Hey, this is the Daily Overpass. My name is Eric and I make apps.
Now today, I want to talk about "No Budget Marketing".
Alright, so today's topic comes to you from a Abby Dabby, who last week on episode 124 simply said, "Nice video."
Sorry, "Next video, "no budget marketing tips." And then when I didn't do
that for the next video, he was very persistent and said, "Hey, Eric! We
need more tips on how to market our apps with little or no budget. We are not
billionaires like you." Billionaires? Billionaires? You know, I know I shouldn't
showed you that car. I'm just getting by just like everybody.
I know you were just kidding, right? But yeah, that's the
first time anybody ever call me a billionaire. And I kind of
like it. I feel like I'm gonna fight some crime, right? The reason why I
don't talk about that much because I'm not an expert. But what I'll do is
I'll talk a little bit about about my opinions on this. Some things that I've
tried, some things that I haven't tried, and all those all that kind of stuff.
First, let me say that I do not like to spend money on advertising. I hate it.
It's a- you know, every month, every dollar I spent on advertising or
marketing, is a dollar I'd rather be spending on something else.
If I buy, let's say if I buy the new iPhone and
the same amount of money and that iPhone or in the advertisements, I know
that the iPhone is gonna show up, where the ads you never quite know. It's always
kind of iffy. You try new things, you try to put stuff out in front
of people, but so whenever possible I try not to spend any money on marketing at
all. And there's you know, you know that we live in the- imagine we're
back in 1980 and in order to market anything to anybody, you know you either
have to send them a letter, put something on television, or put it on the radio. And
now, you've got social media all over the place. You've got people saying that
they're interested in your product and all you have to do is reach out to them.
It's crazy, the way that we are. So the way that I think about
this, is that just like with developing an app, you're either gonna
have to spend time or gonna have to spend
money. You know, like if you do an app, say you either gonna have to hire
somebody to do it for you, or you're gonna have to learn how to do it and
just code away and do it yourself .It's just the way it is. The same with
advertisements. You're either going to pay to use somebody else's
audience, or you're going to have to put in the time to build your own. And what I
mean by that is, you know, every time you do an advertisement, you're basically
using somebody else's audience. Like in my opinion, I can't think of any
exceptions to this. If you do, let me know. Alright, so you're either- like
you could do use influencer marketing so you can find somebody on social media,
who's built a huge following, a huge audience probably without a marketing
budget too and basically, you might pay them a little bit of money or
just try to persuade them to mention your product and then they'll
talk about it. And then, you if it's relevant to their audience, right?
And that's one way of doing it. I've never done that but I know people who have.
Or you pay for to put ads in like AdMob or Facebook or whatever.
What you're doing is, you're putting advertisements into applications of
other apps that have built an audience. So you have to try to get
some of that into you. So that's the shortcut approach. Trying to
try to bring those in. Of course, if you have an advertisement, no matter how much
you pay for it if it's not good enough, it's not gonna result in anything.
In fact, okay, I'm gonna tell you this even though it's personally
embarrassing to me. Just this weekend- so last- last few
weeks, we've been doing something different. This is a tangent, but kind of
related. We've been doing t-shirts so we've been doing like the Spreadshirt
t-shirts go. So we got our designer Sandee. She's been, you know, she's just churning
out material. She's prolific. She's the Prince of art or whatever.
So, I don't mean Prince, like Prince the artist. She's prolific.
Prince was a prolific artist. So, she's constantly putting out material.
We're trying to get new places to put it. So, there's a t-shirt shop. We got
these really nice-looking t-shirts and spread shirts. And you know, I've never
done anything like this before. I thought we'll try something new. So, I created
these Facebook ads and I spent- yeah, I put a budget on Facebook and I
spent about 50 pounds about- that was it. 50 pounds
on Facebook this weekend. And you're putting ads out there, you
know thousands of impressions. And you know how many t-shirts we sold? Guess?
None. None. You're just like 50 pounds.. Shooo!! I wish I could take
it back. But you don't know. Anyway, so it's the way the way that you learn.
You know, I didn't have to go that way. But I kind of wanted to take
that shortcut route. And that's just the way it is. I've seen other
YouTube people like app people who say, "You could market your app for
as little as five hundred dollars." And I think, five hundred dollars? Come on, right?!
I don't want to spend $500 on that. But you know, like if I was certain
that I spent five hundred dollars and I make a thousand back then yeah I'd do it.
I'm never that certain and it's never actually worked out for me.
The other side of things is, you're paying- you either pay for advertisements
and you're basically using somebody on, somebody else's audience,
or you try to build your own audience. You can do that through various
methods on social media. You could publish anything you want if you
could put- if you've got all the different social media channels and you
can start learning how to use those. Other people are making- able to
make it work, you can make it work. It just means learning a whole bunch of
new things and even then I'm constantly still learning that kind of stuff.
To give you an example of some of the things we do, we did a lot of blog
content and a lot of, you know, like articles and stuff like that which would
be kind of related to what we're talking about. So, well, first of all,
in order to build your audience, you have to know who your audience is.
