In just three years, an online company that finds roles for casual actors and models through text messages on their cell phones has built up a database of 500,000 participants.
What’s more, Instantcast.com just increased its conversion rates by 28.9% after six weeks of testing a new online marketing approach.
Back in 2003, Kikucall.com, an 14-person company devoted to finding marketing applications on cell phones, started up Instantcast.com, a service where hopeful actors and models can pay a monthly $19.95 membership fee to learn about available auditions 24 hours a day through their cell phones.
“I had connections with the casting industry in Los Angeles and started up this service for the casual casting industry,” says Brian Hecht, CEO of Instantcast.com. That would include such roles as extras in movies, some modeling assignments, regional theater and reality television.
The way it works is that members give their contact information to Instantcast, which then lets them know right away through text messages sent to their cell phones when auditions become available. Instantcast.com members tend to be women between the ages of 18 and 24 with strong interest sin acting, says Hecht. (The site doesn’t track how many actors and models it helps place in roles.)
The company markets primarily through paid search listings as well as through its own opt-in database. Last fall, the New York based company hired Optimost to help it increase the percentage of site visitors who indeed do sign up for Instantcast’s services, which led to the increased conversion rates and other improvements.
After just six weeks of testing, Instantcast was able to bump up its improve conversion rates by 28.9% by doing such things as getting rid of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) section on its landing page and adding such features as like testimonials and sample jobs. Copy changes were also made.
“We did some things that were intuitive and some things that were counterintuitive,” says Hecht.
Before Instantcast, Hecht had previously been a journalist with The New Republic Magazine and had been a reporter for NBC News and ABC News He got his start in the online industry in 1994, when he worked for online community Tripod.
For the moment, Instantcast will keep trying to innovate. “We’re constantly testing new things,” says Hecht.
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