Small marketing budget, what to do with it?

Hey Serge,

Have a look at the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. It will tell you a great deal about the vast marketing channels that are out there as well as help you get thinking about your traction goals and setting up your framework.

Firstly, are you already getting customers through your SaaS? If so, then have a chat with them to understand the value that they are getting and how they came across your service. It will also give you a better idea on which target customer segments are your early adopters.

When you have a clear idea of your target customer segments (at the moment, seems to be developers but could be narrowed down further), then it will help you figure out which marketing channel you should hit up. For example, for developers, sounds like you should hit up tech meetups, tech conferences, Hacker News, IH, etc.

Interestingly, it might be something I'd implement in our webapp as well so I'll check it out!

I would reach out to various developer newsletter authors and see if they will present your software in their newsletters. They might do it for free, you may have to pay a sponsorship fee, but I know that you will get signups. Developers like to check out software that is promoted by the newsletters that they follow. One that I follow that would be a good one to check out is Laravel News: https://laravel-news.com/

Hi Serge,
Before you start to plan out anything on the marketing side, I would suggest answering these two questions first:
a) Do you know exactly who your target groups are and what it is you are offering to them (so marketing talk: what is your USP?)
This will help you to better understand, what your sales pitch has to be and which marketing channels might work best.
b) Did you have an in-depth look at your web analytics to identify if it is really the "top" of your funnel where you need help? I have some customers who always think that it is the acquisition part that is not working and we find out later that it often is the conversion part.
If you have all your numbers figured out and you are sure that your website is converting pretty fine, I would suggest to test out the most promising marketing channels (i.e. Google AdWords) and spend a little bit time and money on each of them. This way, you can identify where it is you should be spending your marketing budget.
If you don't want to do this by yourself, find a good marketing manager who can help you set this up and create a marketing set up that will generate more money than you spent.

I hope this helps.

Hey Serge,

You mentioned that you're currently blogging as a form of content marketing. What are you doing to get exposure for the blog posts?

If you're just writing them, but not distributing links, it's going to a take a very long time to see some sort of return.

-Ryan

Hi @Serge, I really like this recent post on IH regarding sales and marketing for early stage startups: https://www.indiehackers.com/@cliffordoravec/real-world-startup-sales-and-marketing-for-the-lost-and-the-clueless-8f2df4804c

It's super actionable and incorporates your marketing budget (test 1 new ad per week) and existing blogging efforts.

1. No, blogging is generally a terrible way to get high-intent visitors to a website quickly, at least early on. Your dollars are better spent somewhere else.

2. No, learn adwords yourself and manage the $950, someone from UpWork willing to manage a $950 budget isn't going to know what they are doing well enough to be worth what they ask.

3. No, they wouldn't be on UpWork if they knew what they were doing.

4. Yes, see #2. I'd put the entire $950 into Adwords, bid on high-intent exact match keywords.

Hey Serge,

There are so many channels (free or at little cost) that you can experiment with. The general truth doesn't exists, so you need to experiment a little bit with your audience and your market fit. Facebook ads still works very well for relatively small budget. But you could try some experiments like post on Quora, record the explanation youtube video, post on reddit / targeted facebook groups, etc. I think you should begin with bringing the value to the users, if they like it, many of them buy your product. Google Ads should be cold sales in your case and it shouldnt meet your target ROI. If you will have more time or cash to spend you could prepare case studies, long form blogs, whitepapers, check lists ... you can exchange this in-depth materials for visitors emails. With solid email list you can prepare nurture campaign and prepare them slowly to sales point.

Good Luck,

Robert

Hey Serge, $950 is really a small amount of budget for marketing products and services. Here is an article that might help you: https://e27.co/bootstrapping-e-commerce-business-9-best-practices-consider-20170627/

This comment was deleted 8 years ago