Software Challenge Update: Marketing Your Service
I’m getting there with the software challenge.
- I’ve created the service.
- I have today bought the website for it.
- I’ve written a sales-page & business plan for it
- I’m currently using it to see what I can improve upon and bugs and the like
In short, getting it out before January ends doesn’t seem unrealistic any more.
But there’s a kicker in that last sentence: Getting the business “out there.”
Marketing is a make-or-break deal for any venture, whether it’s a multi-million dollar venture or a probably-pocket-money thing like I plan.
Here’s my three-step plan as it stands:
Start Small With People Who Will Want To Use Your Service
I’m going to send out emails to some people in the next couple of weeks. I’ve pretty much worked out who I’m going to ask – and it’ll be based on the fact that they could use the service and enjoy it.
Now, this is going to come with a caveat: whether it’s early access, a free review copy or something else… you need to frame this as a benefit to them. As such, you can then freely ask for testimonials and maybe promotion as well in return for early access/free access/whatever.
Social proof is important and getting reviews is always good.
Also, these people are bug testers. I don’t mean that you should pull a Microsoft and neglect to do any beta-testing, instead relying o your customers, but there are bound to be blind spots that you won’t have seen or issues with the look, feel, or function of your service.
The Easy Way To Market: Get People To Do It For You
I’ve never run an affiliate program before. When it comes to selling books, the margins are too low to realistically make it worth doing for a good affiliate. (Affiliates tend not to work for the $0.9 pay-outs.) For freelance work, it’s never been appropriate for me to have an affiliate program either.
But I’m going to try and run one for this software thing I have going on. That’s because:
- It’s relevant
- The margins are there
- I know people interested in the service also tend to be interested in affiliate marketing
There’s also the added benefit that – no matter how good you are as a salesman – you can’t do a better job than hundreds of salesmen.
Affiliate programs are fantastic marketing tools, but they add other dimensions (like paying people and dealing with affiliates… that’s a topic for another day.)
Step Three: Paid Advertising
Once I’ve set up the other two, which are relatively small-scale things for now, I’m going to use the software idea to test out something else I need to learn: Paid advertising.
You might remember a while back I wrote a few articles about affiliate marketing and driving paid traffic.
It’s all interesting and it’s obviously something I need to get into to push everything to the next level, but like a dog chasing cars I got distracted and then had other stuff to do. There’s also that and the risk of losing money, which is always daunting.
That said if you’re starting a software-as-a-service business, then you have a lot more to gain by doing paid advertising: let’s say you’ve got recurring revenue (say you charge $10 a month) ; you can afford to spend quite a bit because over the course of a customer’s lifetime they’ll earn back the cost to acquire them. This is more the case than with a single product sale.
With a recurring revenue model, you might balk at spending $100 to get a customer, but the math checks out providing you deliver a service that’ll keep them a customer for years.
Also, start with something easy and hyper-targeted, and you’ll probably lose less money but still get some customers.
(Again, more on this later… I’m not an expert and it’s all just thoughts buzzing around in my head at the moment.)
What Am I NOT Doing? (But You Could)
That’s the three-pronged approach I plan to take.
Before we wrap up the article though, I thought I’d talk about what I’m not doing.
I’m not taking a content-based approach to the marketing of this service.
You can and it’s what I do most of the time – writing high quality content that gets shared around – but this time I’m going to push myself away from the comfort zone and force myself to test different things.
The reason I’m doing that isn’t a quest of self-discovery: It’s that the two major channels above (affiliates, paid advertising) are scalable without the time-commitment steadily escalating.
I mean, there’s obviously a learning curve which will take a lot of time. Also, managing paid ads will take time. But if you can buy a hundred visitors, you can repeat the same process to buy a million visitors. You can’t say that about content: You can’t write one article and repeat the process endlessly.
Final Thoughts
This is more a random collection of thoughts than it is a coherent article. As always though, I hope there are enough little ideas to help some people out.
What’s good about this topic is that every little bit of it is something I can expand upon in future updates.
To recap, here’s my intended three stage process for marketing my new software-service business idea:
- Get in touch with a few people who are interested in the service, get them on board
- Expand that into an affiliate program
- Learn about paid advertising and use the software/service to get good at using paid adverts
That about wraps it up.
Enjoy your weekend, everyone.