Marketing general

How come there isn't a marketing general in Veeky Forums ? Lots of people make threads asking questions about marketing, yet no one has made a thread dedicated to these questions.

Lets have a Marketing general.

OK, guess I'll start this thing myself...
if a website doesn't even have users after 1 year (after posting it to Veeky Forums sometimes) but its idea seems to be good (got lots of praise about it), should I rebuild it, spam it more or simply drop it?

First spam it.
If it still doesn't work, then decide to rebuild or drop.

Although it sounds like what you need to consider is why the website doesn't have users.

I'd go with this.

Depending on what type of site it is you might need to make some fake profiles and stuff to "get people interested" - pretty much all dating sites do this.

>Although it sounds like what you need to consider is why the website doesn't have users.
the website uses FOSS text-to-speech engines to make audio files that you can convert to videos and/or share. sadly, the voices suck, and the best TTS engines out there are not free (as in, neither FOSS or $$). also, I guess the UI sucks in mobile.
I'm not really sure what groups would use the site. I tried making/spamming memes and stuff, and that didn't take off.

>I'm not really sure what groups would use the site.
there's your problem.
Identify (or create) a problem. Present this website as the solution.

Quite frankly i don't know what use it could be? Why convert to videos? Do the videos including the written text?

You know more than me, tell me, who could use this
>Teachers and Lecturers?
>Boardrooms, instead of stenography?
>Management when sending memos?
>Train Schedule Announcements?

>Do the videos including the written text?
no, you give the site the URL of an image, the URL to the audio and it will create a video with audio that you can use for, well, whatever you want.

btw, the site is nask dot co

>College starts next week
>I'm on Marketing

What should I expect Veeky Forums?

Depends on your school. If your uni doesn't have a solid business school then you shouldn't expect much. An MBA is probably in your future if you like marketing.

Layout needs work man. It's too plain, see if you can find an image like pic related, except... ya know better. I think visuals will really make the site more self explanatory and inviting.

I still think the real problem is there's no suggestion for what problems or purposes it can solve.
It'd be great for lazy university students who want a more audio-visual presentation, they can throw in some images, type up there notes. Hit play on a video and let the computer do all the talking.

But think more broadly, where is this technology useful?
Safety announcements? Public Transport?
hell maybe you should start selling it to all the guys here who are trying to make mad Youtube money, that way they can create "original content" with minimal effort and not appearing on camera!

EVERYONE: MARKETING IS ABOUT SOLVING (or creating) PROBLEMS

btw. who here watches the Gruen Transfer?
Compulsory watching for anyone interested in marketing.

what do you people think about black hat SEO?

hey, thanks a lot for the advice!
do you think the website and/or voices are not too bad?
my problem is, obviously, that I suck at design and marketing.. and I'm not really convinced that the website is good enough, so I'm not really sure if I should keep working on it. I wish I had a partner or something.

No idea about SEO

I didn't really try many voices, so I don't know -- I wonder if they are intelligible enough, but then again I didn't click around.

Set the default setting to the most intelligible, clear, understandable settings. If people want to customize, they will.

>and I'm not really convinced that the website is good enough,
Well if you're not convinced then who will be?

Highly suggest you read up on Michael E. Porter, this dude is the Guru on "strategy".
Also remember what Theodore Levitt said:
>People don't want quarter inch drill bits, they want quarter inch holes.

With this website you currently have the drill bit, but you don't know who wants holes.

What are you're problems, let's see if we can solve them.

I have one: I got a film I'm about to go on a publicity tour. No idea who my target audience should be, without a target audience obviously I don't know which channels, demographics etc. etc to target.

End game is NOT to make a profit on this investment, it's to build a following so my next film will be profitable.
I'm really selling myself not the film.

Any ideas how I can work out who I should be selling to?
I don't really think there's any similar films out there ("If Wes Andersson remade Blow Up is about as close as I can get") so I can't just rip off other people's marketing strategies, but that also means that there's the potential there is a untapped audience who will eat this film up voraciously.

