IF YOU’RE THE AVERAGE consumer, you may not have heard of DigitalOcean, a cloud hosting site for developers. But here’s why it’s an interesting case study: The site has grown exponentially since its 2011 launch, raising $123 million from investors and registering nearly a million users.
Mitch Wainer, DigitalOcean’s chief marketing officer, says the company expanded through a series of marketing hacks, outlined below, which other businesses can use.
First, he recommends inviting a core group of customers to try out a “beta” or early version of your product or service. In DigitalOcean’s case, the startup demonstrated its first product at a New York tech meetup—the perfect place to find its developer customers. It signed up fifty. Wainer says he followed up with phone conversations with those early adopters, asking them a variety of questions about their favorite foods or books or blogs. The point? To come up with a blueprint of a typical customer—a key to targeting the rest.
After that, he says he allocated a small marketing budget for getting more customers. You may be bootstrapping, but getting the world to find your product or service isn’t going to happen without a bit of investment, he says. Set goals, such as doubling your users or customers within thirty days. “Whatever it is, you want to set targets and goals month over month, and you want to be tracking day to day,” he says.
As an online business, Wainer says he found discounts or promo codes—distributed via website banner and text ads—to be highly effective. “We used BuySellAds.com and BuyAds.com to find relevant websites to place a banner ad on,” he says.
In the beginning, it’s important to closely monitor every online marketing campaign you set in motion to understand what’s most effective in getting people to sign up or take action. Wainer suggests creating monthly key performance indicator (KPI) reports, an easy thing to do with a simple spreadsheet populated with data from Google Analytics as well your conversion data. “You want to build monthly reports to track your channels and your spending,” he says.
DigitalOcean also tried so-called content marketing, providing programming tutorials on its site to build credibility and attract customers. Wainer recommends that startups aim for about twenty posts per month of content, hiring a writer if need be.
As a tech startup, DigitalOcean was able to quadruple its number of users by “A/B testing,” or comparing versions of things like call-to-action buttons, pricing models, and messaging to see which was most effective, he says. But any company can play with pricing or offerings. He also recommends refer-a-friend campaigns (he used a referral automation tool called Ambassador) and contests to give existing customers an incentive to sign up more customers.
DigitalOcean also used Facebook and Twitter ads to spread the word about its product. On Twitter, for example, the company pinpointed key “influencers”—people who have the power to affect the buying decisions of others—retweeting them to get on their radar. “Those relationships build more awareness and spread [your product or service] via word of mouth,” he says.
Lastly, the company used MailChimp and Campaign Monitor for help with email campaigns. If customers dropped the service, Wainer says DigitalOcean sent automatic emails from the CEO, asking for feedback and crediting their accounts, which led some customers to reactivate.