The Carrot App Marketing Successes & Failures
Carrot Marketing Strategies
The first fifty users were directly a result of simple tactics. I asked all my friends and family to check it out. I posted it on all the major social media pages and platforms. I also spent a decent amount of time sending direct messages and emails to people who expressed interest in a dividend tracking app. The first few users are always going to be the toughest, so you have to be a bit creative in how you find them.
To start getting users to the platform, we decided to join dividend related Facebook pages. Facebook pages we saw had a very active community; we could add value to these pages with our platform as many investors on Facebook were looking for dividend portfolio trackers. We were able to provide a service to investors that would ease their journey from excel sheets to automated dashboards that had to most recent price data.
Our Blogging Strategy
The first blog post that we showcased on Carrot was the List of Dividend Aristocrats Before & After Covid-19. At the time the article was posted, we saw interest in COVID-19 related stocks. Thus, we tried to grab a reader's attention by integrating a topic that resonated with many users. Tracking the progress of the article:
- Time Spent 2 hours
- Readers Gained: 159
- Sign Ups: 3
- Revenue: $0
This was an essential step in our plan as Facebook investors got acquainted with our platform and would recognize upcoming articles through Carrot. We decided to continue this blog posting journey to see the benefits of the blog on Facebook pages.
Our second article, Safe Dividend Stocks in the Age of COVID, utilized the same marketing tactics. We noticed that Coca-Cola was getting attention, so we decided to write about them and other relevant dividend stocks.
- Time Spent: 2 hours
- Readers:189
- Sign Ups: 3
- Revenue: $0
The first two articles were experiments on how useful blog posts on Facebook pages were, and we had delightful results. In the next round of articles, we decided to try something different.
Utilizing Google’s search console, we noticed that we were getting a few impressions for the search “how safe is the Clorox dividend,” even though we had no blog post about them. This was our next target. For this article, we decided to do a very in-depth analysis of Clorox, most of the other articles were brief reads, but we wanted to use the SWOT analysis that is practiced on Wall Street.
- Time Spent: 8 hours
- Readers: 127
- Sign Ups: 3
- Revenue: $4/mo
We did notice that this post, for the first time, had significantly fewer interactions from the Facebook dividend community. Although it had a lot less engagement, it did help us tremendously in SEO. We made it to the front page of Google when someone searched the phrase “how safe is the Clorox dividend,” and that resulted in a significant increase in our google search console impression. Although it wasn’t the highest performing article in the short run, in the long term, it benefited us a lot.
Following our Clorox experiment, we moved on to focus on popular Facebook investor topics. In the next article, we decided to write about exchange-traded funds, which many Facebook users had questions about. The title Top 4 Dividend ETFs was concise and grabbed the attention of many people.
One aspect that we changed was experimenting with the sign-up box at the bottom of the article. Usually, at the bottom of the article, we had a banner that read “Reach Your Dividend Goal,” but for the ETF article, we changed it to “Want more news like this? Sign up below”. Our theory is that people were not incentivized to explore our website, but instead, they viewed it as any other newsletter.
Time Spent: 3 hours
Readers: 260
Sign Ups: 0
Revenue: $0
Digital Tool Strategy
The same week that we rolled out the ETF article, Ricardo launched the dividend calculator tool and shared it on Facebook pages. This tool had tremendous success the day it was launched.
- Time Spent: 7 hours
- Readers: 280
- Sign Ups:7
- Revenue: 0
The engagement on Facebook was splendid. People seemed to love the calculator and provided their feedback on what we could do to improve it. It seemed as though free tools brought more traffic and users than our blog posts, which was a remarkable experiment to roll out. Although we noticed that free tools had a better engagement and sign up rates, we are still rolling out articles on a bi-weekly basis to provide our users as much value as possible.
Partnership Strategy
The next significant milestone that we achieved was an interview with Love-Startups. We stumbled upon Love-Startups through Reddit, and although the posts were from several years ago, we decided to contact the owner and see if he would be willing to showcase us on his website. It worked! Within a week and a half, the Carrot interview was front page on his website, and it went better than anyone could’ve expected.
- Time Spent: About 4 days
- Readers: 260
- Sign Ups: 15
- Revenue: $36/year
This brought to our attention the power of collaboration. Collaboration is vital in early-stage startups, and now we are in the stages of securing more partnerships that can benefit not only us but the party we are working with. Everyone that has worked in a startup or is thinking of creating one knows how challenging it is to gain a following. Partnerships allow everyone to benefit from them.
Final Analysis
Experimenting with Facebook groups proved to be worthy of our time and effort. The next phase of our marketing included paid ads. In the beginning, we did not want to utilize paid ads as Facebook groups gave us steady traffic, and users sign ups. We ran two ad campaigns, one through Facebook and the other through Google. The Google campaign did not show any significant increase in traffic nor engagement in the ad.
Attempting to convert more users, A/B marketing strategies were involved but those proved to be ineffective. Low engagement with only one user signing up showed that Google ads were not worthwhile at this stage. To further demonstrate our theory, the Clorox post was boosted using Facebook ads. Although it had more engagement and traffic than the Google ad when it came down to the cost of user acquisition, it didn’t make sense. Reverting back to our Facebook blogs marketing strategy up to this day has proven to be more effective than paying for ads.
Going forward we aim to focus on organic content (blogs, and free tools) to promote our app. Just like our investing strategy, we have long-term goals of building out this platform and want to implement long-term strategies as a result. While blogging and free tools may not be the sexiest growth strategies, they have undeniably proven to be the most reliable. Our hope is to build a vast ecosystem of content that can cater to anyone in the dividend investing space, young, old, new, or professional. Once we build that body of content that provides value to investors, the rest will take care of itself.
Carrot: https://www.thecarrot.app
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thecarrotapp/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/thecarrot_app
Thanks for such a detailed walk through! Question: Can you elaborate a bit more on your blogging / facebook strategy? Did you only share the posts onto your own FB page? Or into the various FB groups that you joined? Thank you!
Our own FB page gave us practically no new users, largely because when we started the page we didn't have a big network of friends that we could invite to like it. The best results were achieved from (active) FB groups. We found pretty much every FB group that dealt with dividends, joined them, and began promoting there. The most important thing is to not spam these groups (there's already enough of that). Instead of asking for people to sign up we instead chose to write blog posts and then put a sign up link at the bottom of those posts. Much friendlier approach and people don't feel like they're being sold to.