🙈 StreamAlive's marketing fails

The latest news from StreamAlive and the world of online, offline, and hybrid live events.

Hi there! In this week’s newsletter:

• What the hell is systems thinking?

• Part 2: Our marketing fails 😭

• IN 1 HOUR: Learn a repeatable no money marketing framework from a marketer who has done it all.

What the hell is systems thinking?

From personal relationships to office politics, from public policy to geopolitics.

Systems are at work everywhere.

We don't see them because we've got used to focusing on symptoms and solving problems in isolation.

We ignore high-impact levers to solve problems, preferring simplistic efforts that provide temporary relief.

Next week we’re hosting a #StreamAliveShowcase workshop with Manish Agarwal.

You will participate in stories of blind villagers, an autistic airline passenger, a drug trade busting cop, the war on terrorism, incentives for footballers, dying forest and weather changing citizens.

He will look at how to solve unsolvable problems by showing you how to see what is hidden in plain sight.

Manish is also keen for you to bring your own workplace or neighborhood problems so he can workshop them with you during his session using his Systems Thinking framework.

Registration is free, but seats are limited so save your seat today.

🤔That’s not how it was supposed to go

Last week I pulled back the curtain a little bit on how StreamAlive was growing using free marketing strategies.

If you’re reading this before 9:30am New York time, you can still catch Jessie Paul talk about her No Money Marketing framework that she teaches to brands to help them compete and win in crowded market places.

This week I wanted to talk about our marketing fails, because maybe you can learn from our failures.

What isn’t working for us at the moment

Of course, not everything is working for us at the moment. Oddly, our paid channels are our worst performing sources of new signups.

• Newsletter ads

• Google ads

• Display ads

Fingers burned by newsletter ads

We had such high hopes for newsletters as they seem to be all the rage at the moment. It’s an industry that’s grown so big that you can now programmatically purchase advertising in newsletters from central marketplaces.

We used a tool called paved.com which is a broker between newsletter owners and companies looking to advertise in those newsletters.

We budgeted around $3000 to advertise in a dozen newsletters. Our expectation was 250-300 signups at a cost of $10-$15 per signup based on the promises of the newsletter owners.

What we actually got was 17 signups, so a cost per signup of $176 😱

We discovered a murky world in newsletter advertising with inflated numbers across the board.

Our suspicions were aroused when we started seeing hundreds of visitors from small towns in America which had zero engagement on the page - the average time on site was zero.

We looked at the screen resolution and found that hundreds of visitors had 800x600 or 1280x649 resolutions. This is really unusual, 800x600 was popular 15 years ago, but not today.

After some googling around, we learned that 800x600 is the default resolution on virtual machines.

Virtual machines are popular for bot farms because using one computer, they can pretend to be hundreds of internet users.

We learned that the audience sizes claimed by many newsletters are fake, but they make them seem real to advertisers by using virtual machines and automated scripts to open the emails and click on the links.

That was a $3,000 lesson for us 😱

Suffice to say, once bitten, twice shy.

Google Ads consumed 100% of our marketing budget

The challenge with SEO is that it can take time to see your pages rise up the rankings. Work that you put in now will start paying off weeks or months later.

As a stop-gap you can use Google Ads to secure the top slot while your organic rankings improve, but the downside is that there is a heavy price to pay.

While Google Ads and Display Ads account for 20% of our signups (see the pie chart above), we’re paying a lot of money for those signups and as a company without a big marketing budget, we’d prefer to put that ad spend to work somewhere else.

We’re seeing costs increase to over $25 per signup despite advertising on very targeted keywords like “google meet poll” or “word cloud for zoom”.

As much as we love turning on the taps and getting instant traffic from Google, it’s not a viable long-term strategy for us.

TODAY: No Money Marketing

Catch Jessie Paul teaching her no money marketing framework that any company can replicate and follow to make themselves heard in crowded market places.

And she’s going to be teaching TODAY for you absolutely free.

Time: 9:30am EST / 7 pm IST

Catch us on our social pages

If you haven’t already, check out our social media pages to stay updated on our quirky takes on the latest social media trends and the occasional piece of engagement-related advice.

All the best,

Peter and the StreamAlive team