The Lean Approach To User Acquisition
I usually use the same approach every single time before starting any type of side project or testing any new channels. I try to approach growth hacking as lean as possible. If it’s a side project, I try my best to build out a solid foundation and understanding of my potential customers prior to when the app is finish building.
What works for me might not always work for you, but I always start off marketing by asking myself a few questions. I usually write these questions out and try to answer them myself. This will help me validate my ideas and targeted marketing channels.
- Identify 5 target categories.
The first thing I always tell myself to do is to identify 5 target categories. For example, if I was building out a CRM, then those categories could be something along the lines of sales manager, real estate brokers, insurance brokers, small business owners, and anything else that you can think of that would benefit from a CRM system.
2. Find out where they hang out
Where are these people located? Are these people on Twitter or more of a Facebook type of person? Are they on any specific forum or group? Is it a tight community with a lot of offline meetup? I always try my best to identify as many channels as I can. If my product was targeted towards real estate agents, then I would want to be everywhere they are. I would want to be apart of everyone of their communities. I personally like to do research on each individual channel to see which one can help me achieve the highest results. When it comes to doing research, I love to use plain Google, Twitter, Followerwonk, Buzzsumo, Alltop, Google News, Google Trends, Groups, Meetups and wherever these people might be. Sometime I turn off Adblock to see which keywords are associated with which ads so I can locate their channels.
3. Talk To These People
Why guess when you can learn from talking to your customers. I like to approach these people through email, Linkedin, Twitter, and other social blogs and ask them what they think about my product. This really helps me get a sense of what my customers are thinking about. What don’t they like? What do they like? What you think is the best is usually not what your customers think is the best, which sucks I know. Instead of worrying about growing my product, I like to talk to random people and see if they will even consider using my product because 8 out of 10 times, they say they will use it, but at the end of the day, they won’t even sign up.
4. Identify The Channels To Attack
What are the best channels for you to attack? For example, if I was running an ecommerce site that sells regular cheap wallets, then it would be a complete waste of my money to target Linkedin ads. Usually during the talking phase, I like to ask the people where do they hang out or where do they find out about similar products. This helps me identify the channel I need to attack. Another thing that I like to do at this point is to look into my competitors channel’s. Where are they advertising? What kind of ads are they using? What’s working for them and how can I do better? Things like that help me out a lot. For b2b it might be webinar. For b2c it might be instagram/social media.
5. Start Blogging
I always believe that content is king and that content is one of those marketing strategies that should be implemented early on, even before the product is built. We’ve seen Hubspot achieve excellent results by doing this. The good thing about content is that it stacks up and continues to build on top of each other, as long as you’re pumping out stellar stuff. Blogging is a lot more powerful than you think. Not only can you develop a ton of brand awareness overtime, it also can show that your startup is a trustworthy startup that knows what they’re doing. I’ve seen a tremendous amount of inbound traffic coming from blog referrals at every single startup that I’ve been apart of.
Last but not least, I like to make sure I keep track of everything from the very beginning. I use a combination of Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Spreadsheets, Notes, Intercom, SQL etc. Basically I want to know as much as I can about my channels.
Interested in reading more? Subscribe to my personal blog at http://wilsonpeng.com
