When I joined InstaLively it was still a startup in its infancy. I was the first marketer on-board and frankly I did not have much in terms of experience. The challenges that were laid out in front of me were pretty simple yet very steep.
- Find a way to gain traction fast.
- Get more people to sign up for the beta.
- Rank the website for certain keywords.
The first two were pretty straight forward as they fell on to best practices that are followed by every Digital marketer out in the industry. I posted on social media, posted inquiries on Quora, ended up reaching out to people individually and then closing them using the landing page. Ranking the website was harder because I had absolutely no budgets at all.
That is correct, I had zero budgets, no existing networks to tap into and very little hands on experience to achieve this.
This is how it looked on the day of joining.
Now a lot of traffic coming to the website was direct, i.e., it was coming from word of mouth. Social was also giving us decent amount of traffic for a company that was still in the first month of working.
This is how it looked after completion of a month
As i started completing all my daily DM chores I noticed the traffic was steadily increasing across all channels. It was still not enough. It was a steady growth and what I was looking for was something more exponential. I started looking for more ways to get traffic to the site. There had to be a more efficient user funnel which would help me get more people on the website.
This is how it looked in 3 months
We finally achieved this in 3 months of work. How did this happen? All of this was done by putting in absolutely 0 investment. All you need is a good starting point and of course a little bit of luck. Here is how we did it -:
Blogs- InstaLively was a live streaming application focused on lifestyle. We targeted the lifestyle segment and started creating SEO optimized posts that slowly but surely started gathering pace. In the process we finally struck gold with our post on “Places to hangout in Delhi”. This post got more than 3000 shares and got over 10k reads in the first month of publishing. Noticing the interest in this piece I optimized it for ‘Places to hangout in Delhi’ and waited patiently for a couple of weeks for it to settle.
This data is over the span of 13 days
The post started getting traffic like crazy and ended up going viral becoming a steady source of traffic for the website. As you can see, other blogs, while not doing as well as the first one, are still doing a good steady job.
Social- Social was a tough nut to crack because being a live streaming company it was pretty hard for us to align content with the asynchronous nature of social media at large. However the following plan was laid out which helped us gain a large traction while also helping make InstaLively a well know name in the target segment -
- One video a day about the local news done in selfie style interview.
- One Gif format calendar for the special streams happening on the app in a day.
- One theme of the day video which could be tech, fashion, education etc. &
- One stream from the app which gained traction to be shared on Facebook.
This helped us achieve the desired numbers in the social category and gain huge traction.
However, you may ask how did it help us get downloads for the application. That is a topic for another blog though. I will detail in the next blog how ASO and blog helped me get 20k downloads a month with 0 costs incurred.
Reach out to me here.