Nine Consumer Marketing Lessons from Bootstrapped Testing

Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two–and only two–basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business. -Peter Drucker

Consumer marketing is tough, particularly when your consumer makes a purchase decision as infrequently as once a decade, as is the case with cars. To combat these challenges, we’ve thrown a lot of stuff against the wall. Generally, consumer startups should be careful not to spend money on marketing until they have their product and distribution well scoped out. But they should use marketing dollars to accelerate their speed to learning through tests, such as testing channels via micro campaigns, ad copy via Adwords, logos via Facebook or GDN, etc. With that caveat, here are nine things we’ve learned while testing marketing strategies in a challenging space.

1 — Lean on bleeding edge channels. New distribution channels often generate meaningful volumes of traffic before they figure out monetization. For example, many companies were obviously built off of SEM in the early 2000’s and Facebook ads in the early 2010’s, and some believe that influencer marketing presents an attractive ROI opportunity today. At a macro level, as content platforms and channels proliferate at a higher rate (which seems to be the trend), some will succeed more quickly than they monetize, and arbitrage opportunities will exist for marketers courageous enough to move big dollars to them quickly.

2 — Trust your users, not your intuition. Imagine a spectrum of relative understanding of your product. In the beginning, your team is on one side, the rest of the world (your customers) is on the other side, and the gap is enormous. Job description notwithstanding, your team has the worst perspective of any team or person on the planet to understand the palatability of your value proposition from your customer’s perspective — they literally understand the product too well. Therefore, as it relates to clearly communicating what your company does (on a billboard, on a landing page, wherever), be sure that your team is acting on data, not on hypotheses. Watching people who haven’t heard of your company use your product is also extremely helpful — we find that user testing provides the “why”, whereas Mixpanel data only provides the “what”.

3 — Fish where the fish are. If you have a long sales cycle in the consumer space (the worst of both worlds: long lead time that B2Bs face plus the one time nature of the consumer purchase), then it’s critical to identify where your low funnel customers are hanging out, and to get your brand there too. A great case study on this front is TrueCar (side note: TRED is a happy customer of Truecar on the B2B side). Truecar successfully built a brand in the consumer automotive space by hitching its wagon to a network of affinity groups such as the USAA, AmEx and PenFed. Thousands of people visit these communities every month with the intent of getting a car loan or buying a car. Truecar’s ability to cherry pick customers at the end of a long sales cycle fueled their growth and carried them through the Great Recession.

4 — Keep it simple. Today’s consumer has the attention span of a goldfish. Get to why immediately. The more you ask people to think, the less you will convert (editor’s note: my soul died a little bit while writing that last sentence).

5 — Be different. Choose a different font, a different color, a different name. Be bold.

6 — Don’t be afraid to get dirty. If it’s cheap enough, a low converting channel can pencil. If you’re worried about participating in an ugly low converting channel (such as flyers or trinkets), your competition might be too, which means that it might be cheap vis a vis that Adwords campaign you’re itching to expand. If it pencils, it pencils.

7 — Industry PR is blah, tech PR is ehh, consumer PR is gold. Although fake news is the new news, consumers seem to still believe what they read. If you can position your company for stories in consumer outlets or with influencers (the new PR), you might get a huge bang for your buck/effort. Full disclosure: we suck at PR, but when we get it, we notice immediate impact.

8 — Hit them twice. Real world marketing validates digital marketing — and vice versa. When we first started to test campaigns in the traditional world we were blown away by the increase in performance of our digital campaigns. The longer your funnel, the more important it is to commit to digital and physical channels.

9 — Content is king. Content strategies are difficult to implement, and they require an amplification/distribution plan of their own (social media is obviously a great way to distribute content, but PR/influencer amplification is much better), but if they’re executed well, the benefits can far outlast paid digital strategies.