing importance of digital coupons in large brands' marketing efforts as a way to initially break into ad and branding, and business media, b) personalizing the role of digital coupons by engaging well-known home economics and mommy bloggers to post how-to savings and convenience tips and talk with media on Coupons.com's behalf, c) giving media and bloggers new story angles to discuss, i.e., the growing use of digital coupons by entirely new generations of digital consumers, the rise of mobile couponing, etc., and d) creating and releasing regional indexes and statistical data to bloggers and media that illustrate the growing popularity of digital coupons and Coupons.com in the midst of the recession and raking categories of goods in terms of their relative redemption volumes, nationally and by major metro area.

One particularly productive initiative was the Coupons.com index, which reflected consumer sentiment by rate of redemption. The results over the course of 2008 and into 2009 have been significant, with coverage volumes, caliber of outlet, depth of article, tonality/sentiment, accuracy, repeat coverage and other measures increasing dramatically across all outlets including print, broadcast, blogs and Twitter. During the same time, Coupons.com's business grew explosively as well, and by June 2009 the site was ranked among the top 50 on the Web by ComScore MediaMetrix.