RailSupport Growth Hacking Experiment #1 - Paid Ads
In case you missed it, I launched RailSupport.co last week to test if there was a gap in the Ruby on Rails support market for services like small bug fixes, seo updates, and copy changes. WPCurve runs the same type of business and was the primary motivation for me running these tests.
Summary
My first experiment for marketing is a staple in the marketing world: paid advertising. I’m quite fond of leveraging the Twitter and Facebook Ad platforms and so I set out to create an ad on each and see how they performed.
Using Noah Kagan’s guide, I created an Ad on Facebook that targeted an audience of ~32k people across 8 or so major cities. I played around with the ad manager for awhile before I stumbled on a Behavior that seemed promising…people who manage business operations. So, I targeted audiences ages 25-55 who manage business operations. I created a simple ad image using Canva.
My FB ad has been runnig for 4 days, reached 1760 people and generated 36 clicks to the railsupport.co site, costing me $17.47. I’ve yet to generate any signups from this ad.
Thoughts
In hindsight it was probably hopeful that “people who manage business operations” would include any one familar with Ruby on Rails. Rather than target people who manage business operations I’m going to target people who work with or use Ruby on Rails.
I created an ad on Twitter using the same image and targeted keywords and hashtags related to ruby on rails like “small business”, “rails security”, “rails help”, and several others.
My Twitter ad has been running for 4 days, reached 6,771 people and generated 25 clicks to the railsupport.co site, costing me $20.00. I’ve yet to generate any signups from this ad.
Thoughts
I may modify the keywords and hashtags for this ad. Ruby on Rails tweets tend to be either job postings or developers talking about a new feature.
Up Next
Modify the targeting and let these ads run for another couple weeks.
I also plan on reaching out to some communities and soliciting feedback.