Marketing data

hisefilo

@tod-slaughter learning every single day. Can't tell how it works with $100+ products

griffinboy

@hisefilo Would love an update! All these years later I am beginning my journey

clevername27

@hisefilo Get endorsements.

hisefilo

@griffinboy Sure!

It's been 6 years!!!! WOW

I can tell after all this time that Product is the key. If you have an outstanding product, marketing will work like a charm; if not, good marketing tactics won't be enough.

Let's say you come up with a VST plugin that has some disruptive technology (like an A.I.-powered sampler ). The press will be there, forums will talk about you, customers will pay, email lists will grow, and social media will replicate.

My marketing tools are still the same: email, Facebook ads, press, forums, social media (not much, need to work on this), and resellers.

hisefilo

@clevername27 never tried! I think I will. thanks mate

griffinboy

@hisefilo
Thanks!
I shall have to do some research.

I've had an idea for a sample based synth similar to the likes of Omnisphere that I've been working on for years. It just offers a bit more of a modern workflow, and a lot of randomisation and smart tools to assist the sound design process. I'm currently porting it to HISE.

I'm hoping that people will want it as much as I do, but who knows, it might be a giant flop :face_with_tears_of_joy:

At least I'll be set up with a lot of code that I can resuse in other products afterwards!

iamlamprey

just throwing my own experiences in the mix:

VI Control

VI Control has multiple Ad placements for very competitive pricing, and the quality of traffic they send is very high. Even just a T1 forum post can make a few thousand in a weekend if the forum deems it worthy

Revenue-Share Deals & Resellers

Nothing but praise for companies like VSTBuzz, PluginBoutique, LootAudio and AudioPluginDeals. They handle everything on their end and have always had excellent communication.

Youtube Reviews / UGC

I haven't had too many reviews, but any time I do they often drive a lot of high quality traffic. I plan on testing quite a few UGC creators on Youtube & Tiktok this year.

Facebook/Meta Ads

This ones a mixed bag, they can absolutely pump or they can suck your wallet dry. It depends a lot on split-testing hooks, audiences, creatives and basically every other moving part.

Advertorials

These are basically educational content where you demonstrate how you use your product to make a song. I don't have much experience doing them for VI's, but I have for other industries and they work very well, they're also free. I plan on delving into these this year as well.

KVR Email Blast

Maybe I just got unlucky, maybe some technical issue or something else happened, but I paid a few hundred USD (which is 1.5x'd here) and got about 15 page visits. I'll probably try them again in the future. Most likely a banner ad instead.

Paid Articles

Similar results to KVR. I think they get buried quite quickly on the larger websites. The benefit of these is you can add "As seen on: WEBSITE" to your store for social proof.

Affiliates

I'm categorizing this as separate to Resellers & Revenue Share. By Affiliate I mean a content creator who has an established audience. I haven't had much success with them, but I've also avoided any upfront payments due to budget reasons. I think they can work very well if you're prepared to test them similarly to Facebook ads.

I'd be interested to here everyone else's experiences

iamlamprey

Following up here with some more Facebook ads stuff:

You can view competitor ads by clicking About -> Page Transparency - View Ad Library. Then sort by Active, the longest-running ads are usually the winners.
Replicate before iterate. See what the top competitors are doing and emulate it with your own style / flair. Once you get some data in the ad account you can start to tweak & optimize.
Know your metrics. The most important one is CAC:LTGP or Cost-To-Acquire : Lifetime Gross Profit. In plain English: how much money you spend to get a customer, and how much PROFIT (not revenue) that customer will generate over their "lifetime". If you don't track this, you won't get anywhere with any form of CPC.

In terms of my own (current) metrics, I average around a 2.5x CAC:LTGP using a 3% lookalike audience based on my existing customer list. This is restricted to the "big 5" (US, AU, CA, UK, NZ) countries and has a combined total audience of about 4.5 million.

I'm only spending $5/day on each campaign, and average around $15-$20 spend per conversion. With $0.60 CPC and around 100-200 store visits a day (not just from Facebook obviously).

I'm currently testing a single image+text creative, and a video UGC style creative, with a few (previously tested & optimized) headline & copy combos. I let the ads run for 4-7 days before looking at the individual metrics, specifically CAC and CPC to gauge whether that particular test is performing.

There's one page I'd like to mention, who I believe are absolutely crushing with Facebook ads, and that's S.K.Y. Studios. If you take a look at their Ad Library, you can see the "organic" style of content that doesn't come across as an advertisement and instead blends in with organic content on the platform.

I plan on replicating this style of content, potentially hiring a few UGC creators to split-test (yes, attractive people convert better, big surprise). My ideal CAC:LTGP is a 5:1, which would give me a little bit of headroom to scale the budgets (the larger the audience, the higher the CPC becomes, inevitably.)

I'll also throw a quick little tip: setup Google Analytics and use UTM links to track leads from other link sources (VC, KVR, Blogs etc). There's an in-depth writeup by Pulse here:

https://pulsedownloader.com/how-to-track-conversions-from-banners-ads-and-other-media-using-google-analytics/

This lets you know if you're really getting your money's worth from a banner ad, blog post or article.

d.healey

@iamlamprey said in Marketing data:

You can view competitor ads by clicking About -> Page Transparency - View Ad Library. Then sort by Active, the longest-running ads are usually the winners.

Another little thing you can do. If you see an ad from a competitor on your Facebook feed you can click the 3 dots in the top right, and select Why am I seeing this? Then click Advertiser Choices and you'll see some of the targetting options they are using.

hiring a few UGC creators

Where do you hire these people?

iamlamprey

@d-healey said in Marketing data:

Another little thing you can do. If you see an ad from a competitor on your Facebook feed you can click the 3 dots in the top right, and select Why am I seeing this? Then click Advertiser Choices and you'll see some of the targetting options they are using.

Ah very cool, had no idea about that one.

Where do you hire these people?

TikTok, Instagram etc. Search hashtags like #plugin or something, look for people creating advertorial-style content (either paid reviews for other brands, or even just to grow their own pages) and reach out.

Most of them understandably expect payment upfront (no affiliate revenue share deals), and a lot of them are already booked up so it's a bit of a grind. If you like / repost and follow them, the algorithm will start showing you similar content organically.