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Open Channels FM
Strategies for Selecting Effective Marketing Channels
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In this episode our host Katie Keith chats with Afshana Diya, CMO at WPDeveloper about strategies for selecting effective marketing channels for WooCommerce and WordPress businesses.

They touch on a lot of topics including the importance of understanding your target audience, leveraging social media and affiliate marketing, and the nuances of promoting free versus premium plugins.

Together they bring you some great insights on the value of organic content, the significance of customer support, and the challenges and benefits of different marketing platforms.

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Key Takeaways

Understanding Your Audience is Critical: Identifying the target audience for your WordPress product is the foundation of any successful marketing strategy. Different plugins and tools attract distinct user groups, such as agency owners, front-end developers, or business owners. Knowing where these groups “hang out” online helps tailor your outreach effectively.

Leverage the Power of Communities: Engaging with existing communities or creating your own, such as Facebook groups, can foster discussions and build trust around your product. These groups often act as both a feedback loop and a sales funnel when used strategically.

Combine Organic and Paid Marketing: Content marketing, such as SEO-friendly blogs and YouTube tutorials, remains a cornerstone of organic traffic generation. Paid ads, however, should be introduced only when the product and website are optimized for conversions, ensuring effective use of your marketing budget.

Influencer Marketing and Affiliates Work: Collaborating with influencers who align with your product’s niche can amplify its reach. Offering affiliate commissions and building personal relationships with affiliates ensures higher engagement and better sales.

Freemium Model Success Depends on Value: Offering a feature-rich free version of your plugin builds trust and user satisfaction, leading to higher conversions for premium versions. Transparent communication about premium features through dashboards or email campaigns can further boost upgrades.

Experiment and Measure Performance: Effective marketing relies on testing various channels and continuously analyzing their success. Metrics from platforms like Google Analytics, UTM codes, or custom tracking tools can reveal which strategies to prioritize or abandon.

Design and User Experience Matter: A user-friendly interface and clear onboarding process are essential. A good product alone isn’t enough; intuitive navigation and polished design help retain users and drive positive reviews.

Diversify Marketing Channels: Focusing solely on one platform can limit growth. Trying multiple channels, from social media to affiliate marketing to video tutorials, enables businesses to discover what works best for their audience and scale accordingly.

Links

Timestamps with Chapter Titles

  • 00:00 Introduction
  • 00:40 Guest Introduction: Afsaneh Diya
  • 02:03 Marketing Team and Growth at WP Developer
  • 02:53 Choosing the Right Marketing Channels
  • 07:12 Facebook and Social Media Strategies
  • 11:48 Influencer and Affiliate Marketing
  • 25:33 Freemium Model and Plugin Marketplaces
  • 37:17 Content Marketing and SEO
  • 40:59 Measuring Marketing Success
  • 44:54 Final Thoughts

Show Transcript

Katie:
Hello and welcome to Woo BizChat at Do the Woo. I’m Katie Keith, co-founder and CEO at Barn2 Plugins, and today we’re going to be talking about how to choose the right marketing channels for your WordPress business. To do that, I’ve got an excellent guest on the show today and so I’d like to introduce San. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Hi Kade. Thank you so much for having me. So you are the CMO at WPDeveloper. Can you tell me a bit more about yourself and about your role to introduce yourself to people in more detail?

Afshana:
So I’m the CMO at WPDeveloper. It’s a WordPress product company. I joined here in 2018 when the company was just starting. We had only few thousand users at that time over the last few years. Right now we have around 6 million users using our WebPress plugin. So yeah, my background has pretty much about marketing, so you can say that I was all in this space. Later on I moved with product marketing and stuff,

Katie:
So yeah, impressive. So how big is the marketing team at WP Developer now?

Afshana:
So WP Developer is quite diverse, like marketing design and few other teams works collaboratively, but particularly in marketing team we have around 15 people at this moment.

Katie:
Nice. Wow, that’s a lot of people doing marketing then, especially since you’ve helped grow it from nothing. Very impressive.

Afshana:
Mainly that happened because we have multiple WebPress plugin, so right now we have almost 10 plugin that we are working on every day. So we have different team member for each product. So that’s how the team code bigger.

