
Ask HN: How to spend a marketing budget of $US 2k per month? - yeti
Hi HNers,<p>We are a startup in the casual gaming space, beta for a couple months, just hit 10,000 users and picking up pace.  Main demographic is teenage - 20 something girls.<p>Haven't spent any money on marketing, so far just done a bit of posting on some relevant game sites and forums/social networks.<p>Now we're growing and will close a seed round shortly, we're putting aside $2k per month for marketing budget (vast majority remains on development).<p>We know viral/referral is the only long term strategy but want to spend a bit to gain an initial audience.<p>Question - how would you spend that budget?
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adinobro
Personally I would experiment with different sources and different types of
adds. The main thing to do is find out if the adds are working.

If you are advertising online there is always the big two - Google(Adwords)
and Yahoo(Overture). I would also have a look at some online comics. The two
bigest ones focusing on gaming are: * <http://www.pvponline.com/> *
<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic>

There are about 50 other comics that focus on gaming. Each one focuses on
different types of gamers. So if you can try different comics.

The most important thing is to make sure you know how well your campain is
going. If you haven't set up a marketing funnel I would probably try to setup
on of those first: *
[http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understandin...](http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2006/01/understanding_t.html)
* [http://brianwong.com/blog/funnel-visualization-with-
google-a...](http://brianwong.com/blog/funnel-visualization-with-google-
analytics/)

If you have a revenue model you can even justify spending more money on
advertising. Even if you are just trying to BUY market share it is worth know
where you will get the most bang for your buck.

Nathaniel Brown - <http://www.adinobro.com/>

~~~
yeti
Thanks Nathaniel, we use analytics a lot and have some ad:hoc ways of getting
some stats, but haven't properly setup the goal/funnel view... we should.

~~~
adinobro
The main idea is that if you use goals and then segment your marketing dollars
into say 10 lots of $200. You can then run 10 different tests. You might run
campain A on site 2 for a month then change to campain B on site 2. Different
campains might work differently on different sites. The main thing is keep
testing. For the first 3 months you might waste a bit of money but by the 3rd
month you should be able to allocate at least half of your money to areas that
work based on the tracking you've setup and then keep spending at least a
little bit trying new sites. If you don't have at least some for testing new
sites you will eventually start to saturate your market. Keep a log of sites
that were ok because you might want to go back to them with a new campain
targeting their users later on.

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jlees
It seems to me you have to focus on your demographic and spend some time
figuring out their top websites, then figure out ways to partner with them. It
sounds obvious but if you spend the money on getting Digg frontpaged or an ad
on Penny-Arcade the customers presumably won't actually stick, since they're
not your target audience.

Can you set up a myspace page? Add Facebook integration, a Facebook fan page,
etc? Advertise on Livejournal? Celebrities is a good one as someone else
mentioned, also fashion and style sites - with the death of print, could you
even afford to advertise in Cosmo or the teenage equivalents? As well as
casual gaming sites and possibly MMO sites, as plenty of women play MMOs and
look for other distractions as well.

To be honest although I'm a twentysomething girl I'm somewhat atypical and
don't really know what sites my 'demographic' visit - but you need to find
that out. Maybe look at some of your competitors too, there are a ton of
casual games out there.

If you've got 10k users already maybe you can incentivise them to recruit a
friend with some of the marketing budget as well. Free months/extras etc.

~~~
yeti
yes, we'll introduce the "refer a friend" + "import your contact list" in a
couple weeks

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albertni
While there are always exceptions, I'm guessing most startups that are around
the 10k user mark have plenty of _free_ low hanging fruit left in terms of
improving a user's experience or getting more traffic in general. Whatever you
end up doing, you're going to get a lot more bang for your buck with a more
optimized flow.

Personally (and without knowing more about what you guys are doing), I'd spend
the $2k exploring different avenues to get a better idea of what kinds of
things do and do not work. It's hard to know what may or may not work
sometimes without trying it, at least a little bit. Seemingly similar startups
may have very different levels of success with things like untargeted Google
Adwords, targeted Google adwords, other methods of product placement, etc.,
and while you can't always get conclusive evidence from $2k, it's a start.

