4 ms·

You're doing a lot of things right but drop the free plan ASAP It's all the support and overhead of free customers with none of the financial upside. I presume

You're doing a lot of things right but drop the free plan ASAP It's all the support and overhead of free customers with none of the financial upside. I presume you need to start generating proper revenue/profits from this site ASAP. The free plan will hinder that. Adwords is indeed a waste of time and money, Facebook is too. I spent a lot more than you before I realised that, well done for working out it's a waste much sooner than I did! Bing is probably worth your attention. Capterra will drive good leads initially but they'll fall off after a while. Keep an eye on your spend there and pull it if the conversions dry up. Get App always had too high a cost of entry for me to try. Stop thinking the next feature you add to the app will grow your client base. There's a lot of shitty HR apps out there with excellent marketing making more money than you :) Don't make the mistake of thinking that your app can be used in all countries and so why wouldn't we market to the US (or <insert other country here>)? I'll tell you why - there are a lot of large, incumbent and well funded HR apps in the US that you're going up against and you'll lose every time because you don't understand exactly what the US market want. If you're based in Australia focus all of your attention in what Australian businesses want to see. You probably also need to decide what size of company gets the most value out of your app and go after them - same for industry vertical(s). "A person who chases two rabbits catches neither". Work out what rabbit to chase, stop chasing the others, go after that rabbit with all your marketing might. Shape your products roadmap off the back of what that one rabbit needs for you to capture it. Shape your USP off the back of this too. "ANNOUNCING A BEAUTIFUL, EASY TO USE, WEB BASED HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM." is far too generic to appeal to any one audience - so guess what, it appeals to nobody. Source: I run a HR software app called http://www.staffsquared.com http://www.staffsquared.com. I've been where you are. Good luck!

agopaul 10y ago
Could you expand on the choice of the advertising platform? Do you find that Bing performs better than others?
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Yep - less competition and hence lower PPC prices for keywords that are highly sought after on Adwords. There is of course less traffic overall, but more of it converts at a price we can stomach. Would definitely recommend anybody in any industry struggling to make Adwords prices stack up check out Bing.
  - zaroth 10y ago
    Years ago when I did this sort of thing, 'less traffic overall' was maybe 5% of the traffic on Bing that you would see on Google. Often traffic was so low it wasn't worth the extra overhead of trying to manage the campaign. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and to what degree?
    - simonswords82 10y ago
      Totally agree with you, that was the case before but not now... Microsoft have slowly caught up and now operate around the 20% search volume mark versus Google's 60%. Here's more info on the market share breakdown: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-February-2016-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases... The thing to also keep in mind is the %'s will vary according to the preferences of your target audience. For example, our target audience are office based with an admin focus. They tend to use a Microsoft OS, which usually has Internet Explorer and you guessed it - has Bing setup by default! I suspect if you're going after a more "techie" crowd that they're more likely to use Chrome, and therefore use Google for their search needs. Obviously all that really matters are the conversion numbers for your particular app. So I usually recommend that people set up some ads in Bing to mimic what they've setup at Google Adwords. Bing has a Google Adword importer, so just import your Adwords and then run them on Bing for a few weeks to see how you fare. That's what we did for Staff Squared, and we were much happier with the Bing numbers than we had been Google - and still advertise on Bing even now.
      - tmaly 10y ago
        Are there any major differences in who the audience is between Google and Bing?
shostack 10y ago
Would love to know more about why you think AdWords and FB is a waste of time and money. Please don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who has managed many accounts of all sizes (up to the multi-million dollar/year range), often times most accounts just aren't setup very well. Not that I can always blame people as there's always work to do, and things constantly change, but the point stands that you may not be able to dial-in a profitable campaign even after spending $5k depending on what your conversion rates are like. Just as often, the problem is on the website and not the ads as well. For example--and not meaning to knock you here, but perhaps the cartoony graphics are a turnoff to prospects. I don't know, but testing would find that out (which you may have done). All of that said, sometimes it does not make sense to focus marketing efforts on paid advertising channels like paid search/social, but you can usually do things profitably at a small scale, even if you're just focusing on smart use of retargeting with RLSA or something like that.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Good points well made and no offence taken at all. In our particular industry there are some large (wealthy) incumbents who bid silly prices for the keywords that convert. It's a race to the bottom, with Google the ultimate winner. Our CAC was infinitely higher than the LTV of paying customers permitted on Adwords as a channel, so we had to ditch it. We did try the usual things, landing pages with unique copy, split testing ads, split testing landing page copy, negative keywords, retargeting and so on but as the OP discovered just didn't convert. I should add that when I say it didn't convert - what I mean is that we have other channels that convert at a much lower CAC, and so we have doubled down our efforts on those instead :) Google doesn't need any more of my money! Facebook - We probably could have spent more time and money on before writing it off but again, we have other channels that are working and so didn't feel the need to push on with Facebook. In your experience does Facebook do well for B2B products like ours?
  - shostack 10y ago
    Can you give a sense of what size budget you tested with and how much data you collected? Tests that are too small to deliver statistically significant results are something I see quite often. For FB, think of it as a place to connect with your audience. You probably aren't going to see a lot of click-based performance, but there might be a strong view-through correlation since it is very similar to display in that regard. So if you are trying to raise awareness of HR people for example, you can probably target them pretty easily on FB, and if you give them shareable content, that can help be a force multiplier since you won't pay for the shares. You just have to be clever about your targeting, and even more clever about how you are measuring things from an attribution standpoint. If you are expecting it to perform well on a last-click basis, you'll likely be disappointed.
cyberferret 10y ago
Great tips Simon, Thank you - I really appreciate your words. I think you have summarised my marketing mistakes really well and given me a lot to think about. By the way, I have checked out StaffSquared a while back and think it is brilliant. Your app inspired me in a lot of ways to create HR Partner. I've also seen you interact on a few HR or software oriented blogs/forums (as well as here) and think that is a great way to raise awareness of a business. Thanks for your inspiration and advice.
- simonswords82 10y ago
  Hey CyberFerret, your app looks great and you're very welcome. I hope it goes somewhere :) Thanks for the kind words about our app - hit me up if I can ever be of more help. Given you're the other side of the world and it's a big place I don't mind helping out where I can.

