During the Spring of 2014, we decided that we wanted to open up Responster to an international audience. It was time for our online launch. This may sound odd, since the main part of Responster is found on the web. Well, with online launch we mean that it was time to start promoting ourselves on the Internet. Read on to find out what we’ve learned about it so far!
Where to Start
It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that has launched a company online that getting your word out there can be really tricky. Thankfully, there are many great resources online that you can use to set yourself straight on your path to growing your business. One of the go-to sites that we’ve used frequently is Quicksprout’s blog, written by Neil Patel. On Neil’s blog, we’ve found useful advice on how to plan and carry through your online presence. I can really recommend that you check it out. Another valuable website is growthhackers.com. On this page, you’ll find helpful tips on growing you business online from people who’ve done it themselves.
It’s about the Content in Online Marketing
Based on what we read on Neil’s blog, and what we learned from other sources, you don’t want to be perceived as a robot on the Internet. You want to be personal and human, which means that everything you do online has to reflect the people behind the brand. Otherwise, it’s far too easy to get lost in the great void of auto-generated content that make up a large part of the Internet.
To us this didn’t sound too strange since we want to be perceived as a friendly company with a lot of personality. Our goal is to make people feel that surveying is something fun and extremely valuable. By doing so, we want Responster to be a part of the future of surveying. We hope that those who get in touch with us online will experience this.
Here on our blog we’ll try to justify our goal and purpose. We’ll continue to share news about Responster as well as insights, advice, and ideas about our field of work. Make sure to check out the rest of our blog, if you haven’t done so already.
Being Accessible in Social Media
Writing good content isn’t worth much if you can’t share it with others. That’s why you have to make sure that you’re on the largest social media platforms. It’s also essential since it lets you interact with users, fans, and potential customers. When we decided to launch online we created accounts on all major platforms.
Do say hello to us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn och Instagram!
Add som Ads to It
Another way of marketing yourself online is, of course, through ads. The most well-known platform for ads is not surprisingly Google Ads.
Creating ads for Google Ads is an art in itself. There’s a lot to understand about the logic behind Google’s bidding system for ads. Luckily Google offers some great guides on how to get started. Besides understanding the ad platform itself we quite early learned another thing. You should focus on what keywords and phrases that your target groups will search for. You can use some nifty tools to investigate useful keywords and phrases in your industry. We used semrush.com for this, which offers a lot of functionality in its free account. You should check it out!
We’ve also worked with Facebook ads to test the potential of marketing Responster there. What’s really great with Facebook ads is that you can pinpoint specific target groups that you want to show your ads for. These target groups are created based on different criteria such as country, gender, age, and interests. We learned that it’s good to narrow your target groups so that each group contains a couple of hundred thousand users at the most. This way it’s easier to A/B test different ads for your target groups. By doing so, you can discover which ads that work and in what context.
Understand your Users
At some time, you’ll (hopefully) start seeing traffic coming to your website based on your online activity. To some this is where the real work starts, since you have to make sure that your website visitors understand what you offer. Not too surprisingly the aim then is to get people to sign up. So far we’ve discovered the following tools that you can use to understand your website visitors better:
Google Analytics is an essential tool to understand your website traffic. It’s a no-brainer to implement Google Analytics on your website. As soon as it’s up and running you can monitor the website traffic from its web panel. Google Analytics makes it possible for you to see where the traffic is coming from, and how the website visitors behave while on your site.
Together with Google Analytics we’ve also used Inspectlet. If Google Analytics is the strictly data-driven tool, Inspectlet is the opposite to it. With Inspectlet, it is possible to watch recordings of your visitors interacting with your web page. In our case, this has given us valuable insights about what parts of Responster’s website that our visitors and users find difficult. We can then make necessary changes to it based on these insights.
Finally, we use a tool called Olark. My colleague Ludvig wrote about it last week in this post. Olark enables us to chat with our website visitors in real-time while we also track where the visitors are on the page. This makes it easy for us to give accurate help and feedback.
Finding the Golden Mean
Launching our business online has not been an easy task (and still isn’t). With so much happening on the Internet it’s hard to find our space where we can be seen and heard. But this is also what makes it fun and challenging!
For us, this is a work in progress. Every day we’re finding new things to try out by evaluating our own progress and by looking at how others are doing it.
Next week we’ve come to the 10th and final post of this mini-series about the development of Responster. In this post, I’ll share some things we have planned for the future, so make sure to tune in then!
The future of feedback is a 10-part series on how Responster grew into what it has become today.
Every week I’ll publish a new post where I tell you about the life of a startup, the Responster-team and how a product is born.
I hope that you’ll find these posts interesting. If you have a startup of your own or have experience in software similar to Responster, I’d love hearing from you. You can drop me a line whenever you want at [email protected].
Take care,
Hjalmar