Targeted Google ads (for the type of product we were building) pointing to a landing page where we collected email addresses.
replies(2):
Most new founders think that blasting your 'startup' to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Reddit, Twitter, etc. will result in first customers -- that that's 'marketing' -- but that's far from the truth for the majority of products. And contrary to popular belief, the chances your product is one of the exceptions is near-zero.
Those social media platforms bring in 'tire-kickers' and devs that value their time at $0, not customers. These aren't the first users that you should be listening to, because they will always complain about price, lack of niche functionality, etc., yet it's pointless to listen to them -- because they aren't buyers.
You want to market towards buyers, not just users, and ads are a good way to do that for early companies that have no brand awareness or distribution.
How do you target ads when many B2C versions are trying same thing. For example, image editor that are targeted towards b2b.
I get initial interest but then people drag their feet for trials and paying after that.
Any thoughts how can I counter these drag and boost sales?
- More sophisticated logins: Google/etc.
- Integrations
- Attestations (e.g. HIPAA compliance etc.)
- Team management functionality
- APIs
- Audit trails
- Offline communications & support. I'll add payment via invoice here. I have onboarded Enterprise customers who only needed Enterprise pricing because they needed to bay by check, and/or they wanted a phone number to call for help (which they tended to not use often).
I will say that if your market is well-covered in B2C offerings, you may want to either niche down further by adding core features businesses need. For example, can you help them enforce some kind of corporate standard (possibly via workflow)?
Or you may want to get into a different market altogether.