~~~
yeti
Yes, we have plenty to improve in improving the flow and newbie experience

Always wondering about what priority should be new features we need for
stickiness vs improving the first time experience

~~~
froo
Honestly? first time experience if you want to grow your userbase.

You only get one chance to make a first impression.

For example, there are many arguments to why WOW is a dominating force in the
MMO market and one of them is with the "first 5 minutes" concept. It hooks
players early and from there tries to keep the experience fairly pleasant
through the first X levels of play.

There are many other MMO's out there and the first 5 minutes can be
frustrating. These games usually don't do as well.

EDIT - Having thought quickly about another benefit of stickiness vs first
impression, this is another argument I came up with that is pro-first
impression.

I think that if you had to choose between the two, that first impression is
better for the network effects that it can create.

Think about your browsing behaviour and how you pass content along to your
friends.

When you find something new and interesting, do you send it to your friends
(via IM/email/facebook/twitter) straight away or do you wait a couple of days
before you send it?

~~~
yeti
Good point

------
patio11
Develop linkworthy content which is unique to your site.

~~~
froo
It doesn't even need to be on your site - there is a certain digg user (I
forget his username) that always does a bait & switch with content.

Basically he sets up microsites that look well designed (it's usually a very
simple single page design) and have relatively funny content aimed at the Digg
community.

He then submits that content to Digg, pushes it, waits for it to frontpage and
then changes the page to have a "sponsored by" or similar message at the
footer or header, but so it looks like it's part of the actual original
design.

He does this often (perhaps twice a month?) and the cost is very minimal to
him, but sends several 10's of thousands of users to his main site and each of
these microsites provides Google juice for his main site.

He has also managed to pickup additional traffic from bloggers looking for
content via Digg.

Since your main target is teen-20something females, I'd probably start
thinking up comedic microsites related to various celebrities? They always
seem to be a fairly easy to hit target.

~~~
yeti
Thats a good suggestion, thanks! ps - got any links to the digg examples?

~~~
froo
Ok after some searching I found an example. The guy who used to do this is
named Matt Inman and this is one example.

<http://mingle2.com/dating/phases>

You can also see some of the other microsites towards the footer of that page.
They all usually changed after they frontpaged to promote his dating site.
Classic bait and switch.

~~~
Gibbon
Inman is a great marketer and has all sorts of interesting tactics for driving
traffic to his dating site. He's also the former CTO of SEOmoz
(<http://www.seomoz.org>).

Here's a recent interview with him about marketing:
<http://blog.mixergy.com/real-marketing/>

~~~
AndrewWarner
Thanks for recommending my site Gibbon.

The Inman interview you linked to is full of techniques for marketing that
doesn't cost money, but it does cost time.

My suggestion is to pick just one of his techniques and focusing on that
(quizzes, shocking content, for example).

~~~
yeti
thanks guys!

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shafqat
What's your site? A link or name would help us understand your product better.
It's always easier to give advice when we see the product rather than blind.

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melvinram
Are the websites/games free or paid?

If it's free and you're really after eyeballs, you might considering utilizing
methods that give you a higher reach. I'd think about websites with a low
CPM/PPC rate that reach your demographic. I'd also consider spending that
money on developing a good FaceBook integration.

If you games are paid, I'd consider spending a little more on PPC/CPM rates to
get a high quality audience.

~~~
yeti
Free for now, introducing paid options starting later this month. Yes, we'll
do Facebook app/connect to get our viral growth rate up, planned for next
month.

Any suggestion how to find the sites targeting particular demographics and
their rates? Sorry if that sounds like a noob question, we haven't done any
advertising before and are not in the US (although most of our new users are)

~~~
melvinram
One idea might be to utilize Google Adwords (network sites) to find sites by
demographic and then

* use Adwords to advertise there,

* go direct to the sites and see if you can score better deals,

* use various websites like Alexa to find websites just like those sites so you can go direct and talk about sponsorships

* use a combination of the above

------
froo
I've already replied to this thread but I thought I would add another anecdote
about using ads. This is just my personal experience, but I think can
underline that you really need to be creative.

Personally, I think online ads are mostly a waste of money unless you get a
good, measurable conversion from those ads.

Using Adsense for mostly branding or signing up free users is, in my opinion,
the wrong approach since everyone is doing it. It ends up a war of attrition
with who has the bigger budget, with the only winner being Google.

That's not to say you can't do very interesting things with online ads from a
branding perspective. I've used online ads to great effect to create
notoriety, the ad units themselves didn't increase traffic, it was the word of
mouth associated with what I was doing with them.

