You have worked long nights, weekends and holidays making your app/SaaS product good. No, not just good; it’s great!!
This could be the next Facebook.
The next Salesforce.
Your tech is so good that customers are going to be throwing themselves at you along with their hard-earned money, eager for what you have to offer them. You’re going to set records for subscriptions, downloads, daily active users, all the categories!
And now, unfortunately, I need to wake you up. It does not do to dwell on dreams and forget to make a nuts and bolts user acquisition strategy.
I hope you don’t feel like I have just thrown a bucket of cold water in your face but if your business is going to thrive and grow then it is going to need a real plan to reach customers. And let’s be honest — the more the merrier.
It does not matter how good your tech is, if people don’t know about it and fail to become your customers, your business is going to die.
No Customers = No Cash = No Business.
There is good news, though. In fact, it’s great news, because the solution to getting new customers, and lots of them, is within your control.
No matter what some people say, you are not at the mercy and whim of the capricious Tech Gods. The power to gain new customers lies within your own hands.
Here are three basic things that all startups should be doing to acquire customers.
1. Plan for Customer Acquisition
There is a tired, old cliché that goes: “failing to plan means planning to fail”.
Old — Yes.
Tired — Definitely.
True — 100%.
As another saying goes, “Hope is not a strategy”. You must have a plan (yes, a written plan) to acquire customers. This is not as scary as it may sound.
First, identify who your ideal customer is. If you are unsure how to do this, read up on customer avatars. This is an essential process for a young company. Sure, anyone can use Instagram, but when that app first launched it didn’t target everyone. Why? Because targeting everyone with a message that resonates with them is astronomically expensive and impractical. Instead, you need to identify your first customer, so make a customer avatar of who that person(s) will be.
Second, decide how many customers you need to acquire. You should know how many you need in total as well as an estimate about weekly, monthly, and annual goals. The reason you do this is so you can work backwards to understand what you can afford to pay per new customer. This is called cost per acquisition (CPA). So if you need 1,000 customers and have $10k to spend, you need to acquire each new customer of no more than $10. Your CPA is $10.
Third, decide how you are going to find your ideal customer and let them know what a great product you have. Once you know who your ideal customer is, knowing how to find them becomes a lot easier. This is the part where budget, reach, and channel come into play. Let me explain…
-If your product/service is new and no one is looking for it, you may need to hire an advertising agency to promote your company on Google and various social networks
-If your audience is aware of the kind of service your company offers, you may need to hire a PR firm to prove that your offering is better than your competitors
-If your ideal customer is actively searching for solutions to a known problem, you should hire an SEO firm so they find your company first
-Maybe your service is so groundbreaking and edgy that you really need a word of mouth campaign to get people to trust you, so you should hire a growth strategy firm
In each of these examples, knowing your customer and your industry helps to inform your decision about designing a customer acquisition strategy. Note that I’ve also only listed options where you hire out for help — as I’ll explain in point #2, there are other ways.
2. Use Free Customer Acquisition Channels
There are many different ways in which you can acquire new customers. Some of those ways can involve you throwing a lot of money into a particular advertising channel for little to no benefit. Others may involve throwing money at a totally different advertising channel and getting remarkable returns on your investment.
It is easy to forget that there are also free channels available for acquiring customers. Yes, the free channels will require time and energy from you, but they are not restricted or limited by your available cash flow.
As a start-up business that responsibly manages its cash flow, you can use and choose whatever paid advertising means you want but do not forget to use the cash-free methods available to you. There are a million strategies you can use, too many to discuss here, but do your research. If you have more time than money, this is where you should start.
Here are a handful of resources to get you pointed in the right direction:
-Matthew Barby (a favorite thought leader of mine)
3. Measure Everything
That which can’t be measured can’t be improved — and conversely, that which can be measured can be improved. Unless you are measuring your key metrics, you will have no way of knowing which if any of your customer acquisition strategies is effective. If you do not know who your customers are, how they found you and why they chose to use your product, you do not know how to grow.
That means you need to become obsessed with data. In an early stage startup, we aren’t talking about big data, smart data, machine learning, or anything like that. But just because you aren’t processing terabytes of data about customer acquisition doesn’t mean the small numbers don’t matter (was that enough negatives in one sentence for you?) The point is you still need to track everything.
If you have never had to track data in an organization before, you need to immerse yourself in a whole new world of knowledge. A few of my favorite books would be a good starting point: Winning With Data, The Sales Acceleration Formula, and Keeping Up With The Quants (A+).
After that, consider whether your organization is large enough to merit acquiring an entry level business intelligence tool. There are a lot of out of the box platforms that will help to centralize and declutter your data, helping you to make sense of up, down and sideways. Until you have a CIO, a simple tool can go a long way. If you have questions about how to find the right BI tool, please feel free to reach out to me directly to have a conversation.
Businesses die without customers. Even when operating on a tight budget there are key actions you can take that will significantly impact the growth of your business. Have a written plan, take advantage of any suitable free methods available to you and always (yes, always) measure the numbers.
