How to do marketing right when you hate intrusive ads?
Every time I read about marketing, it always comes down to the same answer: Google Ad Words and Facebook Ads.
As a user, however, I cannot stand intrusive advertisement. I hate going on Facebook to check on my friends and family and having to scroll through a flock of "HEY, BUY THIS" messages.
I do believe that there are alternatives though. After all, I come from the game industry and a majority of the advertisement does not go through such means (unless we are talking huge AAA companies).
Do you guys have any advice on how to get visibility and users without resorting to such methods?
EDIT: For those who asked, I am developing a mobile app to discover the correlations in your life (https://www.getdailys.com/) and my current objective is to attract users to the free option and so that they will hopefully switch to premium :)
Content marketing is one strategy that is still an option these days and can give a decent ROI. However, it's typically a long-term strategy, as it will take a considerable amount of time and effort before you'll start seeing results.
Another method which is getting more popular these days is Engineering as Marketing; build small but useful products and give them away for free.
Guest blogging or JV's (Joint Ventures) are another channel with a low barrier to entry. Find others who service the same audience or have a significant overlap with your target audience and work out a mutually beneficial arrangement.
Releasing useful open source projects/libraries is another path worth exploring. It's very similar to Engineering as Marketing though.
If you're feeling lost, might I suggest picking up a copy of "Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth" by Gabriel Weinberg? It's an excellent book describing several paths to growing your business as well as a very useful framework for evaluating each of these paths.
Great suggestions, @chillyorange ! I deeply believe that the long-term approach works best over time.
Yes, it is painfully slow at times, but eventually, it adds up nicely.
We are utilizing these methods for our company (https://weardulo.com) and are beginning to see how awareness about the brand is growing.
I think to your answer I would add also participation in communities such as this one, Product Hunt, Reddit, Facebook Groups, Medium... I promise you will meet a lot of great people!
Participating in communities is definitely another good one, thanks!
Great advice there, thank you very much. I am already starting to think about how to apply it :)
If you want to spend money on advertising, reddit ads are on the unintrusive side. Basically they look like pinned posts. If there are some relevant subreddits to your product, you can target them quite cheaply.
Don't forget influencer marketing. It's huge and growing fast.
How do you suggest to go about this?
hint: it all goes down in the DM.
Start approaching influencers in your space and build relationships.
Platforms can be varied, blogs, Instagram, YouTube etc.
As long as they have an audience in target with what you are offering, it might be a great way to get your product out there.
Probably not answer you're looking for, but there are good Facebook ads and bad Facebook ads. It's probably the easiest (and cheapest?) way to get instant results.
The problem with most ads however are that they are not relevant. By being creative with your ads and putting them in front of the right people, you can really have great results. Not to mention the retargeting aspect of well crafted ads.
Besides, not all people find ads intrusive at all. If so you'd see more "hide all ads" in your Insights.
Honestly, I've started using Facebook far less after the latest newsfeed updates. Why? Because only seeing updates from family and friends is boring as hell. I chose to follow brands because I'm genuinely interested in what they have to say.
I don't think they future lies in Facebook advertising at all. But on a limited budget for instant results, it's probably one of the better options.
Put good content in front of your potential customers and you might see great results.
Like Mattijs said, creating resources and tools for you target audience can be very effective. If you haven't already, you should read this article about why Crew created Unsplash as a side project and how it changed their business: https://crew.co/blog/how-side-projects-saved-our-startup/
Feel free to tell us a little bit more about your business/objectives and maybe we could give you some better examples for your situation :-)
I am reading the article you shared and it looks great. The first sentence describes exactly my current situation: "We changed our business model and had 3 months worth of cash left to turn things around. If we didn’t we were toast. Done." Thanks a lot for the link!
Depends a lot on what you're selling, to whom, and at what price point...
Care to share?
Try something similar to Discord? Word of mouth and having a fun social media presence, more or less.
Tl;dr: be fun and have a product that people like to use.
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