Katie:
Yeah, so when people get into marketing, they need to choose what type of marketing to do and there’s lots of options. But before we get into the specific marketing channels and which ones work best, let’s talk about your market because there’s no point doing any kind of marketing unless you know where your audience are. So firstly, do you have any advice on that? Who to target and where they are? We are talking about WordPress product

Afshana:
Today, right?

Katie:
Yes.

Afshana:
Or WordPress.
Even if we talk about WordPress product, you would definitely agree that even for WordPress product, it depends based on the plugin you have or team you have. For example, there are few marketing channel which we can use which works better for WordPress, maybe doesn’t work for sales or other platform, but works good for WordPress. But then again, for particular plugin and the kind of service it offers, the marketing channel will be quite different. We have one particular plugin, it’s called template ly, which is basically a template library.

So we have around 5,000 ready template that you can use with one click for Guten Bark for Elementor, and it also has a platform where you can share your work with your core worker so they can edit the template on the cloud. So for these tools, probably the agency owner or front-end developer, they are the right market, they’re the right audience to use this product. So I need to reach the places where this agency owner or this front-end developer, they hang out. But if you talk about another product like Easy Jobs, which is a recruitment tools. So for that, I need to reach out to the business owner who has their business, who are hiring people so they can use this to build their hiring platform. So you see even in WordPress plugin, the audience will be quite diverse.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s a really good point about who the audience is. At Barn2. About half of our plugin customers are people building their own website and about half are agencies from freelancers and so on, building sites for clients. So I find that makes it really hard to tailor our marketing, who are we talking to because it does seem to be about 50 50. So I tend to word things for the end user, the person who owns the website, because that’s not going to alienate the people who are building sites for clients. They can think through their user’s perspective, but it always feels a bit clumsy. And as you say, people that are building sites for clients hang out in different places online than people that are building a website. So that’s a really good point.

Afshana:
Yeah, yeah, I mean if you consider early days of a product which is not pretty stable or already doesn’t have any user base, the new product probably is better to get started with the specific place where this targeted audience hang out with. So it could be a small Facebook group, the example I was giving about eops, like business owner who are hiring and posting about their need for hiring so we can directly reach out to them and show how it can be good for their company. On the other hand, when you already have a stable product who is already doing good, people are talking good about it. So that place probably blogs and videos and other things even works a lot better than the small group because you are targeting broader audience, right?

Katie:
Yeah, that’s true. Yeah, let’s delve into Facebook and social a bit more because that’s a marketing channel that a lot of WordPress companies don’t particularly utilize or if they don’t get that much back from it. So at Bond two, we are not great at social media marketing as an individual professional. My Twitter brings a lot of business benefits in terms of the WordPress community, but as a company, our company brand accounts don’t generate much business for us. But it’s interesting what you said about Facebook groups. It sounded like you were advocating for a new product, doing a more sort of direct cold outreach with people that you meet on Facebook. Have you had a lot of results with that

Afshana:
For particular one, two product? Yes. Not for all. Julie Co-founded one hosting panel. It’s called X Cloud. We launched it last year. So after that we launched it very small. At that time we created a Facebook group. We tried to invite few people who were testing our product beforehand, so they invited few other people and that group is one of the most engaging group I have right now. So what happened is a lot of people actually joined the group, saw the discussion, asked few question about their where, and then they make the purchase. So a different kind of funnel it, it’ll work for that product, but I’m not going to say that it’ll work for another one.

Katie:
I really like that. So you found a gap basically where people wanted a place to talk about a particular niche that maybe wasn’t being met and that’s why it works. And another thing which is interesting about that is that you created a Facebook group because one decision which product makers need to work, need to make with their WordPress products is whether to go to existing online communities and join those, whether it’s Reddit or Facebook or whatever, or whether to create their own and try and build and nurture that. When do you think each of those is the right thing to do?

