A somewhat obvious thing about Internet Marketing
I’ve made a few attempts at the next post related to my non-journey, starting a sustainability-based crypto coin, but none of them have seemed worthwhile or particularly gripping, until I wrote this one.
There are many legs to the startup animal. The head bit is the idea and context, but one of the legs that gets the beast moving is marketing. The best form of marketing is word of mouth. Not only is it cheap, but it is also highly valued; a recommendation from someone you trust, follow on Twitter, or read their blog is worth more than any number of pretty moving banners at the top of a web page on making frozen cheesecake.
Word of mouth works well if you capture the zeitgeist, but it’s really hard to scale. Moving from one or two people discussing your idea over a cold lemonade on the banks of Lake Como to taking the world by storm, blowing up the internet, and bringing down your sign-up server is a cosmically large gap; this gap cannot be crossed without some aspect of internet marketing. That is, of course, assuming that you have a volume product or offering, but in the sense of creating a buzz about a crypto coin, this is what you need. Big.
Well, let’s be correct. Even if you don’t have a volume product, Big is needed. The exact type of big will depend on whether it is tactical (buying some new kind of chewing gum that makes your teeth look like freshly cut white granite) or strategic (changing the way a business, well, does business).
The commonality between strategic and tactical is that BIG, in both senses, is the budget required to reach your goals. Tactical requires scale and reach, so it’s volume, whereas Strategic requires focus and hard-to-reach people who are expensive to interrupt from other pressing priorities.
Marketing has many dimensions, and it’s not within the confines of this article to be too specific and in-depth about all of them. You could have a crowded market, where differentiation is tricky to land, or a new type of product or service that requires educating people about the need for whatever grommet or widget you’re selling.
To launch yourself out of the gravity well, you’ll need to test, measure, and learn. For example, try your ad on different audiences at various times of the day or test which type of wording most effectively captures people's attention. Or what exact shade of pink captures the eye on a crowded webpage?
The somewhat obvious thing about internet marketing, then, is that you will need to go through the learning every time you try something new, and even when you have a winning formula, you will also need to adapt as the competition adapts.
This is an expensive process.
Both in terms of time and cost.
As someone who’s starting to set up something new, you can alter the balance of the seesaw in one direction or another. You can invest huge chunks of your valuable time in smaller experiments and engage with lower-cost media (like social media posts versus Google AdWords). Alternatively, you can tip in the other direction and attempt to achieve success by spending your way there.
However, the seesaw is angled, you will need a good population of potential customers to run each of your tests to measure effectiveness and therefore learn.
This cannot be emphasised enough, and I’ve come a cropper to this myself on more occasions than I would admit to in polite company. This Substack is polite company, I believe, inasmuch as the number of disparaging comments to my articles has so far been zero (this is not a call to action people!). Ergo, the example we’ll stick to is my crypto venture. I choose to bias my investment towards time deployed, rather than cost (as, honestly, it wasn’t really a choice; my pockets aren’t that deep, and my arms are metaphorically relatively short, such that even if they were deep pockets, I wouldn't be able to reach deeply into them).
There are no shortcuts, so it's better to debunk this. Heading over to Fiverr and employing someone who appears to have done wonders historically to increase, for example, YouTube subscribers, is not likely to yield significant results for 30 of your Earth pounds (or dollars).
You might gain subscribers, but they aren’t genuine consumers of your product or the media describing it; they’re on the other side of the trade — bots or click monkeys. It’s a false win.
You’ll need a significant amount of time over a prolonged period to gain traction. If you’re thinking weeks, start thinking months, and if you’re thinking months, move up to years. Ditto with budget, think it’s going to be £1000, budget for 3x that, and so on.
There’s an old saying that if you’re building a tech product, your marketing budget should be (If I remember correctly) at least 2x your development budget. Usually, it’s the other way around.
With my crypto project, I didn’t have the legs to create enough momentum. I couldn’t sustain the time investment, but I also recognised that the audience I needed to reach (without educating non-crypto people) was a “pump and dump” minefield, which went against the honest and forthright concept I was trying to peddle, at least in my eyes.
The only way to make that idea fly would have been to go raise some money and tip the seesaw over to money and marketing budgets. I have not, nor have I yet, done that.
Let’s summarise, then, in case I’ve overcomplicated things here: internet marketing is expensive, it requires audience engagement in a cluttered and busy playing field, with lots of people shouting at the same time. It takes time, effort and money to get a long enough runway to test things out and find out what works. It takes a lot of gumption to do this, because you’ll be questioning the budget or your sanity a lot as the road stretches out onto the horizon without a fuel station in sight.
Good luck people! It can be done, but it needs to be done right. So prepare yourself for the journey.
Thank you for joining me again, friends, you’re always good company and don’t often answer back, like my cat. See you at the next outing, whatever topic we land on. Over and out.