Free marketing techniques for indie makers

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Today’s guest is Aleksandra, she is experienced in branding and marketing. She is a product marketing manager and passionate about building products, brands, and communities. With over ten years of experience in tech and startups, including marketing, branding, event, and project management she helps people build and launch products from idea to marketing (full startup).

Mostly bootstrappers and businesses are bad at marketing. Today she will be sharing interesting marketing techniques for small businesses. Let’s get started:

What is the audience first approach?

A good marketing strategy can help you build your audience even before the launch. Most businesses spend a lot more time creating a product and then start brainstorming how to launch it. Normally this approach fails as there is a high probability that your product launch will fail.

You have to work on marketing from day one, and it’s the most popular approach.

With the internet, we can find customers even before the product is launched, this is called the audience first approach and is getting a lot of traction in the bootstrapping world. This way, you already know where your customers are and how to get them even before launching your product. You can go on forums to ask questions, understand your users challenges and common roadblocks.

What is the best way to build your product audience?

It depends on your product niche and who your audience is. The first step is to identify your target user and then communities where they already hang out. Then start engaging and interacting with them. You can not simply start spamming your product without giving anything in return. A good rule of thumb when engaging with communities is 80% of valuable content creation and 20% of self product advertising.

You also have the option to start using social media listening tools.

The key is to find your audience and engage with them. Get feedback and ask questions to improve your product. By listening to the communities in your space you will also better understand what are the recurrent buzz word that you can later use to better laucnh your product.

Is it possible to re-launch a product?

A re-launch is always possible and encouraged. If you have launched before in a platform like Product Hunt, Aleksandra recommends for you to re-launch it rather than simply delete the old one and launch again as a new product. When re-launching you can always increase the version and call it: “Version 2.0”.

What if the number of users of the product is not increasing? 

There are different approaches. And Alessandra recommends reading Lenny Rachitsky who built a company and sold it to Airbnb a couple of years ago.

He writes a newsletter to break down different marketing approaches of well-known companies. There are three monthly additions to the newsletter.

What to do in early marketing stages without any funds?

It’s time-consuming. But here are some ideas from Aleksandra:

• Creating a community and content around it
• Engage on social media to share your products and get users’ feedback.
• Create a blog on medium and start sharing different aspects of your blog. 
• Invite developers and designers from Twitter or other communities to write blogs for you.
• Launch your product in platforms like Reddit, Product Hunt, etc…

Why publish on medium instead of your own blog?

Medium already has millions of readers, and you have access to it. For your website, you will have to work on keyword research, SEO optimization techniques, create guiding content for higher google ranking. Then people will visit and it and think about to try your product.

What is the best marketing method, SEO or Social Media, for my app?

Aleksandra sayd that in the end, having really good content is most important. You can move step by step and share helpful things on your blog. You can also go for paid social media ads.

Like on Instagram, organic growth will take forever. With paid ads, you don’t target everyone. You can target a specific country, gender, age group, interests, and much more. It is specifically targeted, so it works.

Are paying ads a way to overcome all struggles to build trust?

You cannot just pay to build trust. It takes time and struggles to build. Paid ads are an important aspect of marketing, but you cannot just overcome the struggle to build trust and get sustainability with paid advertisement.