Afshana:
It also depends, right? Always. Yeah. So for X Cloud, what happened is we also tried to see the existing community. We had a lot of conversation on those communities when we launched the product, people had a lot of comparison comparing with other product. So what we tried to do is we tried to be proactive, we try to answer their question and we try to invite them in our space in our group where there are more people talking about the same topic, so you can get the answer easily from there. So that works. But then again, there are few products for those or probably for the audience of those products, they don’t use Facebook, so it doesn’t work for those product,

Katie:
Right? Yeah, that’s always hard. On the one hand, if they’ve got an account that saves a bit of friction for them, but then they might not use that anymore, so that’s hard. I’m interested to know how you invite people to a Facebook group. What

Afshana:
We tried to do is since we were building that product for more than two years, so after certain phase, we try to invite people to start using the product for free, see how it works, and at that place we try to invite some influencer as well, people who manage probably a hundred servers. So when they tried to use their product, our product, they were pretty impressed because X cloud is one platform that we built. With all our experience and expertise of WordPress, we put all together and build this platform. So when people started using, they were actually impressed. When they were impressed, they tried to let their audience know about the product. So I guess that’s how we got traction at the very starting after launch, we had a pretty impressive launch campaign even more than what we

Katie:
Expected. Wow. I’d say the majority of WordPress businesses probably don’t do influencer marketing, so that could be a channel they’re missing out on. How do you convince an influencer to test your product and then what benefit do they get from promoting your product if they like it? That also, it depends.

Afshana:
For some influencer, we tried to show the value, probably there was some influencer who were using our competitor, and if you look closely, you will see they mention about the good stuff of a product. Then also they mention about what more they would like to have. So when we build X Cloud, we try to put together all of the things that people talk about that they really want but they don’t get. So we try to focus on the specific points and did this kind of outreach personally. So we build personal connection, we tried to show the value, and I think one of the major things that product itself, it has some promising value, so it was quite easier to convince people.

Katie:
That’s good. So do they get affiliate commission? Do you pay them? What’s the benefit for the influencer?

Afshana:
Yeah, we have affiliate program. So after we launch, if they sign up for our affiliate program, they will get up to 30% commission. And also for some influencer, we actually try to get the influencer who are talk a lot about hosting and server and other stuff. So most of the people, they actually manage a lot of software broadly. They have a lot of client and other stuff. So for them, X cloud actually look much promising than any normal product probably. So it was quite easier for us.

Katie:
So you’re targeting influencers that work very closely within the same area as what your product does, so it’s super relevant to them?

Afshana:
Yeah, yeah. Super relevant to them. And most of the cases what happened is, for example, if you already use that thing and you would like to try, if you can get something even better, so fast try is quite easier In that case, and since we were pretty confident about the product, we knew if someone try cloud, they will have very good opinion. And what we actually got from most of the cases, what happened is you compare the pricing of X at the same time. Few other competitor had a way cheaper deal for the lifetime license as well. And in some Facebook group people try to do the comparison. YX cloud done pretty new one, it is so expensive than the other one, which is in the market for already few years. So we got very lucky that even before we answered the question, we got many user who proactively answer on behalf of us that how satisfied they are and how they are migrating their client server to X Cloud. So that is one benefit that we got at the very starting from influencer campaign and also from Easer feedback. So yeah, I think that works very well.

Katie:
Yeah, that really highlights the importance of having an excellent product because it kind of sells itself. It doesn’t sell itself because you need to get it in front of people, but once it’s in front of people, the quality of the product has to shine through. And that is half of marketing really. Like for example, let’s go into affiliate marketing a bit more strangely at Barn two, we used to have quite a big proportion of our sales from affiliates when we first started and now that’s really dropped off and most of our sales come from our own methods, which maybe it makes sense because when we were new, we didn’t have our own following, we didn’t have such a good domain authority on our site. So our affiliates did have an audience and they were able to get our products in front of people. So I started off by doing guest posting on some sites and with their affiliate links on their websites.

And this was typically quite prominent WordPress blogs who often write about different products in the WordPress space. And then when they started selling, they could see that they were getting regular sales. And with my best affiliates, I was then able to convince them to produce regular content themselves about my plugins and most will refuse to do that. But my argument was you can see that my products sell now. You can see their good quality, you can see my website convert once you’ve sent people to my site, therefore I’m going to give you keywords suggestions and article outlines and you go away and do the content. And those are the affiliates for me that are the most successful. What would your advice be about affiliate marketing?

