Perhaps you have children leaving for college for the first time this month. Have you given a lot of thought to the sheets they'll be sleeping on? Peggy Allen and Ronda Pierson have.
A few years ago, the two former Lifetime Television executives were getting ready to send their kids off to the world of higher education, and were appalled at the low quality and wrongly sized sheets available for dormitory beds.
This led them to form Campus Bedding.com, which today pulls in more than 1,100 unique visitors daily, up from maybe 300 or 400 last year, Allen says. On top of that, the company has convinced about eight colleges and universities to recommend it as a supplier of bed sheets and linens to their resident students.
The marketing strategy centers on Google Adwords and SEO. Popular keywords are “all the obvious ones to search,” says Allen, who notes that some words like “sheets” are too general to be of much use.
But getting the stamp of approval from educational institutions has the most significant impact. “We've had very, very good meetings that could put us in front of a lot of students, but it just takes a long time to set these contracts up,” she notes.
