I’ve been fortunate enough to be a part of some amazing companies such as Facebook, Mint and now AppSumo.com (including our latest products: Monthly1k.com and SumoMe.com).
Collectively, these companies have reached nearly 1.5 billion people, and each has taught me many marketing methods that are extremely effective.
Here are the 10 most important marketing lessons I’ve learned along the way.
Lesson 1: Incentivize your audience (with something they want)
It’s not just any incentive that gets the job done. You should think in terms of offering the right kind of targeted promotions, partnerships or special access. Here’s what I mean:
Mint: Before Mint launched, we already had more traffic than all of our competitors (e.g. Wesabe or Quicken Online). We accomplished this by encouraging anyone who wanted early access to Mint to add a badge to their blog or website that said, “I want Mint,” or “My money’s on Mint.”
The result? Hundreds of bloggers in the personal finance space began to promote Mint. And because it was (and is) a great product, once they got access, they wrote positive reviews. Their readers were already curious about the product because they had seen the Mint badge and the branding.
AppSumo: At AppSumo we’re always doing giveaways. Our first giveaway (or contest) was gigantic. Anyone could submit their email address to enter to win one of 10 free DropBox Pro for Life accounts. If someone shared the giveaway and recruited friends, they got additional entries (and a greater chance to win).
By the end of the promotion, we had more than 50,000 email signups. Best of all, because this was before everyone knew about DropBox, the giveaway targeted the kind of customers that love AppSumo and the products we promote.
To incentivize your audience the same way, try:
Creating a way to give special access or a special giveaway to those who share your product/service.
Making sure people know what they get (or might get) and emphasize the value/scarcity.
Finding another business to do cross-promotions with — this way you both get new exposure.
Lesson 2: Sponsor small neighbours
Often, the best sites are the up-and-comers; the sites that don’t even have any sponsors yet. You get a better relationship with the site owner and usually a quicker response time.
Mint: At the beginning we avoided large sites like TechCrunch and Lifehacker. Instead, we sponsored small personal finance blogs like Bargaineering and tech startup sites like Paul Stamatiou. I was already reading a number of these sites, and we also used Technorati as a resource to find more.
With Paul, we gave him early access to the product and he then shared his feedback publicly with his readers. (Read Paul’s first impressions of Mint here.)
AppSumo: We sponsored Tim Ferriss’ site fourhourworkweek.com and Andrew Chen’s blog. Again these guys had/have readers that we knew (and they knew) would benefit from what was being offered. Another great site we’ve been featured on is Pat Flynn’s Smart Passive Income. Most people in Silicon Valley have never heard of Pat, but his audience loves him. Our awareness on his blog has been awesome. (Thanks Pat!)
To find the right, small neighbours for your site:
Use Buzzsumo (no official connection to AppSumo) to find what is resonating with your customers.
Contact the creators and/or influencers sharing your posts about sponsoring their site(s).
Survey current customers to find out what blogs and sites they visit in the niche you serve.
Even if you don’t know a popular blogger or any blogger in your niche,emailing someone cold with the subject line “Sponsoring your site” is one of the highest open/response emails I have ever sent. Try it and see what happens.
Lesson 3: Listen to your audience and educate them
(Yes, this is the basic argument for all of content marketing…)
Mint: A site like Mint has to ask for very personal, secure information—namely login information for banks and credit cards. At Mint, we created a blog to really educate people about personal finance. By providing useful, educational content, we created more trust with our audience so people were able to more easily trust us.
By delivering useful articles that taught people simple and actionable tips about their finance, people trusted Mint and shared the content. It was never about the business or why Mint was best—it was about the reader and what she needed to know to improve her finance habits.
The blog also generated a ton of traffic. In addition to articles with actionable tips, we interviewed personal finance writers, including our own team, about their own finances. Here is an early interview from our first engineer’s personal finances.
AppSumo: Last spring we launched a new product (my personal favorite): the How to Make $1,000 a Month business course. At launch we emailed our 750,000+ email list. We assumed that everyone would drop what they were doing, and it would sell like hot cakes. After emailing the list numerous times, they still didn’t buy. (Keep in mind we were emailing many of our most loyal customers—people who have bought from AppSumo 10+ times.)
Obviously this was a setback. So we started to listen to our audience’s fears and desires until we were able to more fully understand what held people back from buying. For example, we learned that people were most fearful that even if everyone else could start a business they couldn’t. Why? Not enough connections, or money, or time, or ideas….
To prove that anyone can start a business, I created a jerky business in less than 24 hours. (You can read the results here.) Instead of just telling someone about the course, I was able to show first hand how it was done. To date, that was the #1 most effective way of selling the course.