Afshana:
We actually have pretty long affiliate marketers. We have many affiliates who joined proactively to promote our product. But if you look around, you will see there are only some affiliates who are producing content on a regular basis and those are the people who are actually doing good. So one thing is that I see many affiliates who actually promote WordPress, Shopify, sas, probably even gadgets and many other stuffs and their audience is quite cluttered drivers, but the affiliates who are focused on WordPress or probably we also have SaaS products as well. So the failures who are focused on SaaS or for example affiliates who are focused on hosting and other stuff, they are the one who is promoting X Cloud better. The affiliate who is promoting WordPress deal only, they are promoting our WordPress plugin better. So it’s all about consistency and the right audience. I mean if they don’t have the right audience, they cannot do better even if how good the product is, right?

Katie:
Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree with that. You get a lot of WordPress companies on the affiliate networks like Share a Sale or Partner Stack or something like that in which people can just browse the available affiliate sites and sign up to become a Barn two affiliate, for example, if we were on there, which we’re not, and I think that’s a terrible way to get affiliates because they’re not in the WordPress niche or it’s very unlikely that they are and they’re not going to be particularly relevant or committed to your product. So I think it’s better to just install a WordPress affiliate plugin on your site, affiliate WP or Siren Affiliates or something like that and just do it yourself. I don’t see the benefit of networks. What do you think about those?

Afshana:
Yeah, yeah, same. I don’t believe in network. I believe personal communication rather even for our affiliate, if you can look around most of the affiliate, those are the people who were connected with us. I mean you’ll give some kind of affiliate bonus. It could be 20%, 30%, 50%, whatever it is, but even more than the money, you need to be supportive. You have to be supportive, you need to provide value. One thing that works pretty good for us is whatever the campaign or deal or launch, new product launch, whatever we do, we try to let our affiliate know beforehand. So most of the cases what happens if you are running a campaign for three days or probably Black Friday or five days, so they need some time to prepare the content, then they will promote you. So if you don’t give them proper time, they don’t have the capacity to promote you. So what we try to do is we try to reach out to personally so they are well out, whatever happening and what we are going to do, and they feel privileged that they know it sooner than anyone else, then they will read the content or whatever they need to promote it to their audience.
So keeping personal touch is very important for this affiliate relationship as well.

Katie:
Yeah, I really like that we have things like email sequences for affiliates where we contact them regularly with things like content ideas, case studies of other affiliates that have found success in promoting our plugins and what they did. And then even so I would say not all affiliates are created equal. We have over 800 affiliates and only 15 of them have ever received more than a thousand dollars in commission. I worked out recently, we’ve paid $160,000 to our affiliates ever. That’s since 2016, but 72,000 of that went to one company, one affiliate. So it just shows that you have loads of affiliates and only a small handful of them are the ones that are really producing content about your products, really worth nurturing. You can’t just nurture them all and expect results. You need to target them.

Afshana:
Exactly. I totally agree because there will be very limited athlete who have the audience, which is related to your targeted audience. So it doesn’t matter how many affiliates you have, it’s more about how many impact will effective affiliate you have.

Katie:
Another thing with affiliates is I find them more useful when it is not Black Friday time with Black Friday they publish a roundup and that never generates any sales for us just putting our deals in their roundup. What generates affiliate sales for us is evergreen tutorials about how to do things with our plugins. Have you got any strategies to engage them on Black Friday that works for you? Yeah, for

Afshana:
Black Friday we tried to reach out to the affiliate a month ago, so they know, I mean since we have multiple products and we have different kind of focus every year, we are not going to focus equally for all product first basically product where we have probably added more value or which has more new features or probably a new features, we try to communicate with affiliate, we try to show them the value and how they should create content which will be attracted to their audience. We try to help them with the narrative and for example, the existing user we have, we collect a lot of feedbacks from the user so we know exactly which point where our potential buyers are getting convinced and making purchase decision, which I try to emphasize on those point and inform that to our affiliate so they can use that for their audience to make compression. Right.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s good advice. So another marketing channel that a lot of WordPress businesses rely exclusively on is wordpress.org. So that would be the freemium model where they have a free plugin on the plugin repository or a theme and then they try to upsell people. Obviously it’s a controversial time in terms of free plugins at the moment, but it’s still a valid marketing channel. And at Bond two it’s one we haven’t done that much. We’ve got some free plugins, but that’s not the majority of our sales. We’ve got, for example, our premium document library plugin has a free version which does track regular conversions. We actually release that after the premium version as an additional marketing channel and it’s done really well, but the majority of our plugins are premium only just on our website. How much, if at all, does WP Developer have free plugins

Afshana:
For plugin? Sir? Freemium for all of our plugin. In fact, we have multiple product which is free on WordPress are, which we never tried to build a pro version or we don’t have any intention to build pro version, we just build it. But for pro plugins, most of the plugin, all of our plugin has the free version in WordPress repository and then pro version on our website.

