I’m often asked how to make marketing without money after my talks. Most of marketers would probably start with a content strategy, social media strategy, growth hacking and all other buzzwords. In reality they end up with Facebook group, without any clear reason and once a month wrote a blog post with no visitors. Let me tell you what I consider to be a good marketing and feel free to take some inspiration for your business.
Engineering as Marketing
All that we tried at Nicereply was waste of money. Several times we tried adwords, but without any reasonable ROI. We paid for PR article and bought ads in several app stores. What you really need to do with your marketing is to find your target group. Target group for Nicereply were users of help desk systems. Thus we made plugins for help desk systems. They put us on their websites, tweeted about us and wrote blog posts about our integration. This was so far the only relevant marketing channel which provides us paying customers only with development costs. Perfect.
But following two examples are even better. Both represents my vision of content strategy and creative marketing.
$ 100k Startup Journey
Groove is a simple help desk system, which are billion more out there you may say, but wait. Groove blog stands out for perfect content strategy to me. That guy set a goal of $ 100k in monthly recurring revenue and decided to map this journey. He write about what he did to reach that goal, what works and what not. He touched many people who are reading his posts and inspires them. Blog has a perfect progress bar. At the end he reached his goal, mainly thanks to his blog, and he stretched his goal to $ 500k in MRR. This blog is worth to be followed. Only this blog itself will teach you a lot about marketing.
The art of Demo at Baremetrics
Finally my favourite one. Baremetrics will show you all important stats about your business, if you are using Stripe system. Your monthly recurring revenue, annual run rate, average revenue per user, churn rate… and how they make marketing? They publish all those data about their business. The demo at Baremetrics home page are their real business data. What is important that they offer same to their clients. When Buffer (widely known open company) publish their data using Baremetrics, it gains a huge attraction.
I’m sure that you’re impatient to visit Baremetrics to see those startups revenues and number of customers, right? Or you straight left this post to read Groove blog to see how they get to those $100k. Now you see – this is marketing: cause such feelings in people.
This post was originally written by our advisor Michal Truban, founder of Black Slide.