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Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

#11

Post by probst »

Festro wrote: post #9
probst wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for your thorough reply! I think we should give it another go and be more restrictive in targeting! Speaking of paid ads: we tried google, bing, LinkedIn in the past. Do you have a preferred place that you recommend that you have seen better performance at than other places?

Google Ads at first for sure. Their search monopoly just means it's the best place for ads on a limited budget. Moving to Bing is worthwhile once you've started to see efficiency drop off on Google. LinkedIn is very expensive and really only worth it for highly targeted ads. Bing and LinkedIn have a slight advantage because Microsoft has all the job title/industry data from LinkedIn for its targeting options, but it…

Awesome, thank you!

Re: Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

#12

Post by probst »

3dsnano wrote: post #8
fjab wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are good hints that have worked for us as well. > whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key I feel this is true more now than it has ever been! Ideas used to be cheap, execution the bottleneck. Now execution (of product development) has sped up so much that distribution is the bottleneck.

agree with the premise here (distribution is hard; get users or die) BUT there's no better marketing than a GOOD product that brings people real VALUE get a 1000 users to your site → 1% conversion → 10 users. if those 10 users have a shitty experience because the product SUCKS, then all of that effort getting them there was wasted. the alternative is making a GOOD product that people actually WANT to use and can get…

I'm all for word of mouth and things radiating out, but doesn't that need some viral factor of sorts that makes the product one that's shareable? We have customers raving about our product actually, and saying they would be incredibly sad should it go away, but are struggling to leverage that into further sales...

Affiliate marketing _does_ work to an extent, and is a kind of rideable wave I suppose?

Do you have concrete examples?

Re: Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

#13

Post by 35mm »

You already know what works: organic forum engagement gives you excellent conversions.

The problem is the hit-or-miss part. That's the actual constraint to solve.

Pick the two or three forums where your ideal customers actively ask questions about the problem your product solves, not where founders hang out.

Spend 20 minutes a day answering those questions thoroughly before mentioning what you build.

This builds trust and relevance. The conversion quality difference you see between paid ads and forums tells you where to focus.

I've also found that forums (in my case private FB groups) are the best source of leads, so I built an app (GTM Intel) to check them frequently and give me a daily list of leads to respond to.

P.S This is very meta / ouroboros but your post is actually one of the ones it found for me today!

Re: Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

#14

Post by probst »

35mm wrote: post #13

You already know what works: organic forum engagement gives you excellent conversions. The problem is the hit-or-miss part. That's the actual constraint to solve. Pick the two or three forums where your ideal customers actively ask questions about the problem your product solves, not where founders hang out. Spend 20 minutes a day answering those questions thoroughly before mentioning what you build. This builds trus…

Heh, nice app! I'll check it out!
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