About Opera Marketing

Not so long time ago there was a plenty of discussions regarding Opera’s marketing strategy, some said it’s good while most of the people disagreed with that.

Daniel Goldman wrote a very interesting article about Opera’s marketing which you should read.

Here’s a list of “to do/done” things regarding Opera marketing.

We are reviving our developer outreach efforts. It’s very important for us to have web developers be aware of and test their sites in Opera. We recently hired a developer/writer to run our developer site, dev.opera.com, where you’ll see lots of good stuff in the coming months.

With the Desktop Team blog, we have made the development process of the desktop browser more open to our fans and followers. This is by far the most popular blog we host on the My Opera Community site. This blog is one of the important places where we converse with you, our users.

For the launch of Opera Mini 4 beta we produced an ‘Opera Mini vs. iPhone’ video — it was extremely popular in the blogosphere and on video sharing sites.

We are producing more fun and informative videos to be released with the Opera 9.5 and Opera Mini 4 (final) launches.

We send many of our developers, executives and others to speak at and attend industry-related conferences and events (worldwide). The audiences attending these events usually include developers, business contacts, and everyday internet users.

We organize large Opera-user get-togethers, which we call ‘Opera Backstage’ events. These Opera Backstages have already taken place in numerous countries, with more of these events planned. In addition to the marketing team, these events are attended by our executives and developers. These events are typically attended by anywhere from 100-500 people.

As I mentioned above, news stories about Opera in the press don’t usually happen by themselves. We have an entire PR department working on getting as much publicity for Opera in the press as possible, in multiple languages.

We’re currently working on a new affiliate program, where our users get credit (and tangible rewards) for encouraging others to download Opera.

Opera’s homepages, both www.opera.com and www.operamini.com are redesigned with each major release of a new browser version. This keeps those sites from becoming stale.

Our marketing and IS departments are currently working on a major redesign of our website.

The website’s design, usability and content are crucial in our efforts to increase Opera’s market share. After people read or hear about Opera, the site is what often convinces them to download and use Opera.

We run ads on various tech websites and blogs to promote the desktop browser, Opera Mini and the Wii browser.

We have (and continue to pursue) major distribution deals with ISPs and web portals to distribute the desktop browser and Opera Mini. Examples include T-Online, Clix and Onet.
Opera sponsors many events and conferences, which gets our name and brand out to conference-goers.

We also have booths at many events and conferences, where we demo and talk to people about our browsers.

We run the My Opera community site, which has close to 1 million registered members. When potential Opera users consider downloading Opera, and notice our strong community of users, I’m sure this helps a bit in their decision to download and use Opera.

We recognize that our users are very talented, and many of them want to help spread and promote Opera. To help those users, we have set up the Choose Opera group where Opera users can plan, execute, and show off group and individual projects that build awareness of their favorite browser*. (*Opera).

We want everyone, not just English-speaking users, to have the opportunity to find information about and download Opera. To support that, we’ve developed localized versions of our website. For example, see ru.opera.com, cn.opera.com, pl.opera.com, and jp.opera.com
Our developers, engineers and QA people often join in on conversations with Opera users in the official Opera Forums, Opera’s IRC channel and on blogs around the Web. This helps make the culture of Opera more open and accessible.

To encourage people to learn more about Opera, we solicit questions from our users to be used in interviews that we publish with Opera executives, developers and others.
We give out promo merchandise to our users and supporters that include: Opera t-shirts, pens, pins, phone straps, stickers, etc.

We do outreach on many social networking sites. We are active on sites such as Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, and Flickr.

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