Katie:
That’s really interesting. A lot of companies that have a free version, they just let that do the selling. So I really like the fact that you are actively doing many other things, which I’m sure is why WP Developer has grown so effectively, you haven’t just relied on that one channel. Do you have any advice on how to maximize the free to pro conversion? So getting free users to pay

Afshana:
Well for a free user, you need to give the value on the front. You need to let them understand what you are offering. In recent time, we see a lot of what press plugin has pretty low value. In the free version, there are very limited features and stuff, but in our experiences what we saw is in most of our product, if you are using the free version, you can do almost everything you need. What happened is like when you are giving so much on the free version and people are using it, they’re getting satisfied at the same time you are gaining trust from them. So the few premium features you have or the advanced feature you have in provision, since they have the trust in your product for a long time, they will convert easily. So even after giving a lot in free version, we see conversion rate is getting and increasing with times. So it’s not about just squeezing and giving the limited feature in free version, rather it’s about providing value, gaining trust, and then in invite them to use the advanced features if they need.

Katie:
That is a really difficult balance to get right. I know some of our free plugins haven’t got great reviews because we’ve probably put too much functionality in the premium version. So how do you tell the free users about the premium version?

Afshana:
So in most of our dashboard they will see what features we have, what features are in version or when they are going to use the advanced feature. They can see that we have this feature, but you need to upgrade to pro. We also try to communicate them with email. And one thing that I think why we get good conversion from free to Pro is one particular thing that we try to do for a very long time that we even try to provide customer support for free user as well, which is very, very difficult, especially when you have product like a million user. So there will be a lot of support in free version. So what we try to do is we try to provide free support in what press repository as well as if they are our customer where they are user who are coming to our website do some support. We never say no, we even try to help the premium support with the premium support, even the free users. That’s another thing that we get a lot of appreciation from the users

Katie:
And you have to support them on the forums anyway, so it makes sense. It’s not about the user. The user doesn’t care how they contact you necessarily, whether it’s on your website or what. And at barn two, our wordpress.org support forum messages come through to our Help scout anyway. So it doesn’t really matter to us either what method they use for the support and you have to keep people happy if you’ve committed to putting a product out into the world, whether it’s free or not, you do need to support your users. So moving on beyond free, there are other marketplaces too. For example, if it’s WooCommerce extensions, then you can go on the wound marketplace. And I think there’s also others for things like elementaries and divvy and so on, although I’m less familiar with those. Are you on any other marketplaces? Not

Afshana:
Really, not really. We tried to sell it from our website only.

Katie:
Yeah, we are the same. I think if we were newer then maybe going on a marketplace is a good way to find a captive audience. I personally wouldn’t recommend invato marketplaces, so that’s ThemeForest and Code Canyon because the business model isn’t there, the prices are too low, there’s no recurring payments and all of that. So I would steer clear of that if I wanted to build a sustainable business, even if I was very new, I’d find other ways to get the word out rather than that personally, although lots of people have found success that way.

