TELL HN: Lessons learned B2B Advertisement
Then I went on to try a couple of things, and there are some lessons learned. I want to share it with the rest of the community.
1) Forums: Signed up to a series of forums for Accountants and Dentists and posted a couple of messages. Traffic generated was < 20 visitors over 3 weeks.
2)Facebook Ads: Thanks to a Facebook sales exec who saw my startup and was interested I got some traction and ended up generating 100 clicks with about 50,000 impressions which is not too bad, but generated no sign ups.
3) Direct Email Marketing: Contacted a sample of 100 businesses who are potential clients in different industries: doctors, accountants, dentists and cleaning services. Zero replies.
4) Contacted a specific newsletter for CPAs however the advertising costs are well over $10K. Didn't try.
5) Contacted a local radio and was asked for $10K budget for 10 airings of the ad + $750 ad production fee; off the table.
6) Directly contacted my own circle of professionals in the health space with one sign up.
7) Google Ads: Does generate some traffic but the visitor pattern on the site suggests that it's my potential customers' customers who are coming to my site not my potential customers. Still ongoing.
8) Currently In Progress: Bought special purpose vertically focused domains such as appointmentForDentist.com, etc and managed to show up on the first page of Google Search. Some traffic being generated but too early to tell if there will be any sign ups.
9) Currently In Progress: Printed out brochures with information on the service and will use snail mail to send it out to potential list of customers.
10) Next: Will show up at local business events and try to market the product personally.
In order not to spoil the post I did not give out the name of my startup, if you made it thus far here you go: smartpointment.com