

Ask HN: How much to spend on marketing? - ahmedaly

Hi,
I am working on a new startup - eCompuCloud.com and I can't really determine how much should I spend on marketing?<p>For example, if I will spend $1000/mo on operating the business, and expect $1000 net profit - which means we must generate $2000 revenue.. how much to spend equal to the cost of operating the startup? Is it vague a little bit?
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kevinconroy
Test test test.

Here's my experience (by YMMV):

SEO FTW. It's incredibly sustainable once you set it up as you have some high
fixed costs but close to zero marginal cost to acquire a new customer.

Blogs. Write your own blog of tutorials on HOW to set up smaller websites.
Make it as easy as possible to follow (check out ScreenSteps -
<http://www.bluemangolearning.com/screensteps/>). Share this knowledge for
free. Cover systems other than yours. These will provide you with a large bump
in traffic of people looking for help. You'll convert about 1% of them (or
slightly more if your pitch is really good).

Experiment with AdWords and Facebook. Both will give you $50 to $100 to start
ads with. See what works. Find keywords that represent your target customer
and see which ones work. If you have a quality score below 7, drop the
keyword. See if it's driving customer and what your cost of acquisition is.
Adjust accordingly.

Email newsletter. (See also: blog). Offer a free guide to setting up your
website to anyone that signs up for your newsletter. Email out tips and tricks
on websites (CSS, JS, plugins, or even just cool designs, etc) once every two
weeks. Have a small pitch at the bottom about your company. It's not about the
marketing here - it's about engaging your audience and building trust with
your brand.

Just my two cents.

Traditional PR (newspapers) can provide big boosts in traffic (or hardly a
blip) and are difficult to track.

------
redspark
_I am not a marketer_

I would think you should first determine the ROI for different types of
marketing and using those figures, come up with a game plan for how much to
spend where. To some degree your marketing spend should drive your revenue.

I think it would be definitely worth is to study common growth hacks as well.

What exactly is your product? I work on OpenStack (more technical and
knowledgable than your target market) and reading your homepage, I don't
understand what exactly you provide.

~~~
ahmedaly
Well.. I made it a little vague so people get excited, but seems I am wrong.
:D

My product is just the same computing cloud service provided, but aimed to be
for home and small businesses, so they can host their websites and apps easily
on the cloud without any technical background needed.

~~~
true_religion
Why would they ever want to host their websites on the cloud as opposed to
shared hosting? What's the value prop?

~~~
ahmedaly
I mentioned several reasons on the launch page, and made it as clear as
possible.

Its reliable.. its scalable.. you pay only for what you use without any
commitment.. and its very, very cheap.

~~~
true_religion
Yes but this is a website... it _has_ to be up all the time, so you only pay
for what you use turns out to be the minimum unit.

Sure, you can scale when it comes time to it but the intersection of people
looking for scalability and very very cheap hosting in the SMB arena is small.