To educate your audience about your product:
Create content that helps people in their day-to-day lives. (At OkDork.com, we’ve focused on insanely actionable marketing content.)
If you already have a successful content marketing plan in place, listen to what your customers are saying and asking to better tailor the content to your loyal customers.
Start a drip or follow-up email sequence to educate new email subscribers about your product and company.
(For 17 more examples, check out Content Marketing Institute’s post about educating customers as a marketing strategy.)
Lesson 4: There’s massive opportunity in expanding internationally
There are 7 billion people worldwide. When you realize that America is less than 5 percent of the world population, you realize that the most powerful spending group is outside of this country.
Facebook: In 2013, Facebook reported that of its monthly active users, fewer than 20 percent come from the U.S. and Canada.
In response, Facebook localized the language for every country where the social network became available, propelling their international growth (this happened after I left). As a result, most of Facebook’s growth has been and will continue to be outside of the U.S.
AppSumo: We’ve spent over $2 million in Facebook advertising at AppSumo. The majority of profitable ad spends were to international audiences. As the startup and entrepreneurial communities in other countries grow, we anticipate that our international sales will continue to grow. (If you are just getting started with advertising, feel free to read this primer on spending your first $100 on Facebook ads.)
Get started on expanding internationally:
Find low barrier ways (like Facebook ads) to begin testing the international space.
Unless you have someone on your team who is fluent in another language, start in English-speaking countries initially.
Don’t wait, start testing. As you plan the next phase of your company, find ways to include international growth.
Lesson 5: Find your niche and validate early
Starting a business is all about validating an idea: Making sure the product solves people’s real problems.
Facebook: Zuckerberg began by creating a product that Harvard students could use and be fanatical about. Facebook then grew to other Ivy league schools and then college campuses. By limiting “The Facebook” to this group, he was able to create a product that college students loved and would talk about.
Mint: After surveying many potential verticals, we found that personal finance blog readers and early tech adopters were the hungriest for the product we were creating. We were able to validate the business with these groups and use them to drive the marketing.
AppSumo: Our niche was Silicon Valley tech startups. I started AppSumo because I needed and wanted the best tools possible to start my own business. Naturally, we focused almost exclusively on these startups and their employees. They hung out at Hacker News, so I spent time sponsoring sites that were commonly featured there.
Takeaways to validate your business:
Start with a TINY group of people to be your first customers. Don’t worry about scale, yet.
Focus on creating a product that a handful of people are truly fanatical about (like Buffer did with Hacker News.)
Don’t start a business or spend money on marketing until you’ve found your first customers. Create a product they love before anything else.
Lesson 6: Design matters
Once you know your product works, investing in design is insanely valuable.
Facebook: At many organizations, design is looked down on—a designer would never be brought in as a high level advisor. But one of Mark Zuckerberg’s most trusted advisors was lead Facebook designer Aaron Sittig. Mark was very focused on all things design—to the point where he would email at 3 a.m. to ask why a period was hyperlinked. (If you want to read more about my FB experience, grab my free book here.)
Mint: The amazing Jason Putorti, our designer, was one of the key reasons people trusted us with their personal finance information. He created amazing, original landing pages (see them here). Same with the domain name. We ended up spending nearly $250,000+ to buy Mint.com instead of MyMint.com. Why? Mint.com created instant credibility and more trust with our customers.
AppSumo: We spent nearly $15,000 designing and optimizing the How to make a $1,000 a month business landing page. This product has helped thousands of people and investing in it has produced great results for us as well. Sometimes we even joke internally that it’s all about the landing page.
Keep in mind that good design does not equal complexity. Peep Laja, in a post about growing a blog, pointed out:
In a study by Google in August of 2012, researchers found that not only will users judge websites as beautiful or not within 1/50th – 1/20th of a second, but also that “visually complex” websites are consistently rated as less beautiful than their simpler counterparts.
Quick tips on creating a design focus:
Create a checklist so your team always considers the design of a new page, product, or even stationary.
Consider how design influences the trustworthiness of your brand.
Don’t spend too much time or money on design until you have validated your idea and have a solid grasp on the needs of your customers.
Lesson 7: Repurpose your insider knowledge
What information and internal knowledge do you have that seems simple to you, but is valuable to others? That’s your insider knowledge, and it’s content marketing gold.
Facebook: Facebook previously had Pulse to show what’s latest on the site. Now it has Trending Topics, which tracks the most talked about topics and stories. Of course, they are taking a page from Twitter, which is one of the best examples of sharing insider knowledge. (For example, Twitter does a fantastic job of lettin