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Marketing

In most cases, market and marketing are the key factors of whether a product can be successful, not the quality of the product itself. It is a frustrating truth. So we will put lots of effort into finding the right market and the right marketing strategy.

The principle is that market > marketing > aesthetic > documentation. So, the priority of everything is to find the proper market.

1. Proper Market

The goal is to find a niche (vertical) market, which is a market that has a group of customers that share certain features. As for openingScout, we choose to primarily focus on the Chinese international students interested in SDE jobs. The reason is listed as follows:

First, those students usually have similar urgent needs to find a job to stay in the US. Second, they are in similar social media groups, following the same influencers, and browsing the same websites, which makes them easy to target when we put out advertisements. Third, they usually hang out together in class or school. So it’s more possible that they will share information about openingScout.

Another reason on our side (the entrepreneur side) is that we all have been students looking for SDE jobs.

2. Marketing Strategy

he ultimate goal of marketing is to convince as many people to buy openingScout’s service. There are 2 steps to transform a general “person” into a buying “customer”. First, the person needs to visit our website, which means that he needs to see our URL, and then he needs to click our URL. Second, the visitor needs to actually pay and subscribe to the openingScout service.

To get website visitors, openingScout’s marketing strategy is to hit our market as precisely as possible. And nailing down the customer to a niche market (as we talked about previously) enables us to perform this very targeted marketing strategy. The specific methods are described as follows:

  1. Put out every article “one acre three points” website every 2 weeks.
  2. Put ads on CSSA public WeChat accounts of universities which has lots of students of SDE majors, such as UCLA, CMU, etc. Those accounts are usually only followed/viewed by students of each university, and the cost to put ads on those public accounts is low.
  3. Make Short videos for the articles we wrote. The videos and images are more likely to attract viewers. The videos will be recorded with Apple’s
  4. The money target to earn at the first launch is 500 USD /month. And we will do an analysis to aim for the conversion rate and traffic to achieve the goal.

To convince visitors to buy the openingScout service, we are aiming to build a robust mailing list, with subscribers who are interested in job-searching related topics and trust us to provide valuable content and not to sell their information. The logic behind it is that people hardly buy products the first time they visit the website. The actual potential buyers usually return numerous the site multiple times (P118 Start Small, Stay Small). So the goal is to get first-time visitors coming back to the openingScout website. If we can have a mailing list with subscribers who are interested in openingScout service, and we continuously send those subscribers valuable content, the chance to have them come back to the website and buy openingScout service is very optimal. There are 4 aspects in building a high-quality mailing list (here, “high-quality” means “with subscribers who are likely to buy the product”).

  1. Get subscribers

    To get customers’ email addresses, we need to provide them with valuable things in return, such as useful information and free services for a time period. OpeningScout will give all first-time subscribers a free 3-day service, and 3 real interview experiences depending on the subscriber’s target job.

  2. Make sure subscribers are interested in the topic

    The potential subscribers need to take 2 steps to subscribe to openingScout emails. First, they need to click the subscribe button on the website with their email address and other information provided. Then, a confirmation email will be sent to them, and they will need to click the confirmation link in the email to actually subscribe to the openingScout emails. This is called “double-opt” (P135, Start Small Stay Small). It might seem counter-intuitive since it creates extra obstacles for potential subscribers, but in this way, we can be sure that the subscribers are actually interested in job hunting.

  3. Build trust with subscribers

    To grow and maintain our mailing list, and to turn our subscribers to buyers, we need to convince the subscribers that they can trust openingScout. We only send emails with subscribers’ permission, we always provide an unsubscribe option, and we promise that we do not sell the mailing list.

  4. Maintain the mailing list, and convince subscribers to buy the product

    We will need to be able to continuously provide valuable content for the subscribers who have not bought the product yet. One email will be sent every 2 weeks with valuable information. The content can be the current situation with SDE hiring, interviews with recruiters/new hires/current employees of different companies, tutorials on job hunting, etc.

In addition to building a mailing list, we will also maintain a blog and post articles there. Since the content can be exactly the same as openingScout’s ongoing emails, there is almost 0 extra effort to have a blog. The blog can help with search engine recognition.