Part 1 on how to market your startup for cheap is here. Read that one first please.
Let’s say that you hate cold emailing folks.
Side note – I would say that you should get over this.. You’re going to have to learn how to cold email people. You are going to have to deal with bounced emails, people just writing back “UNSUBSCRIBE” or just being mean to you.
Get over yourself and deal with it. It’s part and parcel of marketing.
Here’s how to do it with paid ads.
You are still trying to validate your assumption. For the purposes of this experiment let’s assume that your goal is to validate that adding billing guides to telemedicine software would be valuable enough for them to make the switch to your software.
Great, now you are ready to get started
On this page
Understand this important thing about cold emails first.
Cold emails were outbound – YOU initiated them.
Your prospect never asked for it.
Your prospect might not be the right person to contact.
They might not even be interested nor looking.
Your prospect might already be using your competitor.
You don’t know the answer to any of that.
With paid ads, you have one very important thing going for you.
Your prospect is telling Google that they are researching telemedicine and probably even further – billing.
One bad thing about PPC (paid ads) – you don’t know WHO is searching.
Well, there’s nothing you can do about that. Hey! At least someone is searching for the things that you say you will deliver.
Now your job is to capture that someone.
PPC ads to see what headlines and content will generate clicks
Normally, when you have a PPC ad running and Google searchers searched for something, saw your ad, clicked on the ad.
You are expedited to give them some value at that moment, on your landing page.
If you do not give them any value, they are just going to hit the back button and not provide you their email address
What can you offer?
You can write a GREAT, long form guide that TRULY would help the Google searcher.
However, this kind of guide takes a LONG time to write, a LOT of research to be done.. A lot of leg work.
Even if you write a long guide (the world’s best guide), it still will not be seen unless a Google searcher clicks on your ad.
Unless you really crack the code of google search intent and having Googlers click on your ad, you are still wasting time.
So, what can you do today?
Create a landing page and start experimenting with ad copies
Head over to google ads and start creating ad copies. You can even start with just jotting ideas down on your notepad. You are going to have to come up with really short headline variations and short descriptions.
Now you are ready with (e.g) 5 variations of ad copies.
Next part is to understand what the google searchers MIGHT be searching for and how many such searches are being done per day/month.
Research the long tail keywords.. That’s fancy way of saying that you don’t have enough money to compete for the really popular keywords, rather, you should concentrate on longer form searches like “Is telemedicine software HIPAA compliant” or “How to bill for telemedicine ?” ..etc..
It is VERY important to also note down the related searches (shows up at the bottom of the search results page.
Or you can use cool, free tools like ubersuggest or SEMRush etc.
Want yet another shortcut?
Simple – steal from your competitors.
Yes, I said it – steal.
Head over to semrush or spyfu and type your competitors’ domain names one by one. For each such domain name, these websites will give you their ads, the best performing ones, the keywords they target and also give you ideas on keyword groups.
You could even get started from there..
What to do after you have chosen your keywords and created ad(s)
Create a simple landing page in less than 4 hrs. Yes, it is that simple.
Head over to a site like unbounce to create a landing page in a matter or mins-hours.
Spend ALL your time on the marketing/sales copy on that landing page.
If you don’t have time for that and just want people to answer your question and validate you, your landing page could do just that. As a question, give an option to respond.
BTW – there’s another section that teaches you how to use Google Surveys to do the same.
Get-Set-Go with your product validation Google ad(s)
Now you are set to start PPC ads.
Hit start and start looking for responses.
If you are getting no responses – no problem. Try another ad set variation.
If you are getting responses, update your spreadsheet religiously, collect responses and once you have a good sample of data (1, 2, 3 etc), then you know your next steps
Each day, go back to your sheet or CRM and start recording how many times your ad is shown and how many times it gets clicked on.
That’s the most difficult step.
First – You need your ads to be shown in response to a Google query.
Second – You need your ads to be clicked on
Third – You need your prospect to actually take the action you want them to take.
We started with an assumption that users would be willing to use our telemedicine software if we added a billing module with real humans answering telemedicine questions for the users.
Retargeted ads – a simple secret.
Want more bang for your buck? Spend larger amounts of money on the initial searches. Once you have 1000 visitors to your landing page, you can then run retargeted PPC ads on anyone that visited your site.
This means that you can “follow” these landing page visitors whenever they browse the internet. Create simple retargeted ads to show up where these visitors browse, remind them of your brand and your ad.. That’s it. Your ad spend reduces and you get more click.
Try this out at home 🙂
Go ahead and prospect.