Bear Market(ing) Diaries: Focus on Your Winners

There's a saying in investing circles - bulls are right 29 days a month. Bears are right for only 1 day.

That one day erases 29 bull days.

Whether that's beautiful or sad or both, we'll let you decide for yourself. We, on the other hand, are here to share some of our marketing learnings that helped us garner over 12M monthly readers, 3000+ sponsors, and over 100k followers on social media, through the ups & downs of each cycle. The idea behind sharing our learnings is to help your companies maintain their footing on these shaky ground.

Focus on your winners instead of doubling down on your losers

This is for your social media. It has been seen that startups and midcaps try to build a social presence on EVERY social app that there is.

You don't need to do that!

If your Twitter game is strong, maybe you don't need that Pinterest profile.

Each social platform has their meta-rules and inside jokes that can get overwhelming if you try to gobble them all. For example, don't use emojis on Reddit!

At HackerNoon, we went a step further because we could. As a media house that publishes 45k+ writers, getting thousands of followers was easy. So, our goal was figuring out how to get more bang for our sponsors' buck.

We experimented with Ads on all the major social media platforms to see which:

• Brought Engagement
• Reached a wider audience
• Had a lower CPM
• Was easier to deploy

  
  

HackerNoon sponsors buy publishing credits at $499 and it was imperative for us to find the optimal vehicle for social Ads.

We experimented with:

• Customized lead images
• Custom social copies
• Split budgets across platforms
• 'Timing' the ad
• 'Link in first comment'

  
  

We found out that splitting the budget wasn't helping at all. In fact, it was garnering lesser reach when compared to going all in on just one platform.

This is why this newsletter advocates for focusing on your winners instead of doubling down on your ego.

We also found out that (contrary to popular belief) customized lead images and 'link in first comment', despite being very time-consuming and being hard to automate -

DO NOT HAVE A MARKED IMPACT ON THE REACH OF THE POST! Damn, that one was an eye-opener!

So, what does work?

1. Custom social copies brought the biggest impact of them all. Ensure that your social copy follows natural language with hashtags peppered throughout
2. Finding the ideal time is very important. For crypto audiences, the 2 PM UTC time is a golden rule for a reason!

How HackerNoon Buys Ads

Given the finance and tech nature of our content (and our readers), our platform of choice has been Twitter (Chief Twit shenanigans notwithstanding).

We've been spending $20 on every #hackernoon-top-story that fetched about 7k impressions and an 8% engagement rate.

For sponsors, we go the extra mile, or two. Here, we spend $100 for advertising and the results truly shine. The number of impressions skyrocket to over 200k and the engagement rate jumps to over 21%!

This has been so successful that we built an entire offering around it -

1. Buy publishing credits on the HackerNoon brand dashboard (you’ve to create a brand account first, if you haven't already)
2. Number of credits you buy x 100 automatically becomes your AD budget (all inclusive)

Give that a spin to see for yourself or  to learn more!