4 ways to get thousands of customers without spending a dime on Google or Facebook ads.

Christine Fiorelli
Sep 4, 2018 · 5 min read

So you’ve got an awesome product/service, a great team, all the product-market fit you can hope for…now all you need are customers!

You could try Google and Facebook ads. They can be awesome, there is no denying it. If your customers actively search for targetable keywords, Google is an unparalleled source of new customers and leads. Facebook is often more expensive than Google, but users on Facebook are highly engaged and Facebook’s ad targeting is extremely powerful.

The major issue with these channels is often cost, and its detrimental effect on margins.

We can all agree that your customer acquisition cost (CAC) should be no higher than your customer Lifetime Value (LTV). However, Google ‘‘LTV:CAC ratio” and you’ll come upon 1001 opinions on what that specific ratio should be.

While we won’t delve into this here, most would agree that your CAC, relative to LTV, should be as low as possible. Plus, CAC isn’t ad spend alone — you have to pay your sales people and account managers. Your ad spend will constitute only a portion of your overall CAC. How much you can afford to spend will depend upon your unique circumstance, but if you are spending more than 33% of your ARR (or specifically — revenue per customer for year 1), you are doing something wrong.

Let’s look at a typical example:

  • Say you are paying $3 per click on Facebook ads
  • Your conversion rate from click to signed-up user is 10%
  • Your conversion rate from signed-up user to paid user is 10%
  • Your ad spend per conversion ~ $300
  • You still haven’t paid your sales people, engineers etc.
  • Your lifetime value needs to be at-least $1000 or more.

When RocketReach first started, we did not have a LTV of $1000, and spending more money on Facebook or Google ads would have been the most expedient way of killing the company. We did try some other things however that worked great on our shoestring budget, and what follows are some tips and tricks that we learnt along the way:

1. Seek Out Partnerships: Find influencers who compliment your offering and can get your product/service in front of potential customers. Partners might include companies offering a complimentary product/service, industry experts, or online reviewers. Reach out to them and see if they would be willing to do a joint webinar, podcast, promotion or blog post with you, or for you.

When RocketReach was first launched we partnered with a bunch of incubators- 500 Startups (https://500.co/), Startup Health (https://www.startuphealth.com/ ), Berkeley Launch (http://launch.berkeley.edu/) etc.

E.g. RocketReach was offered to every 500 Startups portfolio company at a special introductory rate. This was a pivotal moment for the company. 28% of new signups in 2 months came from this 1 partnership, adding many amazingly useful and influential customers to our user base as well. (Read more about that here later.)

2. Encourage Early Adopters: Your early adopters can make or break your company. In the first few months, we spoke to maybe 100 different people who’d tried RocketReach. We fixed bugs, improved our product, and built something that they were excited about. Our early adopters became our evangelists, and referred us to other customers and partners.

An early adopter of RocketReach ‘hunted’ our product on Product Hunt. That day we reached the #4 Product of the Day spot, and within hours thousands of new users were signing up to give us a try. We had so many new users that day that our site actually went down for a short time due to the sudden burst of new traffic!

3. Speak Up: Join relevant communities such as Reddit or Quora and engage with your user community. As you post answers, articles, comments, it will increase your sites ranking on google, and all that traffic will lead to more users. This is a long game, however, and your returns are proportional to your input. This may be frustrating at first, but if you carve out an hour a day to do this, you will start seeing the traffic build up over time. Remember thoughtful and frequent participation is key and can go a long way. Valuable participation in relevant communities has also helped us address the common question of, “is RocketReach legit?”.

In our first 2 months, 75% of our users came from Disqus. We were quite active on Sales and marketing blogs and that drove traffic back to our site. Of almost 800 clicks during that time frame, we saw over 200 conversions. For us, the equivalent acquisition cost via Google ads would have been around $4,000.

4. (Valuable) Content Is Still King: Another way to help with SEO is to make sure your site has content of value to your potential customers. Do you offer information, tips, case studies or relevant advice that they would find helpful? The better the content, the better you position yourself as an industry leader, and a go-to resource for information, ultimately driving repeat traffic, reputation, referrals, and new business!

By sharing articles on social sites like LinkedIn, Facebook & Twitter our newly launched blog has already started to gain traction with 35% of blog traffic coming from social sources alone. On ‘Quindar’ you will find articles that cover helpful topics like this one, growth hacks, advice learned from (lots of) experience, best practices on how to use RocketReach, and much more.

We’ve mastered trial and error and are happy to share what we have learned with you (hopefully sparing you some of the same mistakes in the meantime). If there is a topic you’d like to learn more about please send us an email at support@rocketreach.co and we are happy to consider it for a future article.

Need email addresses for influencers and potential partners? Check out RocketReach.co and sign up for a Free account today.

RocketReach

Our favorite tips and tricks for prospecting smarter and faster!

Christine Fiorelli

Written by

RocketReach

Our favorite tips and tricks for prospecting smarter and faster!

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