A Stoic Marketing Campaign

A few weeks back we announced our next experiment in Marketing In Public. It’s now time to dig into the details of Stoic Marketing and share some results.

Stoic Marketing

One of the many challenges solo founders face is the overwhelming lack of time to do all the things a business needs done. Maintaining an active presence on social media is both necessary and time consuming. Many complain that the time spent is not worth the benefits gained and I count myself among them. I’ve yet to find the working recipe that turns social media into customers and that’s why we run experiments like this one: #StoicMarketing

We didn’t discover or invent anything new here. Almost everyone is already using some tool to buffer up a queue of tweets. We didn’t even invent the idea of using historical quotes to fill that queue. What we did was choose to try it out for ourselves.

The goal was to spend the least amount of time possible and have at least 3 tweets a day come out on our account. The process was simple:

  1. Using Tweet Deck (free) we set up some searches on stoicism to find inspirational quotes.
  2. Quote Tweet the missives that could be applied to marketing and the marketers life.
  3. Use the campaign hashtags to link the tweets together.
  4. Schedule at least 5 tweets every day as part of a morning routine.

Results

After only a couple of weeks, our website traffic was dominated by a Twitter as the main referral source. Now, it’s important to note that right now, our traffic is dismal. Twitter being the dominant source is a function of the Law of Small Numbers. It’s easy to be first when you’re the only one in the race.

In our Marketing In Public announcement we stated our goal was to increase followers. We failed. This technique, or our execution of it, did not increase our audience. Thinking about the whole concept I’m now starting to see a flaw in the design.

People don’t go to Twitter to read tweets. They spend time on on Twitter to be Inspired, to Learn, or to be Entertained. The hook for this campaign should have focused more on the “to be inspired” aspects. Instead of tying the daily grind of marketing to a stoic grin and bear it philosophy (negative), we should have been more uplifting.

One more thought on why this technique will not increase the follower count, when you audience is small few people will see your tweets. Growing your follower count is not only about what you tweet, but rather where you tweet. Instead of building your own threads that no one will see, jump into the audience of a larger account and engage in the replies on other peoples tweets.

Borrow an audience to build an audience.