I'm a coder, not a marketer, damn it!
Recently, I had the chance to speak with a well known entrepreneur on his podcast about my Neucards app. It was a great opportunity to generate interest, or it would have been, if I hadn't forgotten to spell out "Neucards". I have no idea if there was a blip in the search engines for "new cards", "newcard", "new app", or any similar terms; but I do know I saw basically no change in my website's traffic or in downloads for my app.
A friend told me at the time to try buying SEO ads and I had to sheepishly admit I had no idea what those even were. I've since set up @neucards on Twitter, made a subreddit, joined discord, but I cannot spend much time on them when there is still so much to do on my app. Turning my ideas into code is much easier than selling an end product or convincing others to try out something new. To me, "Neucards" is a fine, descriptive name short for "network enhanced user cards", but no one else knows this, so it is my job to make them aware.
So in the lessons learned department:
- Marketing takes practice
- Refine your message across multiple mediums
- Minimize the barriers to your product
In the end, I really appreciated the advice I received and gained a lot from the experience, so it was a big win for me. The posts in Growth and Marketing have been a big help for me and I plan to keep learning.
What about you? Has anyone else had any missed marketing opportunities?
15 years of marketing and design experience in high tech I'll try to squeeze into a single post.
I think you could pretty quickly and easily test your messaging with the current web traffic you have using something like Google Optimize. It seems like you're looking for both your language market fit and your channel market fit.
Marketing doesn't have to be a drag! I use a lot of experimentation in order to drill down on language market fit and channel market fit. That allows me to put more wood behind less arrows. Managing a whole bunch of marketing activities doesn't sound like your jam, but in my experience, nobody really likes that.
Make a spreadsheet of experiments that you can run on your language fit and your channel fit. Score them according to their perceived impact, and ease of implementation and then start running them. By scoring them you'll know which ones to run given the amount of time you have to dedicate to marketing.
From a design marketing perspective:
"Neucards allows you to share your personal information with others quickly, privately, and securely." - This is great but what does that mean for me? What is the benefit? Less spam? Not being tracked? Tried to clearly identify the benefit immediately. You're telling me what it does but not WHY I should be interested in it.
Your website could use a design refresh. Your navigation is pinned way over to the right, there is no real information hierarchy, the content has no white space around it, save for a giant space in the middle. You aren't inviting me on a journey, I am trying to figure out what is important. You could easily consolidate all of that into a single page that I scroll through to progressively learn more. Start with the biggest benefit and work down from why to how, and then FAQ's and then contact. There are a million and one beautiful, responsive single page websites out there that will give you some great inspiration!
Consider adding some color and font/font weights to your website to be able have a little more visual differentiation. An easy trick is to have labels be in all caps but a smaller point size. Plain black and white is a bit visually monontonous. You can stay monocrhomatic and just use black for headlines and grey for paragraph text. That would at the very least break up the blocks and give uses a visual cue for what is important.
You have what looks like a very interesting product in the sense that it is timely and relevant given the state of both personal security and data usage concerns. I think you're just lacking a way to display that with a visual aesthetic and narrative that is compelling to visitors.
This is terrific! I really appreciate the feedback. You are absolutely right about telling people about the "Why", so I will take that to heart when I revamp the site. All of your suggestions are spot on. Thank you!
Sorry for hijacking, but since you have a lot of experience with marketing and you mention Google Optimize I just wanted to ask how marketers deal with GDPR.
How would you think about and apply your regular marketing playbook for a business where having a cookie popup is a hard no?
I would need more context on the business and the target audience. Short answer is get creative! I know a lot of marketers were pretty bummed about having their tools cut out at the knees, but overly relying on tracking people can put you in a box that can remove your independence. As far as I know there are no A/B testing tools that absolutely guarantee you are operating in the bounds of GDPR or CCPA. It is necessary to do an internal audit of your analytics and data gathering processes to make sure you are compliant.
However, I don't see using an A/B testing tool as absolutely necessary to testing your language fit, and as data privacy concerns advance we spend a lot of time looking at alternatives. I spend a fair amount of time in places like this interacting with peers to bounce ideas back and forth. We also have discord channels that we use. If you have an audience already then engaging with them directly is a great resource to flushing out your ideas. And maybe that is the point, you can build a pretty direct connection with your audience these days on a multitude of platforms that doesn't require you to track their every move on your web properties. In many ways GDPR and CCPA have asked us to be more human about the way we interact with people and generate interest. We are more than ever focused on building community, which requires 2 way interaction and for us to LISTEN and discern instead of track and measure.
Here is the real truth, if you don't have a compelling product, all the marketing in the world can't save you. That should be focus #1. I've tried and tried and tried in my career to make subpar products or services interesting with only mild success. Often times these products have to be oversold and overpromised and there is a lot of leg work to do in marketing to compensate for the flaws of the product. But, if you have a compelling product, and it fits a need, then you have a great story to tell. So figure out a way to tell that story and build a community around it. I don't have all the answers, but I have helped build and launch successful products that used very little in the way of analytics. Just my .2
Thanks for the thoughtful answer!
What I'm hearing you suggest is figuring out how to invite and connect "for real" with customers. You do it on Discord, but it can be done in many other ways. I'm going to keep that in mind... maybe even try Discord myself. :)
Why it is a "hard no"? What makes your case so special that you can't do cookie popups?
On a separate note GDPR =/= cookie banners. Cookie banners become the norm after ePrivacy Directive. GDPR is more about personal data and where can it be stored, how can it be collected, etc.