So, you have to, you know, if you don't have anybody coming into your app,
you have to have an idea of who they are. So for me, the language learning
games is really simple. The Japanese learning games, it would
be somebody who must learn Japanese or somebody who's currently studying
Japanese. Or somebody who plans ongoing to Japan. And based on Analytics
and Facebook, putting the Facebook SDKs in there, I could see demographics of
who's actually downloading the app. So then, as we start to get a bit of traffic,
I can start to to fine tune that more. Now, if you have something that's
not that simple, let's say you have a game, let's say you have a puzzle game,
that's something I'm not quite sure, but I would imagine that you would
look at a similar game that has a larger audience. And think what kind of
audience are they using because those users may be interested in your
application too So like, if I had a game that was like say Candy Crush or
something like that, say it's a three in a row game, I might say, you
know, people who like Candy Crush would really like this game. That was
a big inspiration for me. So you know, that might be who I want to target.
I can do so if that was the case. Unlike the language learning games, by the way,
language learning topics, you know, top five places to go in China ,you
know how to master the four tones, you know in the language
top five- top ten Chinese cuisines. There's loads of
things you could do there. The hardest- even personal stories,
you know, the hardest things I found learning Chinese all this kind of stuff.
The kind of stuff that's not necessarily just go for a hey download my app,that
kind of stuff. So if you had something that was similar
to Candy Crush, you could say, you know, my fave- my five favorite Candy
Crush themes, how I mastered candy crush in one day.
Whatever. You could think of different things you could talk about Candy Crush
and people who are interested in Candy Crush. If they're really interested in it,
they might find that interesting and they might actually look at it as
opposed to, "hey, why you should that download my app instead of candy crush
because that's never gonna work. And this is- it's difficult to talk in
generalities because you can't really tell you know- you kind of just have
to massage things to see how they work. So we have a blog content
that goes out and we try to get that spread a little bit. Another thing we do
is that when we do finally start getting some reviews in on our apps we will take
that and turn it into social media posts. So, we'll, you know, take
a really good review, it will put it into Canva and we'll create some
image quotes, and we share that on Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook
with like lots of tags So, if somebody's searching on it, they can find that kind
of stuff and everything like that. But another thing that I do, and this
this one, you might think this is a little bit creepy, is going on to Twitter and just looking
for who's searching for, what you're looking for. Like I said, if somebody says,
"Hey, I want to learn Chinese or I've always want to learn Chinese or I think
learning Chinese is really hard, then then I will reach out to them and
say, you know, I agree or I disagree or whatever. and just sort of
start a conversation. But I don't do it from the Overpass Twitter account. We, I
actually have ike 20 different Twitter accounts, you know, and
I use TweetDeck to keep them all managed so I see what they are. Like, if I
reach out to somebody about Chinese Mandarin, you know, we'll use the learning
Chinese Twitter account which is learn CH Mandarin I think. And we have
like RSS feeds and everything that's really- always have content, your
aggregated content that goes out there too. So that it's not just the
spamming vehicle. So when I reach out to somebody, I don't just say, "Hey,
download my app." Because that's, first of all, that's rude and it's just
it's not very effective. Nobody's gonna pay you any attention if
you're just that guy. I mean, every woman knows somebody who's a creep, who
just blurts out something creepy and not just have a
normal conversation like people have. There's a really good book that
came out a few years ago. I know you guys, probably already read it. It was Gary
Vaynerchuk's Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook. Which is really good. It went
through all the social media platforms at the time, most of them are still
relevant I think. And it's been a couple years as I read it. But the best
thing about the book was the title, which is the whole premise of the book, which
is, you don't just go for the the right hook all the time. Like a good
boxer, they go for the jab, the jab, the jab and then every so often the
right hook. So you can't just do jabbing all the time. You never try to make the
sell or never try to persuade them to download, but at the same time you don't
just jump in there like a lot of marketers do and say, "hey, download my app."
I've seen this a lot with social media. It's just somebody goes on a
social media and they just say, you know, the first thing they say is, "hey, buy my
product." I've seen Twitter feeds like this where they say, "hey, you should tell
we have a sale going on now." "Hey, we got this new special way.." "We got this.."
It's always just about them then, right? And even on LinkedIn I get
contacted, I get about you know, it seems like lately, I get about five to 10
requests connection requests on LinkedIn, which I accept all of them by the way.
Connect? Yeah. Yes, if you guys need a LinkedIn followers connect with
me. Because the more people you connect with on LinkedIn, you know, the
higher you get up in the search rankings and everything with somebody's
looking for something that you have, they're looking for app developer, I show
up as a secondary degree connection instead of a third degree connection. So
that you know, it works my favor too, to accept all connections.
But as soon as you accept a connection from a lot of people, you immediately,
almost within seconds some people say, "Hey Eric, we're a software development
company and we blah-blah-blah..." and basically saying why should hire them rather than
starting a conversation like you would with a normal person on the stream.
Anyway, I know this is.. Boy, I know this is rambling on a little bit. I guess
what I want to say is, you've seen other people build audiences, right?
You know that it could be done. You just have to identify who you want to reach
out to. It's different for everybody.
The nice thing about social media and the way that information is spread
now, is that you're in a much more level playing field than you were before even
if you don't have a marketing budget. If you don't have a marketing
budget, you're gonna have to spend a little bit more time,
you know, but it's also gonna be a lot more stable.
The key there is- the key is just to get your app in front of as many
people as possible. Anyway that's it for today.
I'm going to talk to you guys, tomorrow.