agopaul 10y ago

Could you expand on the choice of the advertising platform? Do you find that Bing performs better than others?

simonswords82 10y ago
Yep - less competition and hence lower PPC prices for keywords that are highly sought after on Adwords. There is of course less traffic overall, but more of it converts at a price we can stomach. Would definitely recommend anybody in any industry struggling to make Adwords prices stack up check out Bing.
- zaroth 10y ago
  Years ago when I did this sort of thing, 'less traffic overall' was maybe 5% of the traffic on Bing that you would see on Google. Often traffic was so low it wasn't worth the extra overhead of trying to manage the campaign. I'm not sure if this is still the case, and to what degree?
  - simonswords82 10y ago
    Totally agree with you, that was the case before but not now... Microsoft have slowly caught up and now operate around the 20% search volume mark versus Google's 60%. Here's more info on the market share breakdown: https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases-February-2016-US-Desktop-Search-Engine-Rankings https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Rankings/comScore-Releases... The thing to also keep in mind is the %'s will vary according to the preferences of your target audience. For example, our target audience are office based with an admin focus. They tend to use a Microsoft OS, which usually has Internet Explorer and you guessed it - has Bing setup by default! I suspect if you're going after a more "techie" crowd that they're more likely to use Chrome, and therefore use Google for their search needs. Obviously all that really matters are the conversion numbers for your particular app. So I usually recommend that people set up some ads in Bing to mimic what they've setup at Google Adwords. Bing has a Google Adword importer, so just import your Adwords and then run them on Bing for a few weeks to see how you fare. That's what we did for Staff Squared, and we were much happier with the Bing numbers than we had been Google - and still advertise on Bing even now.
    - tmaly 10y ago
      Are there any major differences in who the audience is between Google and Bing?

shostack 10y ago

Would love to know more about why you think AdWords and FB is a waste of time and money. Please don't take this the wrong way, but as someone who has managed many accounts of all sizes (up to the multi-million dollar/year range), often times most accounts just aren't setup very well. Not that I can always blame people as there's always work to do, and things constantly change, but the point stands that you may not be able to dial-in a profitable campaign even after spending $5k depending on what your conversion rates are like. Just as often, the problem is on the website and not the ads as well. For example--and not meaning to knock you here, but perhaps the cartoony graphics are a turnoff to prospects. I don't know, but testing would find that out (which you may have done). All of that said, sometimes it does not make sense to focus marketing efforts on paid advertising channels like paid search/social, but you can usually do things profitably at a small scale, even if you're just focusing on smart use of retargeting with RLSA or something like that.

simonswords82 10y ago
Good points well made and no offence taken at all. In our particular industry there are some large (wealthy) incumbents who bid silly prices for the keywords that convert. It's a race to the bottom, with Google the ultimate winner. Our CAC was infinitely higher than the LTV of paying customers permitted on Adwords as a channel, so we had to ditch it. We did try the usual things, landing pages with unique copy, split testing ads, split testing landing page copy, negative keywords, retargeting and so on but as the OP discovered just didn't convert. I should add that when I say it didn't convert - what I mean is that we have other channels that convert at a much lower CAC, and so we have doubled down our efforts on those instead :) Google doesn't need any more of my money! Facebook - We probably could have spent more time and money on before writing it off but again, we have other channels that are working and so didn't feel the need to push on with Facebook. In your experience does Facebook do well for B2B products like ours?
- shostack 10y ago
  Can you give a sense of what size budget you tested with and how much data you collected? Tests that are too small to deliver statistically significant results are something I see quite often. For FB, think of it as a place to connect with your audience. You probably aren't going to see a lot of click-based performance, but there might be a strong view-through correlation since it is very similar to display in that regard. So if you are trying to raise awareness of HR people for example, you can probably target them pretty easily on FB, and if you give them shareable content, that can help be a force multiplier since you won't pay for the shares. You just have to be clever about your targeting, and even more clever about how you are measuring things from an attribution standpoint. If you are expecting it to perform well on a last-click basis, you'll likely be disappointed.

cyberferret 10y ago

Great tips Simon, Thank you - I really appreciate your words. I think you have summarised my marketing mistakes really well and given me a lot to think about. By the way, I have checked out StaffSquared a while back and think it is brilliant. Your app inspired me in a lot of ways to create HR Partner. I've also seen you interact on a few HR or software oriented blogs/forums (as well as here) and think that is a great way to raise awareness of a business. Thanks for your inspiration and advice.

simonswords82 10y ago
Hey CyberFerret, your app looks great and you're very welcome. I hope it goes somewhere :) Thanks for the kind words about our app - hit me up if I can ever be of more help. Given you're the other side of the world and it's a big place I don't mind helping out where I can.