Reflecting on all of my early stage marketing attempts to date (and how tiktok generates me leads).

Hey everybody, this is my first time posting here! I’m going to talk about what I’ve learned so far regarding my marketing attempts, how I’ve been able to drive 800 users to my website this month, and how I have started seeing my website rank on search. I know there’s a lot of things I can do better, and I’m learning as I go.

This write-up is for the person who is thinking of, or, has just launched a side project that needs to gain page visitors (and leads). Below, I’ll be breaking down mistakes and small wins I’ve seen so far with my scrappy marketing techniques. I also have a substack linked at the bottom of my page that includes relevant diagrams/screenshots.

A bit of context: I'm building a web app to help resellers list their items to multiple marketplaces alongside getting visually-friendly analytics.

Let’s talk about what didn’t work first:

1. Facebook Ads:

The reason why they didn’t work for me is that I couldn’t "niche” down enough. I tried targeting people interested in Mercari, Poshmark, ThredUp, and other niches, but the problem was, I couldn’t specifically target resellers on these platforms.

I tried searching “resellers, cross-listing, eBay seller etc” on the audience insights tool provided by Facebook, but there were no relevant keywords. The best audience I could find were people who liked the Mercari/eBay/ThredUp Facebook Page. However, the issue is the fact that there are more buyers than there are sellers on these platforms, so I had possibly a 20% chance of even reaching them on this interest.

If I could post a screenshot here I would but, but I paid 1 Lead for $33 - this was not sustainable.

I spent up to $5 per day for about two weeks and followed the Miles Beckler strategy, which I think is a great resource to understand Facebook Ads if you’re interested.

This was my first failed ad channel - I couldn’t nail my audience targeting, had an ineffective copy and content, had little ad spend and got a very high link click cost.

2. Fiverr:

So one of the earlier things I’ve tried was putting up a simple Fiverr ad. This was never meant to be my main source of traffic, and I didn’t really expect anything out of it. Basically, what I did was undercut the price that was typically listed (anywhere from $15-$20) of people advertising their gigs (ie I will cross-list your items to eBay and Etsy). I did this because a lot of people filter by price so people can see my gig.

Once I did that, I made a gig that basically said that I would cross-list their items through Spred, hoping that their curiosity would take over, and that the buyer would head on to my site.

Not gonna lie, this worked a couple of times, and some people have even paid me.

However, just because it only happened two times doesn’t mean that this channel has been amazing or “game-changing” for generating and getting traffic.

If you’re building software tho, and you find that there’s a manual task that you’re trying to automate through SaaS (software as a service), it might be cool to just put up a gig for fun.

I guess saying that Fiverr didn’t work is the right way to put it, but with such minimal results, I can’t say it did work if that makes sense?

3. Instagram DM Campaign:

Back in February of 2020, and since Jan - April 2020, I was doing an accounting internship at EY.

I had to prioritize my time, and I knew that I had to start driving traffic and building relationships with early adopters.

So I tried a strategy where I was sliding in the DM’s, but a bit differently. Instead of buying one of those auto follow/dm bots, I hired a VA off of Upwork to do a lot of repetitive tasks, with a slight personalization.

Basically tho, all I did was provide a framework to have the VA complete these repetitive, documented actions:

1. VA follows accounts in my niche.
2. VA sends a video of me welcoming them to my account and sends a script to ask them if they’re interested in Spred, depending on the type of reseller. For example, if it was someone who had 10k+ followers, full time, had a social presence, we would ask to do written interviews to collaborate.
3. Depending on the response, I would check the DM’s daily and respond from there with details, ask for their email, etc.
4. At one point, my account got banned from following people, so during that week we just didn’t do anything on it.

I paid $310 in total to the VA over a span of approximately a month. From that, I got 67 email subscribers. That’s around $5 to get an email. Not bad, but I needed to find something scrappier, cheaper, and easier.

Google Ads:

So, I actually implemented Google Ads on May 6th, and it’s pretty cool to see how many clicks I’ve already gotten. Right now, my budget is $8 a day with a max $240 spend a month. I also redeemed a google ads coupon that matches up to $150, so I thought it would be worth experimenting with.

Here are my stats:
108 Clicks
$90 Spent
9 Signups (It takes some time for Google Analytics to register this data). Proof can be found here if you’re interested.
Therefore, $10 CAC.

This has to either do with…

My targeted keywords are off (which I don’t think they are) or

My landing page sucks.

I think it’s number 2 - so I’ll be using Google Optimize to run some A/B tests soon and see what’s up.

