Absolutely a targeting issue. Paid search should be able to produce traffic that converts at roughly the same rate as your non-brand organic traffic (at this stage most of your organic traffic).
How much it costs per click for that quality of traffic depends on your industry, and whether that's profitable depends on your margins. But that's the baseline. After all paid search traffic is the same as organic search in essence, it just depends where the searcher ends up clicking. For you, before you rank highly for core terms, paid search can drive volume you want.
This isn't any advice for the AI slop you're seeking but your line about targeting issues stood out to me as something definitely worth looking at. I don't know how to specifically guide you remotely but if I had to guess I'd advice you to look at your keyword targeting, swapping things away from broad match to exact match, cover more keywords if you can (since exact is narrower than broad) and add negative keywords liberally. Check your search term report for anything irrelevant and apply them as negatives.
If you're not using keywords because Google (or whoever) have pushed you to some 'smart' campaign, then switch to keyword targeting. The smart campaigns are fine but require finesse to handle their blunter settings options.
If in doubt, use AI to figure out keywords to prioritise and negatives to set by default. Or speak to a paid media consultant and get an account review from them, sometimes they'll do this for free.
Speaking of paid ads: we tried google, bing, LinkedIn in the past. Do you have a preferred place that you recommend that you have seen better performance at than other places?
Moving to Bing is worthwhile once you've started to see efficiency drop off on Google.
LinkedIn is very expensive and really only worth it for highly targeted ads. Bing and LinkedIn have a slight advantage because Microsoft has all the job title/industry data from LinkedIn for its targeting options, but it charges more for use of that targeting essentially.
That means those ads pay off more for Account Based Marketing where you have a salesperson reaching out to high-ranking decision makers and you want your ads to be hitting them in a small audience campaign to back up the cold outreach approach and warm them up before the rep secures a call. So, B2B marketing for big contract based work mainly.
You’re right about it being a bit more difficult to market in an age of constant AI slop.
Personally I have two products that I have created that actually solve a problem, whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key.
I would advise you start with friends and family first, just to get some valuable feedback.
Influencer ads and TikTok promotion also is promising — atleast compared to cold outreach or LinkedIn
Hunting for discords or telegram channels or finding where your core audience hang out (not necessarily in real life even though that is useful info) so that you can reach these people and showcase the product.
Ps. I wouldn’t pitch the product like a sale or like you need users. I would pitch it by asking if they could help take a look as I am researching. If you lead with research you will get users
We have excellent feedback from the users who do find us, so there is product market fit for the subset of customers that have a need for our product strong enough to actively search for it, but maybe that's an issue in and of itself: the fraction might be too small, and furthermore, for the (hopefully) larger segment of the user base that don't have a need strong enough to actively go looking, we need to be sufficiently visible for them to chance upon us...? which I guess drives home the message even more that visibility is key...
Thanks!
> whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key
I feel this is true more now than it has ever been! Ideas used to be cheap, execution the bottleneck. Now execution (of product development) has sped up so much that distribution is the bottleneck.
get a 1000 users to your site → 1% conversion → 10 users. if those 10 users have a shitty experience because the product SUCKS, then all of that effort getting them there was wasted.
the alternative is making a GOOD product that people actually WANT to use and can get EXCITED about. you keep it SMALL and work with a limited subset of people who are interested in what you have and are willing to try it in exchange for the PROMISE that it will bring them VALUE. if (and only if) you can truly deliver value for this small group, their excitement and optimism WILL radiate outward. from there, it's about surfing these small waves, paying close attention, and very carefully choosing bigger and bigger waves to surf.
as softwarians we MUST make GOOD products that people WANT to use!!!!! throwing away money on advertisements until you have anything GOOD is a waste of time and effort.