I have two founder friends and they do marketing differently.
One tried an indirect approach, sharing his blog posts with a community dedicated to discussing blog posts:
Well, that didn't work
And the other directly advertised his product in a community dedicated to technical solutions to technical problems:
Helping others while helping himself
The results seem to be flipped. How does he do it? How is he able to pitch to his audience while being thanked for it? Meet Lukasz Wiktor, founder of Personal Discount.
This is how he describes his approach himself:
Syften has enabled us to keep an eye on the topics related to our product. We can easily track posts about discount codes, email marketing, and e-commerce. We can then suggest using our service, or just be helpful by answering questions on subjects that we are familiar with.
Let’s look at his strategy a bit closer.
Stack Exchange
Stack Exchange is a technical community and it only accepts technical answers. Still, sometimes an opportunity will present itself. The screenshot above comes from a thread about time-limited coupon codes. Notice how the user is explicitly asking for an extension.
338 views in a year, very reasonable.
Diehard Redditors prefer to talk with their fellow community members rather than reach out to a company’s support channel. Hard to blame them, it’s very rare indeed to find a company with good support. So why not stand out by offering outstanding support?
Here is one example of world-class support:
See for yourself how Lukasz handled this one.
Community
But you can’t just pop in on a random thread and talk about your product. You wouldn’t want the user viewing your profile to see that you just signed up two hours ago only to answer his complaints. Or worse, that all you do is post links to your website.
You want them to see this:
It’s fine to link to your blog if it’s really helpful:
If you’re looking for quick wins and free money you’ll end up like my first friend. And if you’re willing to spend some time helping strangers on the internet you’ll have results like Lukasz.
Resources
- Personal Discount Blog.
- Marketing on Reddit. A few more Reddit-specific tips and tricks.
- How To Do Content Marketing. Other examples.