Would you think of marketing differently if you never launched?
Something I’ve been thinking about a while is how indie hackers can create a better and more sustainable marketing strategy for their products.
All too often I see people launch and the launch tends to flop, or sometimes it can do well, but the actual results are not great and temporary. @alexhillman encourages people not to do Product Hunt type launches in this post.
I’ve seen many posts here on IH with people who have launched and then don’t know what to do next. Their whole marketing strategy has consisted of relying on a product launch. And when that doesn’t work out they get stuck in what to do next.
At the same time, some product launches do well, so I’m not really saying you should exclude them, but this over reliance on launches feels wrong.
I like the milestones at IH (some obvious bias there) because it encourages everyone to share all the little bits of progress that they make. Starting from the idea, through to creating the product to getting their first customer or their first million. There is so much value in seeing what people are actually achieving and how they are doing it.
@alexhillman and @amyhoy talk a lot about participating in communities to build up your reputation.
My approach has often been to just start my own community.
@adamWaltham focuses on being helpful in everything he does
What else is there?
Can we come up with a nice list of approaches indie hackers should be doing to help market and grow their business?
#ask-ih
FWIW, I don't think launches are wrong or bad.
I think the problem is that people tend to treat launches as an event tied to something being new, when in reality, every day your "thing" is new to somebody.
Even if you're getting traffic from ads or SEO, once they discover or are reminded that you exist, each new lead needs to go through the same basic steps:
Technically, a successful launch "event" accomplishes all of these things. But instead of thinking about how to get 10s or 100s or thousands of people to go through these steps synchronously (which is how most launch events work), think about how you can take people through these steps starting the day they land on your site.
Been thinking more and more about this post, my comment, and expanding my thoughts. They're still work in progress, but getting clearer: https://stackingthebricks.com/how-often-to-launch/
I started off writing a much longer comment, but this isn't the right format for it.
So, the short version...
If you're struggling with marketing or what to do next, you simply don't understand your customers/audience well enough.
It isn't a marketing problem. It isn't a business problem. It's a 'you not spending enough time really understanding your customers' problem.
When you really understand your audience, every single next step is obvious. Marketing channels? Obvious. The language to use to convince people to buy? Obvious.
You don't need to be creative. You don't need to be good at marketing. You just need to genuinely care about the people you want to help. And listen to them.
So go listen. Pick up the phone. Take a potential customer out for a coffee. Sell to them in person. Let them help you.
Building a business is challenging enough as it is. Don't play it on hard mode by accident.
Yes good point, perhaps I should avoid using the 'marketing' word.
And really what you say above is what I've done for Ministry of Testing - I cared and got to know them all so well that it was obvious (to me) what needed doing.
I'd love to get better at trying to explain this stuff better :)
Same!
Why do you say that?
Great advice Louis
I don't really like this argument, to be honest. There are many different marketing channels, and for people with no prior marketing background it is easy and sensible that they may be confused or not know what to do next.
The book Traction covers a different attitude around marketing, that it should be almost entirely experimental. Choose the best 5 options out of the 19 exhaustive options. Try each one. Check results. I'm not saying the book is right, but there are different paradigms out there so absolute language is not necessary.
Understanding the problem well doesn't really tell you how to get your product in front of everyone, and I think it's unfair to imply that if someone is having any trouble with marketing then they must not "genuinely care" or "listen to their customers".
Really thoughtful reply, thanks.
I don't disagree. And the Traction approach you mention can definitely work. It's just a lot of extra work to go about testing all of those channels, when you could just ask your audience instead.
Kind of like buying your girlfriend 5 birthday presents and returning the 4 of them she doesn't like so much, when you could just have asked her what she'd like in the first place.
I talk quite a lot about how understanding the problem is a disease that needs to disappear, fast.
You're absolutely right, it won't help you understand how to get your product in front of everyone.
That's why you should focus on the customer, their pain, and their goals instead.
Really, really understanding your customer, their pain and their goals will help you understand how to get your product in front of the right people.
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That's taking my words out of context slightly.
I was replying to Rosie's original post about marketing strategy. High level stuff.
Obviously there are people out there who have genuine marketing problems. Who don't know how to use a computer, for example. Understanding their customers better won't help with that.
I understand why it's not a popular opinion. But I spend quite a bit of time talking to founders here and elsewhere, and - in my opinion - most of us don't care about or listen to our customers enough.
Participating in communities, being helpful, networking... it definitely helps a lot.
But the way I see it, the question every website owner should ask himself is: how can I generate a constant flow of new visitors potentially interested in my product every single day?
And in my experience the answer is almost always the same: content marketing distributed through search and social.
Take a successful website and use an external tool to see where its traffic come from.
AdEspresso? Allbirds? Excluding direct, more than 50% of their traffic is a combination of search+social (and that means Google and Facebook).
So what should an Indie Hacker do? Learn how to use Google and Facebook to drive traffic. Become good at SEO and FB Ads and leverage them to get leads.
I know it's not easy. That's why I'm working on a marketing crash course 😀
Part 1 is going to be all about SEO.
Thanks Andrea. I like how you put it.
Do you think that FB ads can be useful for my marketing site? I'm tempted just to run some ads to my articles in the hope of boosting emails subs?
Or do you think I'd better of pulling together into a free eBook, "30 Real World Marketing Strategies" and going that way?
Fb Ads low hanging fruit is retargeting. I would start retargeting past visitors that read one or more of your articles to make them subscribe to your list. They already know you so it should work well.
Thanks Andrea. Makes perfect sense :)