Afshana:
Yeah, I personally know a lot of people from Bangladesh who are doing very good at Envato and other marketplaces. Mostly I think because they don’t have the bandwidth or they don’t try to do all the thing in-house. Rather they try to rely on the marketplace because some part of marketing will happen automatically in the marketplace, which is quite easier for them. So yeah, I think if you know that pricks, if you can manage it in that way, that is good for you. But personally I don’t advise anyone to go to the marketplace. Rather it’s better to try to build your own customer base so you can directly communicate with them, you can provide value, you can get stay connected and

Katie:
And things like being able to build an email list and owning your user data so that you can contact them, which you wouldn’t get on those marketplaces. In fact, I would say a lot of people that build WordPress products are developers without any marketing experience and honestly no interest in marketing either. They want to build the products and make them amazing, probably support the users but not do marketing. And for people in that category, my advice would be instead of joining a marketplace that takes massive fees and doesn’t let you have subscriptions or something, although some marketplaces do, why not partner with a marketer and get them to promote your product for free? Give them 50%. That’s probably not that much more than what you might be giving some marketplaces. So a business partner could be an alternative for sole developers. That’s actually interesting

Afshana:
Part because people who are not interested about marketing, they think they own the products, definitely they wouldn’t give the partnership to a marketer.

Katie:
Some do I know successful companies that are a combination of a marketer and a developer for example. That’s how lifter LMS started.

Afshana:
People who are doing that, they’re doing good, or people who believe that they need marketing, they’re doing good. But I know multiple press developer who think that the most important part is the product itself. If the product is good, it’ll sell automatically. You don’t need the marketing, it’ll happen. But with my experience, I see that it’s actually combination of product and all of the other things. So it doesn’t matter how good product is or how good you are at marketing, the product needs to be very good. At the same time you need to put all of the others aspect as well.

Even for design as well. Even few years ago, people in what press industry, they wouldn’t bother about design at all, but right now they do. So one thing I keep saying a lot about this WordPress product business that people who are building the product, they need to think the end user, not like a developer. So one common tendency in WordPress ecosystem is the product owner. They are developers. So they think most of the time in their way solving a problem. In a way developer do solve the problem, but you need to understand that what press ecosystem is for people who are probably don’t have any skillset so they can just drag and drop and use the product. So your product needs to be designed in a way that end user appreciate it and it can be user-friendly.

Katie:
Yeah, absolutely. And things like onboarding to your product so that as soon as they click activate, what do they do next? It may not be clear to them. So things like that are crucial or they’ll just delete it straight away.

Afshana:
Exactly. Because I mean in some product they have very nice features, but probably the navigation is not good enough. So people cannot actually figure out where they will find what. So this UI and as well as ux, it has to be done in a way that is user-friendly in 2024 or 2025 because we are not in 2015, right? In the WordPress plugin, they are competing with SaaS product, which is more user friendly, which is more good looking. So we need to bring ourselves to that place and compete ourselves in that level. So even if user compare with the competitor, we stand out.

Katie:
Yeah, definitely. So we’ve covered lots of marketing channels, but we haven’t talked about my favorite one, which is organic content. So for me that is our blog, which is mostly tutorials about how to do things with our plugins. That’s how we got our first sales. When we first launched a product, we found a niche area and launched into it and we were able to rank because nobody else was writing about that. But more recently there’s been lots of Google algorithm changes and I’ve heard a bit of negativity of it from newer product owners about how to get started with SEO and is it realistic, do you think that smaller sites should even bother trying to build up their domain authority and SEO or should they go down other channels these days?

Afshana:
No, no. You need everything. I would say you need to try everything, but content marketing is the key foundation. So definitely you cannot ignore that. Creating high quality content, which is SEO friendly, like tutorials, case studies, those will bring the organic traffic. Then the other channels like athlete marketing, social media, video tutorial, community engagement and other stuff, those will add values to it. So altogether it is a back, right? So yeah, you cannot just ignore content marketing, even not now.

Katie:
Yeah, that’s true. And that’s a good point about video as well, because YouTube is the world’s second biggest search engine after Google and lots and lots of people are searching for how to do WordPress tasks on YouTube. At band two, we have a full-time YouTuber who’s just building our channel and that’s our second biggest source of sales after the blogs. That’s definitely worth doing. When would you pay to appear in search results? So that would be Google AdWords. When should we do it all organically and when should we just pay

Afshana:
After? You are pretty confident about your product. When you are bringing traffic to your website and your landing base and your interface all are ready to convince the user, you should start using paid ads from the very starting. So what happened in our cases, since we have multiple product, I’m pretty particular about the stability. So we have product that we have probably built for two years and I was not satisfied enough to launch it because I don’t want to launch a half bake product. I want to give the basic thing, I mean probably I don’t need to give all the features together, but whatever we are offering, it has to be pretty stable so people can have trust on us, then we can say that we will bring new feature on next quarter. We’ll probably collect bags from users and develop in that way. But yeah, you need to have those balance.

