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What is your go-to-market strategy?

If I launch a product, I usually run ads on Google or LinkedIn. This usually gets a few customers, but I'm wondering if there is a better (and cheaper) way to find customers? I think digital ads are becoming more and more expensive and more and more competitive.

I also write content that will get ranked on Google. This provides a few users every now and then, but the traffic is not consistent.

What is your go-to-market strategy to find customers?

Mike @ LAWVOLCANO ๐ŸŒ‹
@lawvolcano

๐Ÿ‘‹ Join WIP to participate

If SEO is your preferred way to launch a product, I'm also interested to hear strategies about SEO. I usually write a lot of content for highly searched questions and keywords about the product.

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Stuart Green
@stugreen13

Have been trying this approach. Posting ~3 articles/day around keywords (using SEMrush). Started ~2 weeks ago, waiting to see results over long term

Built a tool for generating the content (blogbud.ai), would love to get your feedback. I use that to generate the articles and then proof-read/edit as needed before posting

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Is your formula to publish regular articles and submit a sitemap to Google Search Console or are you doing additional things?

I've seen some websites rank highly without backlinks so I'm focusing more on articles and website structure.

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Stuart Green
@stugreen13

Just submitting sitemap and urls to Google Search Console for now. Submitted site to a bunch of directories for backlinks

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Here's what we've been doing for www.usedea.com
- Engaging with communities on X and Reddit such as "Build in Public" and "Web Developers"
- Posting content on our blog and dev.to
- Building up to a launch on Uneed and Peerlist

If we go down an advertising route in the future I think it'll be geared towards promotions and reviews on sites like Uneed, Product Hunt, etc.

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Ben Katz
@ben

Solo founder here. I think it's all about what your strengths are. As someone who doesn't work with a team, I have to do things that are very time efficient and scale without me having to do any kind of ongoing manual effort or outreach.

I've tried a number of things:

  1. Cold email: takes too much time to do it right. Personalization to each potential customer and doing enough research to understand what kind of email would work best for them is the way to go, but doing that is a full time job on its own. I've experimented with things like Apollo.io to automate sending cold emails which is a very promising tool, but I find it tough on the personalization front. You can't really automate as well if you're having to write a personal email to each customer and it kind of defeats the purpose of using the tool.

  2. Ads: complex, time consuming to set up campaigns, create content like video for engaging ads. Ineffective for new products where you're not sure of the product market fit yet (at least this is my experience). I'll try this later once I have "product market fit"

  3. SEO: this has had the best results for me. I've been writing blog posts, creating "alternative to" pages with honest comparisons to competing products. That has led to search volume and random people finding my products, then buying the products without me having to manually close each deal. In particular alternative pages have been the most effective so far.

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Very interesting. I'm realizing that SEO is becoming one of the best marketing tools.

Any SEO tips? I'm seeing websites rank highly when they have a sitemap in the footer and then plenty of content pages that have an intuitive hierarchy.

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Ben Katz
@ben

Write blog posts with keywords that you have a chance of ranking for and like I said create alternative pages for competitor products.

You don't need to manually put a link to your sitemap in the footer. You just submit the sitemap to google and it does the work of indexing each page.

I use a plugin for Astro to automatically update my sitemap.xml when I add a new page so I don't have to do any work to maintain it

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Gotcha. When I mean put the sitemap in the footer, I mean make a footer that includes a navigation of how to find all the pages. I noticed that you have a footer that includes a navigation of your website and how to find the content.

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Ben Katz
@ben

Oh, yeah.

The stuff I put in the footer is stuff that I want search engines to index but I don't care about for user navigation purposes

There are other navigation elements that I put in the header if I expect the user to use them to get around the page

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