How/Where do you actually market/sell your plugins?

[hisefilo]

@d-healey not really, it's just an mailchimp replacement. You can segment users but you cannot automate

[Matt_SF]

I had a chat with @ustk yesterday on this topic but I'm sharing here what we talked about.
I'm no expert in marketing but I gathered a few things here and there along the years.

Goals

Your main goal, obviously, will be to generate traffic on your website to:

1. Increate your brand's awareness,
2. Get subscribers
3. Generate sales

1. How to generate Traffic ?

There are several solutions to generate traffic, but the main ones would be:

1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Optimizing the SEO of your website will improve its visibility in search engines.

PROS:

• It's free
• It will consolidate your online presence - provided you're offering quality plugins, and writing hig-quality content.

CONS:

• It takes time to generate traffic
• You have to do it right, otherwise you'll be ranked on the 7th page of google search

In any case, you'll need to build your website/content while following SEO good-practices. Even if you're making ads or using a 3rd party platform, you want your website to be found quickly by everyone, IF you want your brand to be recognized and be seen as solid and professional.

2. ADS

You can create ad campaigns on several platforms (Youtube, FB, Instagram, TikTok).
This will cost money but can lead to a significant number of sales.

PROS:

• You're targeting people that are aready 'interested' in audio plugins
• It can generate a high traffic boost

CONS:

• Costs money
• Require skill, optimization and time.

3. 3rd party resellers

I'm not using any 3rd party platform to disctribute/promote my products so I don't have insight on this subject but others have already responded.

PROS:

• You'll reach a broader audience
• You don't have to think about promoting your product (== you save time)

CONS:

• Commissions are usually significant

2. What to do when you're getting traffic?

Once you've began to get people to come over to your website, what you want is to get their email address.

Why? So you can market your subscribers to generate engagement, feedback and of course, sales.
Statistically, email marketing is still the best marketing channel to generate revenue.

1. How to encourage people to give you their email address?

The main ways to do this:

• offer a free product to subscribers only
• offer discounts
• offer 'high-value' content (i.e. courses, pro tips, tutorials, etc...)

As discussed with Greg, what you can also do is to plan a 'LE' version of your plugin.
You can offer this 'LE' version for free to those who join your email list, then later, release the 'FULL' version and encourage people to upgrade their 'LE' version.

The thing with email marketing is that you really have to take care of your subscribers. Depending on your audience, you won't be able to optimize your ROI if you only send them promotion emails once every month...
You'll benefit from creating a relationship with your subscibers, offering advice on [your area of expertise], giving behind-the-scenes stories, asking them question/feedback, etc... And here and there, offering discounts and promoting your products.

I'll stop now.

PROS:

• Can significantly generate revenue over time (people who already bought from you are more likely to buy again)
• Doesn't have to cost much money
• You'll create a community of sorts and satisfiez customers will likely talk about you to other people

CONS:

• Require writing skills, analysis skills, a lot of planning
• Takes time
• Takes a lot of time

I'd strongly advise to have your email marketing set up completely before conducting ads or going to a 3rd party reseller.

3 Conclusion

There are still many many things to say on this topic (I didn't mention social media content creation). I over-simplified everything in order to keep this post short not tool long...
I probably forgot a bunch of things, but feel free to ask if you want to dive deeper. As I said, I'm no marketing expert, this comes from my own experience and some online resources I gathered over the years. Feel free to correct/complete what I wrote!

Edit: fixed grammar and typos

[Tangerine_Sounds]

@Matt_SF All really good points.

Again, Im no expert but I've read / listened to a few books on the subject.

For anyone completely new to all of this there are some influencers in this field you could look at:-

• Graham Cochrane. His focus is on creating courses and online communities but also building an audience through email. Check out his book 'How to get paid for what you know'.

• Gary Vee (Vaynerchuk). He is big on organic social content to drive awareness. Check out his book 'Day Trading Attention'

• Alex Hormozi. His book '$100M Leads' is all about finding an audience and selling to them.

That's probably enough for now.

My struggle is how to apply the principals to a specific niche.
The authors I have named are not targeting musicians as their customer base (actually that's how Graham Cochrane started but he's kind of moved on from that).
A lot of the advice is to find a problem or pain point that your customers want solving. You could say that for musicians that problem is 'I want my music to sound awesome' and our solution is 'buy my plugin'. But there's a lot of competition out there so its difficult to stand out.