Katie:
Absolutely. Yeah. And I love the idea of waiting until the product’s good enough because if the product isn’t there, then you can’t convert. So you’re paying when someone clicks on your ad, your website and your product needs to be good enough to convert and then not lead to a refund because you’ve paid to acquire that customer. So you can’t just throw money away because they’ll then get annoyed that they don’t know what to do when they install it or it’s full of bugs or something like that. Yeah,

Afshana:
Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Katie:
So before we finish, let’s talk about measuring success. So I’m a big believer in evidence-based marketing and constantly analyzing the results of everything we do marketing wise so that we know where to put our resources in the future. What kind of things do you do to measure the success of each channel?

Afshana:
Yeah, so far different channel. There are different kind of metrics that you need to check. If you talk about content marketing is probably the easiest one because you can see what kind of views you were getting, what kind of click you were getting from those blogs. But when you are talking about channels like YouTube or probably Facebook sometime it’s quite harder to track the exact traction. You can see the bridge views or traffic, but how much money you have made through social media is quite harder to track most of the time. But then again, you need to set certain level of measurement criteria, which you need to check regularly to see what working for you. As I mentioned that you need to try all the platforms. So definitely if you are trying all the platform, you need to see which is working better and which is not. So you can cut down your cost based on those or prioritize one particular channel, which is working better, right?

Katie:
Absolutely. Yeah, it is hard to get the data you want sometimes. So we look at things like where the source of our conversions is in Google Analytics, and we’re also using mamo analytics because we can’t find one we like. So we’ve been experimenting a lot. So we look at where the sales are coming from and because we’ve got conversion tracking enabled, we’ve got a column that tells us how much revenue was generated from each referring website and things like that. And we also do a lot of with UTM codes too much actually. You’re not meant to use them for internal links, but we currently are, we need to do a different type of event tracking for that

Afshana:
Particular thing. We actually built one product, it is called Better Links. It’s a link tracking. We actually built that for our own need. It is more of how your link are getting used, where you are getting data from. So later after our use, a few of our friends, they started using the product better links to measure their performance on their side later we it as a product better links. So yeah, even for ourself it’s quite difficult to track the measurement because we have multiple products, but all of our sales happening in one side, so it’s quite difficult to track all the datas from one place. We had to build our own customized systems to track those data. But yeah, definitely you need to look into those so you can see where you need to improve or where you need to put your emphasis on.

Katie:
Yeah, I’ll check that out. I’ve just it on webpress.org. I see it’s got over 20,000 active installs, so it’s a popular plugin I didn’t know about. Yeah, at the moment we’ve got things like UTMs on all of our blog posts so that we can see which blog posts are generating sales. But that’s quite a clumsy way to do it and at some point we definitely need to replace that. Yeah, okay. Well I think we’ve covered pretty comprehensively different marketing channels. Before we close, is there anything else you’d like to add that would be useful for people?

Afshana:
No, I think this does about many channels, but one thing I keep mentioning that you need to actually try different channel because you don’t know which one will work for your business. We know what can work for what press ecosystem, but for your business particular need, you need to try different channel and see what’s working best. You need to do a lot of baby testing, a lot of experiment and measure what works best and then based on that you’ll figure out the rest. So keep trying. Don’t rely on one particular channel because your neighbor know the channel people are talking a lot about probably that’s not the most important channel for you, or rather probably one another channel could be very important for you, which people don’t talk about much. So

Katie:
You have to keep trying. Definitely my advice would be to try different channels and then measure the results and pick maybe the top two or three that are getting the results and then put a lot into those. So don’t spread yourself too thin long term unless you’ve got the resources to do so. But you do have to try things to find what will work for you, as you say. Definitely. Definitely. Well that’s been great. Thank you so much for coming on. Do the woo, where can people find you online?

Afshana:
So Amy available on X at Ana idea and I also have a website ana.com, so you can connect me anywhere.

Katie:
Perfect. Well

Afshana:
Thank you so much. Bye. Thank you so much for having me Katie. See you soon.

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