It's a hypothetical.
With that said, can you not imagine why a business would like to avoid having cookie popups?
If we flip the question: what makes your case so special that you can't make the business work without collecting your customers' personal data?
I think this is spot on. If you can't, then there is something wrong with that business. No business operations (including marketing) should depend on customers' personal data.
Opportunities are good but it is better when you don't tie your marketing to opportunities only.
It is preferable to have everything ready once one knocks on your door but if you have a good foundation (and some resources) you can even create a "moment" (like a created opportunity).
Marketing is a craft. So, yeah, it takes experience and knowledge. Unfortunately, sometimes there are people who do stuff without knowledge and they practice and they gain experience. But that experience not always aligned with the realities of the world.
Messages are so important. How to position yourself in a market and how you talk about yourself/your product can make or break your marketing.
Removing friction is one of the best plays. It generally makes everyone's life easier. Although there are some people that say increased friction contributes to more sales. But that is the opposite of my experience. Might be dependent on target market/niche.
My reply to your subject was 'damn it, I'm a marketer not a coder'
It's been a real frustration for myself as I'm very much a marketer but have very limited coding skills. I see potential in projects that developers don't. But I guess that's the skillsets we are born with
I'm amazed at people who do marketing so well and so naturally. I'm hoping I improve with time.
I totally feel your pain... It takes a lot of time to actually find out the channels that work, and there is no magic pill that will immediately get you thousands of users.
In the WBE Space we have a #feedback channel and I use it often to get an external perspective of my landing pages. This helps me optimize my message and increase the CTA rate...
Feedback is critical. One funny thing I discovered, is that since my users are anonymous, I can't reach out to them :)
I'm sure I've missed a ton of marketing opportunities in the past year and a half since launching my own app. I was heavily into adding more and more features and fixing bugs when I really should have been working on the marketing.
I highly recommend reading a book on marketing at a minimum. It's opened my eyes quite a bit. As devs, we often think in terms of features and how adding yet another feature is going to really make our product shine. The big lesson I've learned so far in what I've read is that to market correctly, you really need to think about your users and their problems and communicate just how your product is going to solve them. And, your message must be simple and direct. Anything that confuses your prospects loses them.
That said, one quick bit of feedback on your app store screenshots: perhaps you can make that first screenshot clearer in what the product does? Right now the heading is "Secure by design" and if I was browsing through the app store and read that, I wouldn't know what the product is for.
For me, I'm continuing to hone my copy more and more and plan on updating my landing page to make the product "sell" clearer. I've updated the copy in my app store screenshots a bunch of times and am still not happy with where it's at.
@allenu If you can, try testing your copy on your landing page or other web properties. Testing is a cheap and affective way for your audience to tell you what resonates. Writing good copy can be a very cognitively demanding task because you're trying to fit so much into so little and have it appeal to the right person.
What I find very helpful in writing copy is separating idea generation from refinement and editing. The first thing to do is to just generate as many ideas as possible, where the goal is to remove your self-editing tendencies and get out of your own way in order to just get words on a page. It doesn't matter if they're good or bad, the point is just to give yourself a lever to generate momentum for writing. I like bullet points, some people use excel spreadsheets. The purpose is to get you writing and let your brain work out the ideas as you go.
Once you have generated a volume of ideas, you can start to loosely organize them, and from their begin to keep, kill, or combine them. As you work through organizing your ideas, refinements and edits should flow more naturally because you've given your brain and subconscious a chance to mull over the topic without trying to immediately give it a shape and definition. What this exercise helps with largely is learning how to be concise through contrast - idea generation SHOULD be free flowing and meandering, it will help you carve out what is important. By the end of the exercise you should have a few good iterations of your copy and then test, test, test!!!
Awesome tips. Thank you!
I'm going to do the A/B testing thing on it.
I have definitely experienced some of what you've suggested. I've written down many different angles and ideas and have worked over some ideas over and over again. I'm learning that this itself is work. From a dev standpoint, I never really thought about how much work writing copy or "designing" marketing really is. Now I know it's real work.
Anyway, I'm definitely finding it gets easier to combine ideas and refine them to simpler language after I've written several iterations. It's genuinely surprising how clearer you can make something with effort. At first it seems impossible to reduce an idea down to a sentence or two, but it can be done!
Another useful thing I've found is just critiquing other landing pages I see or trying to pick up ideas from really good ones. As with anything else, it's definitely a skill, and one you can get better at.
I really appreciate your feedback and suggestions. I will be revamping my App Store page on my next release, so it is good to hear what is currently confusing. Do you have any books on marketing that you would recommend?
I've been reading The 1-Page Marketing by Allan Dib. I like the book so far because it's very direct and doesn't have a lot of cruft. Best of luck to you!
Terrific! I'll check it out.
It’s okay if you’re not a marketer. We’re not born with all the knowledge either. Either you can partner up with one, or just wear the hat yourself, and figure it out. It’s not rocket science.
As with most things in my project, I'm doing the "slow and steady" approach. But I'll keep at it.
Had this exact problem when I was building out my app.
Luckily, I had started building a landing page and a Twitter audience during time to share my journey and it helped tremendously with user acquisition, but I am definitely still a noob marketer.
Only just now getting into ads and man, there is so much more to learn.
One thing I could share with you that I've heard is helpful. Master one medium first then progress to others.
That's good advice! I'm nervous about ads, mostly because I have a limited budget and want to see some user engagement before trying to tap new streams.