How to fail at marketing | Hacker News Reader

How to fail at marketing

blog.songz.me

23 pointssongzme29 comments

Do you have any metrics proving that these tactics don't work?

I mean, sure, I can see why you don't like them - but having a marketing tactic that is wildly unpopular and having a marketing tactic that doesn't work are not the same thing.

Case in point: a lot of people hate the "one wierd tip" ads that The Truth About Abs uses - but they seem to work pretty well - http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2011/11/02/the-truth-ab....

It's the marketing equivalent of meth. Does it sell? Yes. Should it? No.

It's also a symptom of "flash in the pan" products.

Can you expand more on the second point? I'm not sure I see a correlation between marketing techniques that were unpopular with one or another social group and being "flash in the pan".

Another example: long form sales pages. They've been discussed here on Hacker News before, and many people here hate them, but they do (apparently) convert very well.

I should have thought of that example.

Yes, long-form sales pages are an excellent example, which I can personally attest do indeed work.

Personally I feel that this marketing tactic is ingenuine, especially since these comparisons are coming from their own blog. Any observant reader would have noticed the obvious bias, which raises a question about the credibility of claims.

The one vs that comparisons will have been much more effective coming from a tech review site.

So the answer is no, you have no metrics. You have a vague belief without evidence.

you are absolutely right. I do not have metrics, and I do not intent to spend anymore time finding it. If you are able to get some supporting/contradicting evidence please feel free to share it.

not that it's the same at all, but your great question made me think of negative political ads. I can't find any research that clearly shows how effective negative campaigning is, but apparently >70% of ads this election season were negative or attack ads (http://mediaproject.wesleyan.edu/2012/05/02/jump-in-negativi...). That feels like a lot and I can't imagine that the smart people working on these campaigns would spend so much here if it didn't work as well as other tactics. I'd love to see metrics here too.

What we need here is a small campaign based on votes with an easily-polled, easily-targeted demographic, a few thousand dollars to spend on media buys, and no morals...

Totally agree. Writing "X vs Y" posts is a pretty common and effective inbound marketing tactic (it tends to be a common search query across buyers).

Here's an explanation of why and how it works: http://www.thesaleslion.com/blog-talk-about-competition/

When I'm comparing products or deciding to use a service i'll often search [product under consideration] vs [competitor]. Entering this conversation by titling your articles with relevant search terms seems smart to me.

Here's a link to the vsee vs skype article: http://vsee.com/skype

Here's an excerpt:

    So Why Skype?
    
    Of course, Skype is an excellent service if you're on a good network and don't have to be too concerned about data security. In addition, you can
    
    make phone calls to recipients on traditional telephone networks
    be part of the 663 million registered Skype users as of September 2011
    Skype from almost any platform: desktop (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux), mobile (iOS, Android, Symbian) and smart TVs

As you can see there's way more to it than "attacking competitors" they're legitimately explaining the differences between the services.

I think having those posts are important for SEO reasons (I often times look for comparisons by typing in Product X vs Product Y in Google - there's probably nobody )

The problem is just how they're framed, as there's a number more of them vs. general marketing and usability posts. If they hid them away a little better in the back (kind of how RingCentral does here - http://compare.ringcentral.com/) it wouldn't be as much of a problem.

"When running a startup or business, the goal is to create a better user experience and help advance technology.".

This. I love Apple commercials because they describe the good parts of their products, infomercial-style.

Pretty consistently, shitty products have shitty ads that try to slam their competitors and try to associate their brand with some sort of cheesy emotional stock footage, 1970's-bullshit-advertising-firm-style.

Thank you! Great minds think alike.

Personally I think VSee has great potential. I don't want their lousy marketing to get in the way of their product and have people associate their product with desperation and "cheesy emotional stock footage, 1970's-bullshit-advertising-firm-style".

Well said!

What about the I'm a Mac/I'm a PC commercials?

And the "original" 1984 Mac commercial, or most of the ads on this page: http://www.cultofmac.com/182021/the-top-10-worst-apple-ads-o...

I don't understand this at all. Apple is one of the companies that invented the 'Us vs. Them' marketing scheme with their 1984 commercial, Mac vs. PC etc.

This is true. I was trying to think of a commercial that highlights product design and features and this popped into my head. I had forgotten about their Mac vs. PC ads.

I remember lots of people dancing etc. Now even Microsoft is doing it - the product is a prop in a Busby Berkely number. So who's showing product features? Maybe for Apple, the flashy case IS the feature?

The first comment is actually from the CEO of VSee. It's worth reading.

True. Reproduced below for convenience. http://disq.us/8bqidj

Dear Song, this is milton, CEO of VSee. I actually agree with you - we suck at marketing - and I am personally to blame for this. I did my PhD at Stanford on human factors of virtual team work via video. I never did any company before - and I have struggled a lot over the years learning how to do it - and to not disappoint my team (who works long hours). from my psychology background - almost the entire company is focused on making a great product - we have a lot of designers and great engineers and this is our singular focus (as you will see from using vsee).

For marketing - I am a complete dummy here - and I wish I know the secrets to do it well. I asked Anne, our writer, to write the vsee vs. competitor X articles since I get asked how is vsee different from X about 10 times a day. I was tired of repeating myself - and doing a bad job at it. So I asked Anne to write it down for our users. I was also pleasantly surprised that it is actually working for inbound marketing - we are now the top page for many of our competitors - they spent money on marketing - we ride their coattail :)

We actually love competition, why we are the ONLY company who lists all our competitors on our home page (see the bottom link). From my PhD days working on vsee by myself - I love competition since it pushes me to make a better product - and everybody wins.