So my questions are
>Who are my key demographics?
Once I know that, then I can find out what media they're consuming, which blogs, influencers, forums, websites, cafes, bars, cinemas, magazines, zines, reviewers, art spaces they frequent and try and spam those.
>What appeals to this demographic?
Then I can target the material to those appeals, sus out which elements of the film they will be drawn to.

How would I find out that short of getting a random cross section of the community into a room to watch it and seeing which demographics respond to it best?

I like it, solid yet simple. But if you need more spice, contact me and we can start a plan to not only visualize but grow your site. (I'm a web designer)

One use for the tool might be staring you in the face; forums.

I'd love a tool that can transcribe threads into audio files that I can play in my car. Self development forums might go for this idea I think. It sounds like it'd take additional work to bring it up to that level, but it's an idea that solves a time-related problem.

To the marketing guys on here, I have a couple of questions. I'm learning how to increase sales for businesses, particularly conversion rate optimisation (CRO).
There are many areas that I need to work on. Some of these I can learn solo; copywriting, landing pages, wordpress etc.

However, I don't have a site of my own to practice optimising on. There's a free tool for Google Analytics, but nothing for CRO. My goal is to freelance using what I've learned, then eventually begin a service business.

Does anyone have any suggestions? The obvious answer is to build a site. I'm just wondering if there are alternatives. A site takes time and money, and I'm not looking to learn about site-building. Plus I'd need to build traffic. Although it would have benefits in what I'm trying to learn as I'd gain experience from a client's perspective.

Any suggestions, especially from those who've learned similar stuff, I'd be majorly grateful for. Thanks

>I'd love a tool that can transcribe threads into audio files that I can play in my car.
that's really difficult to do well, because you have to parse many technical words, badly formatted text, etc. you'd end hearing non-sensical speech.
I don't even have a degree in CS/CE, but AFAIK, not even the state of the art is able to manage natural language in a useful way. I wish, I really wish I could do that, though.

Bumping

The only was is to build a site unfortunately, there's no other way to simulate human behaviour for CRO. Remember, you don't optimise pages. You optimise user journeys, can't do that without users.

I highly recommend that you learn sitebuilding, just don't pay anything for it.

Download XAMPP, and then you can explore with Wordpress on it. Nobody but you will be able to see it, and you can experiment all sorts of web design.

Two principles that I've guided myself by in CRO and just business sales in general are:

1. Make It Simple. A fairly common mistake is for businesses (particularly small businesses) to have overly long and convoluted signup processes.

A tale of two clients:

I had two clients that specialized in B2B products and services. To just be able to talk to the first one, you needed to fill out a form asking for:

First name, last name, email, telephone, number of employees, and what you need help with.

The second one on the other hand, required just a name and an email address.

Over a 6 month period, the first one got around 100 completed forms, and the second one got 10,000 completed forms. Of those 10,000 forms maybe 9000 were spam and bullshit filled out by bots but there were still like 1000 legitimate claims. You can always filter and qualify leads later, but you don't want to miss a customer who was too busy or too lazy to fill out your form.

2. Make It Of Personal Interest: Nobody is going to just browse your website for shits and giggles because they're bored, and they especially won't fill out the sign-up sheet either. You can start by making content that's tailored to a specific target.

For example, if you provide EMR software, you best be sure you have content that doctors would enjoy on your website. Moreover, you need something to push people into actually signing up, be it a discount, limited time offer, etc.

Finally, you need to stress the importance or necessity of your product or service. If you actually have a good product, somebody NEEDS it. There's a demand for it among some groups. It's those people you need to sell to, and the worst part is they might not even know they need your product. For example, IT. No business can run without IT, but so many people try to do it themselves and they gloss over really major details like backups and disaster recovery.

To perfect it would be difficult but to do in general wouldn't be too hard and could be useful for some people.