Inbound Marketing Case Study

It seems there’s a shortage of real life case studies demonstrating Social Media Marketing as a cost effective strategy.  Most people aren’t sure they quite believe it.  There’s no way of measuring the performance without getting stuck in.  In which case our experience might prove useful for people looking for confirmation.

“Over the last year we’ve been testing a number of strategies whilst simultaneously understanding where our software as a service fits, and where it doesn’t.  Our objective has been finding one or more processes that achieve predictable performance.  Once we’ve figured these out we’ll be able to start scaling up the business.

We’ve had mixed results with everything we’ve tried, but amongst the outliers we’ve seen real evidence that something works – social media.  Here’s a summary of what we’ve tried, and our conclusions.

Avoiding the sales patter, we have software as a service targeted at helping smaller businesses do things that can’t with other software.  It serves in the relationships and operations space and we’ve removed a lot of the typical complexity.

There are things we’re improving, but service levels have been above 99.7% for two years of alpha/beta.  Those people who take a little time to base workflow on our system really like it, and recommend it to others.

Our business strategy can best be described as “last man standing”.

Software development, distribution and maintenance costs are approaching zero.  People are expecting software to be free, or close to it.  Vendors are expected to make a return out of the fact people are using the software, as opposed to paying for it.

The critical success factor has moved from controlling the distribution channel to cost of customer acquisition, and now is move toward cost of “adoption”.  Basically registering a new user buys us nothing.  We only get to make money out of it when they use it.

This is where social media enters the picture, but more on that below.

Our strategy is based around using brains instead of money – no outside equity, no debt, fixed cost close to zero.  This way we may not win a lot of users, but we’ll definitely be “last man standing”.

So bottom line – we have to find a way of dropping our “cost of adoption”.  That means a combination of adding “blue ocean” value with acquisition costs lower than revenue (which is zero).

Our first marketing pilot targeted SEO and Keywords with Google.  This proved enormously expensive, got us a small amount of traffic, very few conversions and adoptions not worth talking about.  Without going into totals, we achieved registrations at around $200 each, none of which ever used the software.

For “free” software this didn’t make sense so our next test was Content Network.  Initial results were encouraging with registrations at around $30 each, but adoption remained horrible.  Conversions ran at close to 10%.  We didn’t get a lot of traffic, but did get registrations, none of which were worth a dime.

Our most disappointing test was paid directory listing.  The cost was only $400 – insignificant alongside what we’d paid for SEO and Keywords, but we achieved nothing at all.

Finally we got into social media.  For the record we’re beginners, but decided to try it out for ourselves.  Admittedly the amount of effort has been significant.  Posting content and asking/answering questions isn’t something to be done in a coffee break.  BUT the results have been staggering.

In just a few months our traffic has gone through the roof (compared to what it was).  Admittedly, our registrations per visit has gone down.  This didn’t surprise us.

What did surprise us was “adoption”.  Promoting our offer through Content Network achieved adoption rates lower than 2%.  Registrations achieved through social media activities have exceeded 30% adoption.  We know we can improve that, so all systems are GO but best of all is we didn’t pay Google a penny. ”

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