Tea Tracker First Ad Campaign: Results and Lessons Learnt

I was waiting for waiting to implement a few more features before launch the first advertising campaign for the Tea Tracker. However, fellow attendees of the App Marketing Meetup pointed out to me that with 352 million mobiles running Android. I shouldn't worry too much about making a bad first impression. So I went ahead and created a Facebook Ad campaign for the Tea Tracker. Also, a Facebook page to complement the Ad campaign.

For the Ad, I had it run for about three weeks last month. I set a lifetime budget of $200. I narrowed down the demographics to people who were interested in tea. I also filtered for people in countries known for heavy tea consumption. According to Facebook, the ad reached 474,423 people. Not bad for $200 but what about the return on investment?

The return wasn't great, but that is understandable given that the Tea Tracker is a very specialised app. I did increase my lifetime downloads by 120 people. But did not retain most of them. But that's understandable because, again, this is a specialised app for the niche market of boutique tea drinkers. But I am glad I tried running a Facebook Ad campaign. It'll be useful experience for when I do have an app with a wider potential audience.

The biggest outcome from the Ad campaign was the creation of the Tea Tracker App Facebook page because I did get likes to the page. It's only 25 people but there is potential for the page to grow, but only if I provide worthwhile content. To that end, I am writing reviews of the teas I drink. Publishing them on Medium and cross-posting them on Facebook. I have two reviews up already and hope to review a new tea each week. Who knows, the reviews might lead to more downloads and engagement for the Tea Tracker!

Tea Tracker Slide

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These are the slides I presented to Brisbane iOS/Android App Marketing this month. The focus was on how I am currently monetizing the app, ads, and how I am marketing, I am not. I am in the process improving the UI, adding a social media sharing feature, embedding some affiliated links etc. Once I have completed the necessary upgrades, I plan to undertake a Facebook ad campaign. Facebook ads are cheaper than full Google Adwords campaigns. Plus I can theoretically better target Facebook ads to tea lovers. At any rate, stay tuned for more tea tracker news!

Introducing the Tea Tracker! from Sharmin (Tinni) Choudhury

Social Media Marketing: Planoly

It's almost time for next month's meetup of the Brisbane iOS/Android App Marketing group. So I am still in time with my thoughts on this month's meetup! I presented my Tea Tracker to the group this month and the chief discussion was about how to hire the right developer. But I was more interested in the secondary presentation of the Instagram social media marketing support tool: Planoly.

Briefly, Planoly allows you to plan out your Instagram posts for days and weeks in advance. So that every day, you can post something on your Instagram feed without having to do daily work. Planoly's UI makes it easy to layout images, allowing users to ensure they get enough visual variety in their feeds. Not to mention, make sure that their feeds are full of interesting and relevant images.

To help with the actual image content, Planoly also pulls in public Instagram feeds. Allowing users to easily repost other's people's photos. This latter part is allowed under Instagram's terms and conditions, but there are many who would consider this morally dubious. Especially since proper photo credit is not automatically affixed, but instead left to the Planoly user.  Personally, I would always attribute properly just to avoid any potential backlash from angry content creators.

Social media marketing is new territory for me. As such, I am woefully unaware of the tools and support that's out there for building your brand through social networking. I'll definietly checkout other tools that are available, not to mention, use Planoly to market the Tea Tracker when I am ready!

SEO Marketing: The Pitfall of content generation

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) has become something of a buzzword that many people are aware of but very few people seem to understand. Places like Airtasker are filled with requests that are some variation of "I need SEO." But with no explanation or understanding if they mean they want their website tuned to have a high SEO score or if they want to undertake SEO marketing. SEO tune-up of a website involves a few hours of work to make sure Google has an easy time indexing the site. SEO marketing is an ongoing effort that can be very expensive.

However, the lack of understanding of SEO but the vague feeling that it is something necessary has to lead to the situation that many people are falling prey to unscrupulous "experts." The so-called "black hat" SEO tricks that artificially boost Google ranking but lead to long-term issues with Google penalties is rife! The other pitfall is spending a lot of cash generating content. But the content in question, not generating any benefits. Either because it didn't drive eyeballs to the website it was designed to promote or because the visitors to the page were not becoming customers. In short, SEO can be a black hole of time and money for the unwary.

SEO content marketing can spread a brand and keep it in people's minds. I mean, I find myself visiting Domain a few times a month just because stories from their news section keep appearing in my Facebook feed. I'll certainly Domain if and when I need help with real estate. Of course, I keep going back to Domain because their articles are interesting and good. Good content like that can be expensive to produce. Even with online job boards offering up writers and infographic designers for reasonable costs. Still, I do think SEO content based marketing is worth pursuing.

For my part, when I built this website, I made sure to ensure that this website was optimized to make it easy for Google robots to index it. Squarespace, of course, made life easy and I am grateful for that.  I paid less attention to SEO when I built the website for my company. This was because I wanted the website up as a placeholder while I worked to get apps released on the Google Play Store. Now that I have a few apps up, I am starting to layout marketing plan. This includes tuning my company website. But also, looking at setting up separate websites for each of my apps and using said the website for focused marketing. At this stage, I would probably generate all my content myself. That could be an interesting task. Especially for the Tea Tracker. I am looking forward to researching different types of teas so I can write about them!

UpSpot, Photofeeler & AngelList

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I don't remember how I heard about UpSpot. I think, I got an email invite to try it either through LinkedIn or AngelList. But having received the email, I decided to check it out. The website seems to focus on highly skilled technology professionals, allowing a social media platform for technology consultants/freelancers. So UpShot certainly fulfils a niche as Freelancer is too general and full of odd development jobs. So I was intrigued with UpSpot and decided to make a profile.

I started it but stopped, and forgot about it. But the founders of the site are very proactive as the site grows, so one called me up and encouraged me to complete my profile. I started doing that but quickly realised how out of date everything was. Including my profile picture. Indeed, I didn't have a good recent head shot! Trying to decide on profile pictures lead to discovering PhotoFeeler, which is a website that rates profiles photos in the category of business, social and dating. You can pay for votes or vote yourself to earn karma. I got about five photos rated just using karma. None of my pictures scored very highly. The picture with this post was the best of the lot. I think it is good enough for now. I'll have to take some better head shots later. As for UpSpot, I haven't gotten any jobs through there yet. But I am cautiously optimistic.