Go Viral Instantly with Kickoff Labs

Creating buzz online is no easy task. Unlike conventional media channels, you can’t popularize a brand with a blitzkrieg ad campaign. Throwing money at banner ads and Google AdSense won’t help much either. To create a sustainable, positive and grass roots level word of mouth chatter, your campaign should go viral.

Going viral requires some really cool ideas that grab the attention of people in few seconds or less. One key ingredient of such a successful campaign is a gorgeous landing page that reveals hardly anything arousing curiosity. A landing page might sound like a single static HTML page, but when done right it can and will work wonders for your brand.

Kickoff Labs emphasizes that it helps you acquire customers. That’s a bold statement and I’m not going to believe them until I try it out myself. Care to join me?

Overview

Kickoff Labs app helps you create a beautiful and unique landing that lets influencers spread your message via viral sharing. And all that can be done in less than 60 seconds without having to write a single line of code! In the backend, the web app assists you to set up auto responders and send out newsletters. Helpful analytics information about the userbase is another useful addition to Kickoff Labs.

Pricing

Kickoff Labs pricing plans are affordable and start from $15. There are in total three plans and they all have the same featureset. The number of landing pages one can create and the number of newsletters that can be sent are the major differentiators of each plan. Besides, there is a free plan that lets users set up one landing page, but limits the number of customer sign ups to 50.

Getting Started

After a single-click signup using my Facebook account, I landed on the dashboard. Before getting into how to set up the landing page, I gotta tell you about the amazing referral campaign the founders are running. With a personal yet professional message, the founders ask us to help spread the word about the app and reach their goal of 5000 customers. The message was really touching and grabbed my attention instantly. Hope they help us the same way to create forceful campaigns!

Give your landing page a name in the prominently placed form and hit Create. After a bit, the app loads The Designer. The designer is where you can change everything users see on your site. Here you can add a logo, change the theme, and customize your thank you message.

Using the Designer

The designer launches with a simple design with just the name and a email submission field. All the major manipulation options are tucked away in their neat little drop downs.

Use the Basics menu to add or update the name, tagline, logo etc. If you have a nice background image to go with the page, one can be uploaded separately as well.

From the form drop down, you can customize every aspect of the form right from the Thank You message to the text on the email button. For those who are really picky about the color choices, a comprehensive toolset is available in the Design menu. There are five different themes to choose from and if you upgrade to a paid account, the mention of Kickoff Labs is automatically removed.

Tracking and Monitoring Results

As soon as you create a landing page, the options in the dashboard are unlocked. Most of them are for paid accounts but options like exporting email database and creating custom email messages are available for free users too. Subscription links to your Twitter and Facebook accounts can be added to the landing page and premium account holders get to edit the tweet text and the opengraph data.

Another awesome aspect of Kickoff Labs is the extensive analytics that accompany each landing page. With a brilliant bar diagram, detailed stats about the number of sign ups and views received over the last 30 days are displayed. There is no mention whether premium users get analytics for an extended period of time.

Final Thoughts

Acquiring customers and building a business do not go hand in hand. If you focus a tad bit more on one aspect, another tend to falter. That’s where Kickoff Labs comes in. But it took forever to get the verification email even after opting to resend it (both mails arrived simultaneously later!). Since the page cannot be published until the email verification is done, I hope the developers fix this issue soon.

There are way too many point and click website builders, but Kickoff Labs has smartly confined itself to a niche (an exponentially growing one at that). With a bit of creativity, it won’t be hard to create a viral landing page. The web app does a bang up job and I highly recommend this for those who are on a budget and want to move quickly into the market.

Share Your Thoughts!

What’s your idea of a successful viral campaign? Can point and click apps like Kickoff Labs beat the effect a carefully hand crafted landing page?