What’s worked (kinda):

TweetDeck:

Tweetdeck is the best free tool to understand what’s currently happening on Twitter in your niche. It helps you prospect and allows you to add value to conversations.

When I can chip in, whether it’s in an educational, or entertaining way, I’ll do it. I also just started posting content on Twitter with memes, so we’ll see where it ends up. At the moment, there hasn’t been much traction.

Especially in my demographic as a uni student, Twitter isn’t used much. But again, depending on your niche, you should check out Twitter as an organic method of growing relationships! It never hurts.

Organic Instagram Content:

I also post organic content on Instagram, and it does pretty well. I think the thing with Instagram is that “making it” or becoming a large page is tougher now with so much saturation and competition.

The one that I have been doing is posting entertaining content towards my niche, and also branding myself a bit differently by following back people who follow me, and people who have signed up for Spred.

For content, I source user-generated content on Instagram/Reddit etc, give credit, and re-post it. Although I would like to make native content, I have just been prioritizing a lot of other things (like product development, recruiting, etc).

Reddit Ads:

I was able to get 6 conversions off of Reddit Ads. Not bad, which is about $6 per email. You can see that Reddit costs more than the IG DM campaign, but the thing is with IG I sent the link manually after a person on IG responded. I’m accounting for time here, and all in all, the IG DM campaign became more costly just because I had to check my messages, send appropriate responses, filter, etc.

Reddit was one ad, conversion, and boom. I didn’t need to implement a high touch system.

I know for a fact that my LTV (lifetime value) will be larger than $6 in the future, so depending on the ad fatigue, this can be a potential channel to scale and explore. I won’t go too much into this, but the reason why I believe it’s better than Facebook ADs is that I was able to target subreddits that were very relevant to my business, such as r/flipping - which is a community of resellers on Reddit.

Personal Facebook Profile:

This is by far the best channel I’ve had so far, and it’s all because of one thing - people buy from people and not companies.

Once you know this, I believe that marketing, at its core, is simple. I also believe that it determines everything else when it comes to communicating - how you email, tweet, post content, respond, etc.

As you can see, this is not a business, and you could do this with your own personal account that you already have. Now, once you make a profile, here’s what you have to do next…

Join as many Facebook groups in your niche as possible. For example, I joined “Poshmark Sellers U.S.A”, “Etsy Sellers”, etc.

Start engaging and building relationships with these people. Answer questions when you can, provide relevant links, and if you can’t do any of those, just like and react to their posts. Understand that relationships take time.

Whenever there’s a person who’s asking for your service, recommendations, etc, personally message (do not add your service in the comments, because that’s spam) the user who made the post and the people who have commented.

In terms of best practices, what I would suggest is spend 30 minutes every day at the end of work to prospect and build social equity on this platform. I’m also going to explore with some posts on my page and see if anything happens from there.

Personally, I don’t think I’m going to even try publishing as a Facebook Page, just because the reach is so low. With a personal profile, I think that’s completely different.

Tiktok:

Tiktok’s been a game-changer in the past year. The organic reach on this app is something I’ve never seen before, other than Vine, or IG in its early days. Take advantage of this while it lasts. You might be thinking, “Tiktok is only good for consumer-facing brands”, but let’s explore some potential ways you can use Tiktok to still drive brand equity and potentially bottom-line revenue, even if you’re B2B, like Spred.

Note*: Resellers are my main target market.

Not that there aren’t any resellers on TikTok (because there are many), but I decided to switch up my content on this platform that’s geared towards aspiring youth entrepreneurs, and here’s my view:

If it’s relevant to what/who you want to be in the future, it never hurts to build social and brand equity. Look at Gary Vee as a great example - you probably won’t ever hire his marketing company (which might be his main source of income), but, he still provides valuable content to marketers, entrepreneurs, and youth.

And the question is - why does he produce this content?

Because it builds social and brand equity. It makes him a household name. It builds trust.

If you’re a CMO for a Fortune 500 company, and you’re deciding which marketing agency to choose from, there could be a high chance that you would pick Vayner Media for the core reason that your wife, kids, and uncle know about Gary.

If you want, the opportunity is there. Many of my vids have hit over 150k + views.

Conclusion:

So, I’ve tried multiple things over the past.

Here’s what didn’t work:

• FB Ads
• Fiverr
• IG DM’s with a VA
• Google Ads (need to try different copy, but the potential is there).

Here’s what’s kind of working:

• TweetDeck
• Instagram - Native Content
• Reddit ADs
• & a Personal Facebook Profile
• TikTok

Hope this helps! Would love to hear what you all think, and I post at random times here: https://kaito.substack.com/p/scrappy-wacky-early-stage-marketing