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In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services. This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astrotur
by cj 3y ago
In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services.
This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement).
I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found questions from people on forums asking how to accomplish [what our product does] and we'd answer the question with a post recommending our service.
And then we wrote a bunch of tutorials / guides for how to integrate [popular service] <> [our product] to achieve [what our product does] so that if anyone googles "[popular service] [what our product does]" our help docs are usually top of the page.
Posting on forums was fine to get the first few users, but it was long-tail SEO (which is pretty easy to rank since it's long-tail) that got us the next 200. If the search terms are specific enough and the category is relatively undiscovered/unexploited, it's easy to rank. Unfortunately it's really hard to find unexploited niches.
- moneywoes 3y agoperhaps it depends on the audience as well correct? for example, a dev tool has sa technical audience who would primarily not be influenced by say PPC in contrast to form posts
- dale_glass 3y ago> In other words, "Word of mouth" for all services. Yup. I avoid every single ad I can on principle. Only exception I used to make was for youtube sponsors, mostly out of laziness, until I finally installed sponsorblock. I've gotten so good at it that at this time I haven't the faintest idea of what movies are there to see at the cinema. Not a single one. I'm probably a very extreme case in actually having succeeded in disconnecting myself from popular culture to a very large extent.
- hennell 3y agoThere is a real problem with discovery without any ads. I'm still aware of movies, but I never have much idea what TV shows exist anymore, or even when shows I like might are back on the air/streaming. I might hear about about something interesting on social media or a podcast, but won't remember it until I see a picture on the streaming platform months later, when it's already been canceled for lack of viewers. Youtube is actually the only place I actively block all ads, because they seem unable to stop spamming me with android games that are nothing like the ads at all and are unbelievably annoying. Most websites and stuff I'll let them show ads by default, then block the site if they have more ads than content etc. Although I also just try to avoid those sites in the first place.
- ryandrake 3y agoIn general, I don't want to "discover" products, not at all times of the day, on every web site I visit, every radio and TV station I tune into, every billboard I pass. Marketers have this notion that people are all merely 24/7 product-consumers, constantly on the lookout to discover new products to consume, and as long as their "message" reaches my brain, it's an unambiguously good thing for both parties. When I'm browsing the web, or driving to work, or watching a show, or trying to complete some basic task around my life, I'm definitely not trying to discover your product. I wish marketers would stop assuming I am. If I want to look for an unknown product, I'll deliberately go out and do so. In that case, and only in that case, ads are welcome.
- burnished 3y agoNot knowing about whats new on TV is a feature! Given the wealth of tv and movie content available, should you be treating a canceled show that wasn't intriguing enough to look into at the time as a loss?
- otabdeveloper4 3y agoRead the post again. "Word of mouth" was in scare quotes because this "word of mouth" is actually astroturfed product placement "native" advertising. (People forget that humans invented the advertising industry precisely to shield civilization from this kind of "word of mouth".)
- dale_glass 3y agoTrue, but it still has some upsides. These days I mostly hang out in dark corners of the net. If it's profitable at all to astroturf there, then it's barely so. And if you manage, it's mostly because you actually managed to make a positive contribution to the space at the same time.