One decision I do regret is not spending more time learning about marketing over the last few years. I spent quite a bit of time traveling and working in refugee camps - from Syria on the Iraq border to Africa to South East Asia. We got pulled into these projects since vsee requires less than half the bandwidth of Skype and has fast screen share - so refugees is now one of our biggest user segments. I have been to Africa 5 times and MidEast 6 times in the last few years - and when not going there - I spent most of my weekends working with developing countries from Egypt to Nepal to Gabon to use vsee for their telemedicine to virtual team work. If I didn't go to these refugee camps - I would have more time to learn about marketing - and vsee would be in a better shape. And I can always go work w/ refugees After vsee is successful.

Thanks for the thoughtful critique, with warmest regards,

Milton CEO VSee

@milton: it's a phony excuse for being "bad at marketing" (which you claim and then cite your excellent SEO results) and kind of shoehorned in here to CYA, but your work with refuges sounds awesome and commendable. It's a great use of your product and talking about that more on your blog would be fantastic to read.

Thanks Boise, I wholeheartedly agree and I quoted you verbatim in my response.

@Boise, please believe the following is the sincere truth :)

1. i am BAD at marketing. vsee does not have hundreds of millions of users. vsee uses managed peer-to-peer secure streaming to allow massive scalability but without the security downsides of skype. my goal is to create a tool that can impact millions of people. i have tried all sort of things to get marketing traction - and they have mostly failed - ie - we don't have millions of users yet.

2. we have a lot of competitors - so I get asked all the time how is vsee different from X. We wrote those articles to help our customers decide. We actually try to be fair in the articles - why we always include why they shouldn't use vsee. We are also the ONLY company that includes a list of our competitors on our home page (see the bottom :). I know vsee is not ideal for all users - so they should be able to learn all the options.

3. this marketing tactic is working a little (but not at the scale we would like). ie - we steal a lot of customers from tokbox. if you search 'opentok alternative' we are the first one :) if our goal is to compete w/ OpenTok - you may say we are great at marketing - but on the large scale - we are pretty bad since we don't have hundreds of millions of users.

It seems really odd to conclude that their marketing tactics do not work just because they 'bash' their competition in a series of blog posts.

The theory also seems to disprove itself by the fact that the very posts in question are the most popular on the blog.

I agree that there are 'classier' way of marketing yourself then semi-duplicate link/SEO-bait posts but does it work? Absolutely.

don't know anything about their product but tacky marketing tactics don't make me want to find out.

Dear Everyone - this is milton, CEO of VSee. VSee is bad at marketing - I would be the first to agree with you! :) I would like to share what we have tried, and what we are doing.

First - we created vsee to change how people work. When I as a graduate student, I worked at Intel Research Lab every Fri - and the 101 drive back to Stanford Fri night was killing me - and I did that for 5 years :( I noticed that the hottest tech companies - Apple, Google, FB, etc - did not truly embrace remote work. The reason is that productivity drops by 50% when people are in remote offices. so our team set out to create a tool that allows people to work remotely w/o the productivity tax. We are spread across 9 cities - and our company policy is that even the local staff only comes to the office on Fridays (free lunch, fun, etc) - vsee is designed to let us work (thus the fast screen share, live annotation for design, pair programming, sales, etc).

Next - we do want to make money and have a lot of users :) Because our company is almost all designers and engineers - we struggled with marketing a lot. We tried getting on Tech Crunch, other press coverage, etc - and we have mostly failed. Our top users use vsee a lot - but I couldn't figure out a way to describe vsee where the press would care. People just assume this is another skype or webex copycat - while we are solving a different problem (we want to allow people to work, vs. making a remote presentation).

We also tried partnerships - it is slow and painful. contact me privately and I will share our war stories.

I attended a talk by Rand Fishkin - and I loved it. so 6 months ago we decided to focus on inbound marketing. we wrote a lot of vsee vs. X articles as a sales tool previously. so we posted them, and added SEO keywords. the result suggests this is a good marketing move :) we get a lot of customers from Tokbox, Skype, etc. if you search for competitor X alternative - vsee is now on 1st or 2nd page for most of the big guys in this space. We tried buying google ad words, but our space is too hot - we can't afford it. so riding on our competitors' coattail seems reasonable.

However, our goal is to get to hundreds of millions of users - and toward that marketing goal we have failed. Our challenge is that vsee is not a video conference tool, but a tool to let you work. we couldn't figure out how to describe this in a marketing way.

We did notice that our top users are telling their coworkers verbally - 50% of our web visitors download vsee and sign up (i was told this is insanely high). But vsee didn't have a viral loop - so the spreading factor was less than 1. so 2 months ago - we decided to focus on viral loop design. I attended http://growthhackersconference.com last Fri - and it was the best event ever!!! :)

Our marketing focus now (in terms of resources): 1. viral loop growth hacking: 90% 2. inbound marketing: 5% 3. press outreach: 4% 4. partnerships: 1%

hopefully millions of people will be able to use http://vsee.com for free soon!!! :)

ps: why do I travel to and work in refugee camps? to be brutally honest, I was not a save-the-world type. In school, I was probably the biggest nerd you would ever meet. I spent most of my time in libraries and writing code - research and hacking were my passions. since VSee requires less than half the bandwidth of Skype, and its fast screen share makes it a simple work tool - we have a lot of users in developing countries. As i learned about our users - I became part of their world - and I started traveling to refugee camps to work there. I have traveled to Syria on the Iraq border where Hillary Clinton used vsee, worked with Angelina Jolie to vsee w/ Chad/Darfur. After working in many countries in Africa, Mideast, Southeast Asia - now supporting our users there has become my passion. But I do struggle with how to spend my time - so that vsee the company is not hurt by my refugee activities.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com