Updated Site Content
Home Page
Our original home page was intentionally focused on email marketing as we wanted it to rank highly in search engines. This didn't work, plus many people use our product for use cases other than (or as well as) email marketing; so the message was confusing.
So we have:
- Made the home page 'generic', with an explanation of multiple use cases
- Removed some of the content – it was too cluttered, too wordy and probably too intimidating
- Replaced the image at the top of the page with one that is simpler and brighter.
- Added a section to show that the images can be shared with 1 line of code
Landing Pages
We then added landing pages for some use-cases:
We can direct different people to these landing pages, to provide a more focused reply. It also allows us to improve the SEO as we can have more specific text for each use case, vs having a small amount of text for each on the home page.
Footer
We reorganised the footer and added links to the new landing pages.
Language
We have decided to use US-English for the website pages and most blog posts. US English ranks higher than British English because of the size of the market. Although some British-English will slip in, because we are English 🙂
Marketing
The co-founders (Kevin and Paul) are technically very good, but we aren't marketing experts. We have read books by Gary Vaynerchuck, Seth Godin, 37 Signals and others – and we have watched a lot of videos (recently, a lot of MicroConf) but it isn't our strength. This is why we are grateful for getting support from people.
Over the past few weeks, we have been talking to Chand Babude who has given us a lot of advice on how to identify a target audience and market to them. Our marketing focus over the next few months will be:
- Review software sites for our competitors. Record the types of people leaving reviews and what they are saying (likes and dislikes)
- Create a customer profile(s) based on step 1
- Look in Reddit, Quora and other websites for groups where this customer profile likes to hang out and chat
- Engage in those websites/forums (not sell, but offer help and advise). Look for common questions and address them in the OKZest website/blog (including long-form articles)
- Find 100 websites, 100 bloggers, 100 newsletters, 100 YouTubers that the target customer would be interested in
- Email the websites, bloggers, newsletters and YouTubers an offer/proposal to write a guest blog. Also pitch them OKZest as a service. Also offer them to be an affiliate (earn commission on customers they send us)
- Write more 'linkable assets' and infographics
Blog Posts
Added 3 new blog posts.
The blog post Unleash the Power of Personalization: OKZest for Sales and Marketing Professionals was written after completing steps 1 and 2 above (i.e. creating a Customer Profile). I then fed the information into ChatGPT (which I use a lot) and created a blog post from it.
AppSumo
AppSumo turned out to be a major disappointment.
Every interaction with them from onboarding to exit was bad.
The onboarding process was very slow, they didn't promote us at all in their emails and didn't list us on their home page.
They said that we would be listed with them for 120 days, but it ended up being almost 6 months – then they removed our listing with no notice.
We didn't get many sales with them – and most of the sales we did get were directed there from us!
The reason why we used AppSumo was to get exposure – epic fail!
We started the month with 79 followers and are now at 93 – that's an increase of 17.72%. Using Publer's 'Recycle' function (combined with Spintax format), we have continued to add new posts that get repeated on a weekly/monthly basis.
Twitter Outreach
Twitter do still allow some calls to their API for free, so we will continue to use our tools ourselves, as we have been getting engagement (and some sales) via this method.
SEO
We are using Screaming Frog to help fix and improve our code and SEO. It's a really good tool
Email Deliverability Issue
Each week we have been updating our email DMARC DNS record, inline with what we documented, however when we went to pct=100 , it caused Gmail to block our emails (so some people didn't get our signup confirmation emails), I'm not sure why because this DMARC check tool didn't report any issues – and we have done it before with our cold email domains, without any issues. We have left it at pct=75 for now and will review it later.
All Work and No Play…
Paul went camping in his Tesla Model 3 😊