Last year when I was spearheading the campaign to get Rick Astley the Best Act
Ever award at MTV's Europe Music Awards, a bit of a rivalry occurred between
the Tokio Hotel fans and the Rick Astley fans - I used this to my advantage.

Essentially, I leveraged Google's Adsense to plaster simple flashing
(annoying) "Vote 4 Rick" ads all over other fansites around october 20th when
the site's traffic was flat.

Post's below contain screenshots that blog readers were sending in of ads in
action.

<http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/20/please-stand-by/>

<http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/23/this-oozes-irony/>

All up, I think the ad spend over a 10 day period was about $20 .. it was
around that, I don't remember it costing me too much.

You can see the traffic increase to the site as people became interested again
with what was occurring and telling their friends of the pranks that were
happening.

[http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oc...](http://files.marklancaster.org/images/bestactever_traffic_oct1-nov11)

In one case, I managed to embed a rickrolling flash ad in a certain Tokio
Hotel Fansite, belonging to a critic of our efforts. She got so angry that she
actually disabled advertising for her site so that I couldn't get ads in
there.

<http://www.bestactever.com/2008/10/26/unappreciated-gift/>

I also started targeting certain fansites directly, specifically one fan
fiction site because they used Project Wonderful and the Ad unit was
relatively cheap.

This is the message that the admin of that fansite sent to me via project
wonderful. I found it to be highly amusing and this is the first time that I
have made this public. I literally had every ad spot on their site filled with
a flashing "Vote 4 Rick" ad which cost me the minimum $5 for project Wonderful
and lasted about 4 days.

    
    
      Hello Mark Lancaster,
    
      Darcy Gilmore has sent you a new message! The message is:
    
      ---------------------
      Subject: Your Ad on our TH Site
    
      I love that you're advertising on our site, it's ingenious! Keep up
      the hilarious work, it's making all of our douchebag members foam at
      the mouth, and nothing pleases me more than that.
    

So, I guess the overall message is get creative. Create Purple Cows. Nothing
beats word of mouth dollar for dollar.

~~~
yeti
Thanks, froo, we did a little test of a couple of viral things (tag a friend /
youtube etc) but to be honest they didn't really do so much, maybe because the
content was cute but wasn't funny/shocking/bizarre enough...the hard part is
to come up with a creative idea

~~~
froo
I think really the best thing you can do is listen to your users, keep your
fingers on the pulse of your site and then act accordingly.

In my case, I didn't create the rivalry, I simply listened to what the readers
were saying and the discussion happening on other sites and reacted
accordingly.

It's much easier to ride a wave than it is to create that wave.

Sidenote: There were a few negative effects of my antics, but I turned those
lemons into lemonade. The people in the IRC channel at the time got a real
kick out of what I was doing.

It ended up in the sites comments being spammed a little by Tokio Hotel fans
in a short couple hour window, which luckily I noticed it as it was happening.

I actually found much joy when I noticed this occurring in realtime and
redirected those particular people to a rickroll on YouTube using a 301
redirect for those specific IP's in the .htaccess file.

Actually the best use of this tactic (specific IP redirects) was to a certain
Tokio Hotel fan/critic named Claire (admin of a TH fansite) who left a very
nasty comment on the site. I simply set up a redirect for her IP to a
subdomain on the site and a page I set up specifically for her in minutes.

<http://hacked.bestactever.com/>

She was very upset thinking I had somehow "hacked" her computer and had
emailed me with all sorts of threats and many four letter words.

The site's users got a huge kick out of that. It was childish yes, but that's
what the site required at the time. Stupid childish antics. It added to the
site's notoriety and was free - word spread around about the antics and
traffic increased as a result.

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vaksel
if you are in the casual gaming space, I'm guessing you are doing flash games.
Spend that money to hire some people to develop games for you. Almost any game
will spread like wildfire all across every single game aggregator, and will
drive a ton of traffic your way

And if you are going to ask questions, you shouldn't hide your startup name on
here, you'll get higher quality help, if people know exactly what you are
doing.

------
ashleyw
I'm no expert on marketing, but I think I'd check out StumbleUpon paid ads:

<http://www.stumbleupon.com/ads/>

~~~
iuguy
Having used stumbleupon ads I'd have to say that the quality sucks. YMMV but
for our main site and our news site StumbleUpon didn't add anything for us.