Ultimately there is no 'one size fits all' formula for any of this so its about trying different things and seeing what works for you.

[hisefilo]

My 2 cents. I insist. If you create a plugin that reads your mind and makes drums grooves just by thinking about it, all marketing techniques will work. If you do a sampler with a string pad. None will. Product is the key in my modest opinion. I prefer to use my limited time for creating.

[d.healey]

@hisefilo said in How/Where do you actually market/sell your plugins?:

Product is the key in my modest opinion

I would take that further and say it's the audience.

If you don't have people who want to buy then it won't sell. So you could start with the audience and work backwards to a product.

[hisefilo]

@d-healey absolutely. The good thing in my case is that I am the audience because we are among them. We know the insights. We’ve been using vsts for many many years. At least in my case.

[Chazrox]

@d-healey I would take that even further (lol) to say Identify your demographic, and fulfill a need or a want. Best scenario.

[tomekslesicki]

@hisefilo I would also recommend Flodesk - great pricing model (they charge you a fixed low fee monthly, and don’t limit your audience or emails sent), good automation features and nice design options. Quite possibly the best newsletter service I used so far. And I used a lot.

[aaronventure]

@tomekslesicki did you try the Amazon AWS email service? It's literally pennies.

[orange]

I use Amazon SES with a plugin called The Newsletter on Wordpress. It really does the job for a few dollars.

The only downside is that it is integrated into the Wordpress system so it uses the sources of the server, and has a limit on the number of hourly emails. If set above the limit capacity, it creates problem on the site.

But other than that, it beats MailChimp and many other services.

[d.healey]

@orange I used to use The Newsletter too, very good, but check out FluentCRM it does this same thing but also has automations.

[orange]

@d-healey I’ll check that thanks

[DanH]

@d-healey is it paid for the automation stuff?

[d.healey]

@DanH Nope, it's all included and integrates with WooCommerce.

[aaronventure]

@d-healey David, did you talk about tax collection issues and MoR pricing? I recently found out about www.polar.sh and they seem to be a good new deal.

Plus the open source angle.

[d.healey]

@aaronventure Looks like it's an all-in-one solution so I would have to put my products with them instead of on my WooCommerce site, is that correct?

For VAT I'm all set, it's just US taxes I was thinking a MoR would be of benefit for me. I'm considering Stripe tax, they charge $0.50 per 10 API requests per transaction, but I can limit it to just the few states that have an economic nexus thing, so shouldn't cost me too much.

[aaronventure]

@d-healey Yeah, it's an all in one, but the fees are a lot lower than their competitors.

You could also just serve your US customers with the Polar checkout.

[d.healey]

@aaronventure I don't see that I could integrate this into my current WooCommerce site, and my licensing system is very dependent on that.

[ustk]

@d-healey said in How/Where do you actually market/sell your plugins?:

Install FluentCRM and FluentSMTP and combine it with Amazon SES.

Alright so I tried to configure this.
But I realised that for both getting out of the SES sandbox to get a production/live behaviour, and for leveraging the 200 email/day limit, I had to apply. I received a response today, both are denied...

Below is the application message I sent as requested.
Any idea what could have gone wrong?
What you guys did you do to get accepted?

Hello,

Please find below the required information regarding our email sending practices to assist in evaluating our sending limit request.

xxx is a brand focused on developing audio plugins for musicians. The emails sent include order confirmations, newsletters, and updates on existing or newly released products. These communications may contain general information as well as promotional content, such as discount coupons or sales announcements.

Email campaigns are managed through FluentCRM. Subscriber lists are maintained via both manual and dynamic segmentation. New subscribers opt in to receive newsletters and transactional emails either during the checkout process or via a "stay tuned" popup on our website.

Newsletters are sent approximately once per month. Promotional emails related to sales or coupons are sent during major holiday periods (e.g. Black Friday) or when a new product is released.

Bounce handling is managed through FluentCRM, which automatically segments and removes invalid addresses. Complaints are treated with high priority, and any customer requesting removal is manually unsubscribed. Additionally, all recipients have access to unsubscribe and preference management links in the footer of each email as well as in the customer account page.

An example email is attached for your reference.

Best regards,
Greg xxx
Owner, xxx

[d.healey]

@ustk That looks perfectly reasonable to me. It was several years ago that I did mine and I can't remember what I put, but it almost certainly wasn't as well worded as yours. Are you able to request another review?