Hi there, I'm looking for feedback/advice on how to grow my product, www.packagr.app

I have a Shopify app I promote it through Facebook ads by creating and targeting the right audience.
https://trackifyapp.com/

Hi Chris,

As someone who has been marketing for 13+ years (including for companies like Microsoft, Oracle & other tech businesses), I’ll be happy to give you a few pointers.

I’m just going to go off what I’m seeing from your website as I have no other information.

Clearly, you have something that people want or need. This is good - it’s absolutely necessary for any marketing to work. No amount of marketing can help a terrible product - at least not in the long-term.

Right now your message is focused on the features & benefits of your solution.

This has been the traditional way we are taught to market but a story is a much better way.

Why is a story better than features & benefits?

1. The final decision maker for your solution might have zero technical knowledge - thus your features & benefits mean nothing to them. A features & benefits message makes it much harder for your potential customer to explain and sell the value internally to the final decision makers.
2. Even for the potential customer who understands the features & benefits - it’s a much less persuasive message than a story.
3. Features & benefits are not very sharable compared to stories.

Why are features & benefits harder to explain to others, less persuasive & less sharable.

Because the human brain is wired for stories - we make sense of the world via story. Teachers have known for a long-time that stories & analogies are the best way to convey information - especially information that is complex.

We share stories all the time - every day. It’s how we naturally communicate.

And we are convinced by stories because stories spark emotion in us - cold facts and figures don’t do this.

You might dismiss this because, after all, you are selling a technical product to people who are logical and not emotional.

But as someone who has sold & marketed technical solutions B2B (business-to-business), I can tell you that even these decisions, ones that are supposed to be so logical & rational are all made on emotion as well - the logic is just the rational justification.

And the science backs this up.

Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio studies people who had experienced brain damage in the area of their brains that generated emotions. As such, they couldn’t feel emotions.

Surprisingly, he found that these people, as a result of their brain damage, couldn’t make decisions. Many decisions are not clear-cut: all options have pros & cons. Without emotions, they found it very difficult to choose.

So, you want to trigger an emotional “want” in your target customer with a story - one that they can justify logically with your features & benefits.

SO WHAT STORY TO USE?

One of the most effective stories to use is one that has been used by companies like Salesforce, Hubspot, Zuora and many others to grow fast and dominate their markets.

These businesses brand themselves with an ideology, what’s called Ideological Branding.

An ideology is a set of beliefs.

Businesses that brand themselves with an ideology don’t just do so with any set of beliefs - they do so with a set of beliefs that says that the old way of doing things no longer works and that there is a new & better way of doing something. This new & better way just so happens to be made possible by their solution.

This is not just a set of beliefs though. It's also a story - and a very persuasive one at that.

For example, Hubspot branded their marketing automation solution with the ideology of Inbound Marketing - an ideology that they created in 2006.

This ideology told the following story:

"The way that marketers are going about generating leads (cold emailing, cold calling, advertising etc.) is no longer valid in the modern internet age. Consumers now research solutions online. The best way to reach them and generate leads is to provide one’s potential customers with valuable content online that helps them & capture their contact details by giving them free content & then nurture them with more free content until they are ready to buy."

This formed the core of their marketing & sales message. They didn’t sell their marketing automation solution, they sold this story.

The focus was on selling the ideology (Inbound Marketing), because if the prospect believed that they needed to implement Inbound Marketing then Hubspot’s solution would sell itself because it was specifically designed to help customers implement Inbound.

This message enabled them to grow from $0-$100 million in revenue in just 8 years.

HOW TO APPLY THIS TO YOUR BUSINESS?

You need to find the right ideology for your business.

There’s a framework you can use. It’s called the USPNR framework - rather than write it all out here and make this post even lengthier you can learn about it here: https://bit.ly/2tX4ooO

Hi Chris - very interesting product.

Your pricing scares me. Let's say an entire university decides to use your solution as a way to manage package deployment - they might have a team of (let's say) 20 data science researchers. They pay £5 a month, they can all use the system as long as they don't use over 1gb of storage?

Let's say you save an hour of each researchers time a month, you could well be saving them £1000s, and your getting paid a fiver to do it.

It seams very unlikely they would use more than a gb I would expect.

I think you might've set your prices low, by an order of magnitude. Would a company that needs this kind of tool really balk at £50 a month? £100, or even £200?

Why can your contact form only handle 200 characters? What happens if a user has a more serious question?