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Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

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Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#4
I was there last night. Rand is a supremely talented presenter and did a great job of explaining how early stage startups can gain traction through organic (inbound) marketing.

He explained the basic concepts of online marketing and the basics of marketing strategy in a supremely succinct and inspiring way. It was golden! It was entertaining! Highly recommended!

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#5
When asked about paid marketing. Starts around 74:30

"Holy crazy crap does retargeting work."

"If you do great inbound, the first money you should spend should be on retargeting... people that were sort of interested but left"

"...uses a company called has offers in Seattle - they've been very effective for us".

"would not recommend raw display. It will perform poorly for you."

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#7
What a great speaker Rand is. Definitely makes me interested in the service. Loved the examples of real marketing such as urbnspoon, dropbox, seomoz, and simply hired.

Also, he gave 2 months of his svc away for free for the talk: http://www.seomoz.org/partners/hackers - Found this in the hackers and founders site.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#9
post #5

When asked about paid marketing. Starts around 74:30 "Holy crazy crap does retargeting work." "If you do great inbound, the first money you should spend should be on retargeting... people that were sort of interested but left" "...uses a company called has offers in Seattle - they've been very effective for us". "would not recommend raw display. It will perform poorly for you."

I'm part of a stealth startup that's handling retargeting for about 30 startups now and I can confirm that it is indeed a brutally effective method for acquiring users. We're seeing that on average, retargeted ads perform about 350% better than any other kind of targeted ad. It seems a little crazy until you recalibrate your understanding of what's happening. Instead of trying to push new information on a user (which no one likes), with retargeting, you're _pulling_ people back to something they've already expressed an interest in. It works marvelously.

Example: We're running retargeting for an SaaS startup that gets a lot of airtime on HN, and they're snagging new users at less than $2/head. Once these folks get on board, they spend on average $40/year on the service. Our little team had a "f___ yeah" moment after the 4th day or so when we saw how well it was working. We're now hustling to hire folks to meet the demand coming from word of mouth.

If any HNers on here want to ad retargeting to their startup, web app, side project, mobile app landing page, or whatever the heck you're building, hit me up at the e-mail address in my profile.

We're still building out our actual product so startups and technical people make for the best customers. Less explaining, more appreciation for results, more understanding when we goof up.

Re: Rand Fishkin: Inbound Marketing for Startups

#10

I was there last night. Rand is a supremely talented presenter and did a great job of explaining how early stage startups can gain traction through organic (inbound) marketing. He explained the basic concepts of online marketing and the basics of marketing strategy in a supremely succinct and inspiring way. It was golden! It was entertaining! Highly recommended!

I was there and 100% agree on everything you said.
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