Best marketing channel

Discussions
#1

What’s your best marketing channel? I’m looking for some inspiration.

I’ll start. Direct sales seems to have been the bear for me. So like emailing warm and semi-warm contacts and getting on phone calls with them.

But I don’t really enjoy this much (as compared to development).

I’m pretty active on twitter but I consider that more relation ship building. Haven’t seen a lot of direct results from twitter.

Also sponsored a conference with a but of swag and that seems to have worked fairly well too. Surprisingly.

#2

It depends on your market. What is your market?

I get a lot of sales from just online ads. It can cost a lot of money, $1000-2000 per month but the sales it generates make it worthwhile.

I tried cold calling and even hired a sales person but the ROI was very poor.

#3

Right of course. Amongst a variety of other factors. I’m just interested in hearing a bit from people in this community.

I’m an ecommerce email marketing plugin basically. It’s not something that I think a lot of people are searching for so ppc might be tough.

That’s awesome that you have paid acquisition cracked! I may just dm you to find out a bit more about that! :slight_smile:

#4

I have found PPC is working pretty well. In my industry the search terms are pretty well defined so I am not sure if that is good or not. To make PPC valuable you need some cash reserves though, it costs me > $1000 p/m and I will soon probably spend twice that.

#5

Hi @kalenjordan. Have you read Traction? It’s a useful collection of various channels and a framework for selecting one or more channels. Has a 5-step process: brainstorm, rank, prioritise, test, focus on what works. Of course, one point is that you do exactly what you’re doing now, which is see what’s worked for others :slight_smile:

http://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Guide-Getting-Customers-ebook/dp/B00N06Y2DW/

I got pretty good at Adwords back in the day, which helped. I haven’t used it in anger lately so rather listen to @craigvn!

I also mailed a few bloggers which got my traffic kickstarted. And tried, in my limited ability, to refine my SEO somewhat. I was never an enthusiastic writer though. One thing that brought me content was getting customers who were asking for discounts to do write-ups of how they used the app, and add a few screenshots of their setup. I specifically said not to sugar-coat it and just write what their process was. I’d add the pages to the site and would have various natural-language (rather than salesey) pages, including foreign languages.

#6

No I haven’t read it but heard about it. Heard a few interviews that Gabriel Weinberg gave - really interesting. I’m not too much of a reader unfortunately.

Interesting to hear about your experiences - thx for the feedback!

#7

Hi Craig,

Have you tried the freemium model before selling via trial? I am currently doing freemium and wondering about the other model :slight_smile:

#8

I have considered freemium but have not done it for a few reasons.

  • I think it would cost me too much in support for clients who are paying nothing
  • My entry level price of $19 is very cheap for someone that is running a business off the software.

I don’t think I have ever had someone ask for a free version of the software, they are used to traditional desktop vendors charging thousands of $ and anything reasonably priced is welcome.