Paid advertising is relatively straightforward: pay a platform (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and drive traffic to your website. Plenty of SaaS companies do this because it is direct, measurable, and easy to scale.
Likewise, we use paid ads at Ahrefs too. But with a twist. We use paid advertising to promote our content.
Why? Well, a few reasons:
Most people don’t sign up for software after seeing an ad. That’s just not how the buyer’s journey works, and we’re aware of that.
We pitch our product in all the content we produce (tactic #1). So each article basically acts as a sales page. Seen from that lens, we’re actually driving traffic to an “educational sales page.”
Content needs to be discovered in order for any next step to take place. If no one’s reading your content, then they cannot be educated, link to you, or consume your “sales pitch.”
That is not to say we don’t use paid advertising to get sign-ups. We do. But we only use it for our free tools like Ahrefs Webmaster Tools. It’s a much easier “sell” than trying to convince someone to buy software based on just the first impression.
Dividing the workload like this whatsapp number list allows both the vendor and the affiliate to focus on their strengths. The improvements are similar on desktop and mobile. Most of the focus in 2021 was on mobile results.
Read our guide to PPC marketing if you want to learn more about using Google Ads to drive traffic and leads.
8. Conferences
Every year, we speak at a number of conferences. And they get us sign-ups:
Written reply of someone who learned about Ahrefs through an event in Bali
Events, like podcasts, are aplenty. You can always find one to share your expertise at. They don’t have to be a 10K-person event; small, local meetups work well too.
If in-person events are not possible, you can always look out for virtual conferences and summits. In fact, Tim did one earlier in the year for the AdWorld online conference.