Finding a Niche Community: FabuLingua
If you’re launching a new product, (or in this client’s case, an entirely new company!), how do you know who your target customer is? Even if you think you have a clear and big market, it may be too big for marketing success without a bottomless budget.
FabuLingua, a Spanish language learning app for children, was ready to launch their app to the world. The challenge: with a totally new product, knowing where to start marketing is difficult – and trying to target “parents” without narrowing the audience further was overwhelming.
The solution:
Marketing is most effective when you have a specific audience in mind so you can address their exact problems, needs, and desires. Marketing to “all parents” is too broad and there is too much variation among parents and parenting styles. We did a brainstorming exercise with FabuLingua to determine potential narrowed target audiences, using criteria like “likeliness to try the app” and “interested in additional educational tools”.
Our experimental target then became parents who homeschool their children. Not only were they a large enough market without being too large, but the homeschool community’s tendency to spread information by word-of-mouth added important value for a new startup with limited budget.
We decided to do a campaign with bloggers, social media influencers, and podcasters to get coverage and discussion about our app in as many homeschool-focused places as possible.
How we approached it:
We did research into the homeschooling space to find our right-fit partners, and found a combination of specific individuals we wanted to work with who could provide authentic connections, and networks of popular bloggers and writers to give us broader reach.
While each partner was given a small sponsorship fee, we more importantly designed a 3-month free trial offer that was unique to their community (longer than the standard 1-month trial offered to everyone).
We provided a writeup and guide to our app, along with lots of high-quality photos, logos, and graphics so our bloggers could create accents and pinterest-ready images to use in their posts.
The result:
We spent less than $3,000 total. 22 blog posts, 76 social media posts, and 2 podcast interviews, which gave us valuable backlinks and great testimonials to use in marketing and on the website.
For a new company, links back to our site (backlinks) are very important because they help Google and other search engines know that your site is legitimate; provide interest and value; and give context for what your site is about. In this case, if someone were to search “Spanish language app” or “Spanish for kids”, our efforts make FabuLingua more likely to appear on the first page.
We also achieved a $1.37 CPM in digital advertising for a very specific market. CPM is the cost per thousand impressions, a measure of how many people saw a post or ad, and for what cost. A “good” CPM can vary depending on your target audience, how expensive they are to reach, how much a lead or prospective customer is worth to you, etc. — but for Fabulingua, this was an excellent return on our investment.
As an additional bonus, we received a handful of ratings on the App Store.
The lesson:
By finding a niche market, and utilizing them well, you can accomplish big gains with a small investment.