Why Developer Need to Learn Marketing to Get Web Development Clients
For all my fellow developers who are like me and want to learn how to run a business with your web development skills, this post is for you.
As developers, we all love writing code and working on new websites or app ideas. But unfortunately, a love of code is not enough when you want to get a web design and development business off the ground.
In the past year of working as an Independent Contractor for a web design agency and working on web development projects for my own clients, I can honestly tell you that just knowing how to code is not enough to start getting clients.
If you really want to work for yourself as a developer, you need to learn how to grab people’s attention online. If you can’t consistently grab the attention of people who want to make use of your services, you won’t get any clients.
So how do we learn to consistently grab people’s attention online?
I don’t know yet… but this is the first post in a series of posts that I will be writing to find out how we as developers can do that.
Every so often, I will publish a new post talking about something new I’ve learned about marketing a business as a developer.
What I’ve Learned Tried so Far
I recently learned how to create a Facebook ad campaign and planned to use this campaign to get new leads on potential client projects. I learned how to do it from an online tutorial and they made it seem so simple.
Well, I ran the ad campaign for a week with a small budget of about $30 dollars, and here are the results I got:
- My ad targeted an audience of people who were interested in E-Commerce and Entrepreneurship (E-Commerce Web Design is my niche)
- My ad reached 1,789 people as they were scrolling through their Facebook and Instagram feeds.
- Out of those 1,789 people, only about 5 people clicked to view the landing page that the ad linked to, which means that the conversion rate on my ad was about 0.2% which is really bad
- Out of those 5 people that clicked, all of them spent less than 30 seconds on the landing page of my ad which means that they left as soon as the page loaded or while it was loading.
Now obviously it’s my first time running an ad on Facebook so I can’t say anything definitive but this data suggests that the people I was targeting were not interested in or looking for E-Commerce Web Design services.
And this makes sense because Facebook is a platform that people on go on to interact with other people. They are not on there to search for a web developer to work on a project for them.
So if you’re going to use Facebook to grab people’s attention and get some new leads, you can’t take the direct approach of just offering your services in the first ad you serve to your audience.
I realized that a much better way to use Facebook is to use it to promote useful content that I make to educate people in my niche on why they should work with a developer.
Then once I’ve built a little trust with my audience, I can go in and try to run a campaign on people who have interacted with my content.
What I will be doing moving forward
Moving forward, I will experiment with Google ads because Google is a platform that people use to find what they are looking for at the moment.
So if someone searches up “E-Commerce Website Design”, maybe I would want my ad to show up so that they might want to work with me.
Now that’s easier said than done because advertising on Google is incredibly competitive and I have no idea what kind of budget I will need just to get started. I don’t want to put all my eggs in one basket so I will be running a Google ad campaign with a small budget and see how my campaign performs.
Hopefully, I get some better numbers than what I got on Facebook.
Please let me know if you find this kind of content interesting.
I’m really trying out this whole build-in public thing and I want all you entrepreneurial devs out there to know that you’re not alone out here.
Also if you have any marketing tips to share with me, please leave a comment. If I think it is something that might be beneficial to me, I will try it and write up a post letting everyone know how it went.
