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The story of a boring American startup that didn't know how to advertise itself and tried everything

Forbes published the story of an American startup that tried all the major advertising methods and came to the conclusion that the most effective ones are not necessarily the most expensive ones.

The owners of the startup Backblaze understood from the very beginning that they would not be able to attract attention with the essence of their service alone. Their company's business is pretty boring: cloud storage for photos, music and videos for $5 a month. For this reason, the founders of the project had to try all possible ways to stand out.

First, the company erected a large roadside billboard with playful text that read “say hello to your lost files.” Then she appeared on American television: popular TV presenter Ellen DeGeneres showed viewers how the cloud service works, and then distributed an iPad purchased with Backblaze money to everyone present in the studio.

However, these costly strategies turned out to be extremely ineffective. The billboard, according to Backblaze CEO Gleb Badman, once came up in a conversation with an investor, but did not bring the company new clients. Of the 170 thousand people who watched the DeGeneres show on YouTube, almost no one bought a subscription to Backblaze.

The head of Backblaze, to his surprise, discovered that the most effective methods of advertising were such cheap methods as affiliate links, search engine optimization and maintaining the official company blog. Of the online advertising services, only Google AdWords (search advertising) turned out to be effective. Badman set a goal that the cost of one attracted user would not exceed the annual profit from one client, which was exactly $50.

Thanks to Google Adwords, the company earned about $3 from a new user who came from a request with the name “Backblaze” in the text (at a cost of $2 per click). However, by spending money on advertising for search terms like “online storage” ($20 per click), she increased her profit per customer acquired to $200.

According to Badman, getting media mentions was a challenge for the young company, but the tactic was one of the first to bear fruit. Each post on the official blog of the service also consistently provided a certain number of new users.

Facebook advertising, despite its low cost, turned out to be ineffective for such a “utilitarian” service as Backblaze. Using the Google Adsense service (contextual advertising on third-party sites), on which one click cost the company 65 cents, brought it tens of thousands of views, hundreds of trial registrations and almost no users who paid for a subscription.

Badman’s conclusions from the experiment are quite simple: to make a name for a small startup, you don’t need to chase maximum coverage, you need to work with an audience close to it. Expensive and spectacular advertising methods most often distract from the essence of the service provided by the company and turn out to be less effective than cheap targeted ones. For successful business growth, Badman advises, first of all, to concentrate on satisfying the interests of the company’s current clients, rather than on finding new ones: after all, there is no more effective and cheaper advertising than a good sundress.

#Article #startups #advertising #Ellen_DeGeneres