Marketing Case Study: Choosing the Traction Channels to Test at Palazzo Interiors

How we used the Bullseye Framework presented in the book Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares to build a new marketing strategy for our family’s business.

In 2018, my father, Aleksander, asked my wife, Lele, to help build a new website for our 15-year-old family’s business, Palazzo Interiors — an interior design services company focusing on communal spaces, offices and high-end private homes.

Since then, we’ve spent the last months planning a total makeover in the business plan. Of course, Palazzo Interiors is and will be an interiors design services company. However, we realised it’s time to refocus to our core activities and target customers.

As written in the book, I’ve just read, we need to sacrifice parts of the business to make ourselves stronger.

When you try to be all things to all people, you inevitably wind up in trouble. — Al Ries and Jack Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

And finally, we have reached the understanding that we want to focus on designing big and beautiful communal spaces and offices, along with helping to furnish the high-end private homes. This, however, means we need to rethink our traction channels by which shall we reach our potential customers.

We know that there are two types of customers/partners we should reach: the executives at real estate development companies working on communal spaces and offices, and the owners of new high-end homes, whereas ideally, it will be their second or third home as people usually want to do everything by themselves on a discounted budget when it’s their first home.

We could also test approaching companies that are setting out to build/buy/lease new offices for themselves but as of this moment, we believe communicating with the other two groups to be more fruitful in the long term.

So next, we should figure out what are the best ways to get the attention of those two groups of people. And that’s where we’ve turned to the Bullseye Framework.

Nineteen Traction Channels & the Bullseye Framework

After interviewing more than forty successful founders and researching countless more, Gabriel and Justin discovered that companies get traction through nineteen different channels.

Those channels are as follows:

• Viral Marketing
• Public Relations
• Unconventional PR
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Social & Display Ads
• Offline AdsSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Content Marketing
• Email Marketing
• Engineering as Marketing
• Targeting Blogs
• Business Development (BD)
• Sales
• Affiliate Programs
• Existing Platforms
• Trade Shows
• Offline Events
• Speaking Engagements
• Community Building

If you’d like to get a better overview of all those channels, then I’d suggest reading through the book. But I do believe most of them to be enough self-explanatory that I could skip describing each of them.

With so many channels to consider, figuring out which one to focus on is tough. That’s where Gabriel and Justin created a simple framework called Bullseye that helps to find the channel that will help the company set a marketing strategy.

Using Bullseye to find your channel is a five-step process: brainstorm, rank, prioritize, test, and focus on what works.

The Case of Palazzo Interiors

As suggested, we first brainstormed ideas of how we could use any given channel to attract customers. The results are as follows:

• Viral Marketing — Pure word of mouth already works for us and by writing content on every successful project, there is a chance to have people share stuff on social networks more. Perhaps we could try incentivizing people by offering a % or some other perks for their recommendations.
• Public Relations — We could start pitching big and successful case studies as stories to local/specific press or simply offer press that we’d start writing a (bi-)weekly column on how to design various types of projects.
• Unconventional PR — We could send every developer and/or ex-client something fun and Palazzo-like as a gift to remind us, hoping it’s something they would want to share via their social networks.
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM) — Setting up ad campaigns to attract pull traffic makes very much sense. We should test others than Google as well.
• Social & Display Ads — Setting ups ad campaigns to push our messages to potential customers on Facebook has not worked that good. Perhaps test LinkedIn and Twitter?
• Offline Ads — We could test some ad on local/specific press with sharing a promotional code.
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) — Let’s generate lots of content for high-level publications to share, thus building links for us.
• Content Marketing — Let’s start writing 2–3 pieces of content on a weekly basis on various elements of interior design, the latest fashion and customer success stories. Also think about making ebooks, infographics etc.
• Email Marketing — Let’s start a newsletter with design tips for new homeowners OR one about designing happy offices.
• Engineering as Marketing — Let’s set up a simple webpage that gives new home/office owners an estimated cost for their design and furnishing based on the number of people, m2 and other metrics.
• Targeting Blogs — We could look for niche design bloggers/vloggers and offer them a chance to promote some specific brands in exchange for a % or $.
• Business Development (BD) — Let’s design materials (e.g. presentations) for developers to use for % OR set up a strategic partnership with specific developers for $$$. Also, just network more!
• Sales — Of course… (As starting every project includes sales elements for us, then we decided not to evaluate this as a separate channel)
• Affiliate Programs — Offer some bigger publisher a deal where they’d get 10% of every deal coming from using their e-mail list.
• Existing Platforms — Let’s build an app that lets you choose default furniture and shows how it would look using AR.
• Trade Shows — Let’s offer some companies that we’d set up their expo booth for free, in exchange for marketing.
• Offline Events — Let’s host a wine/cognac nights and other types of free educational seminars for all the top developers to build relations.
• Speaking Engagements — Let’s have Airita (the head architect and my mother) speak at various conferences/expos, perhaps host workshops at the office or rent one seminar room in Tallinn.
• Community Building — Let’s set up a Facebook group where we’d share design tips and answer people’s questions honestly, without trying to sell them anything.

From here we started analysing all those ideas, reaching an understanding that most of those activities could be fun things to test once or twice but as per our estimate, they would not have enough return-on-investment.

For example, the ideas listed under Viral Marketing, Engineering as Marketing, Targeting Blogs, Affiliate Programs, Existing Platforms and Community Building could potentially work for us, however, we don’t think they would bring enough customers unless we would decide to focus our services for bigger markets like Germany or France.

Meanwhile, we’ve tested push type of marketing like Social & Display Ads, Offline Ads and Email Marketing enough to see this doesn’t bring the desired outcome in our case.

And as much as we believe in speaking engagements, we think there are more effective channels to focus on, at this moment.

At the same time, I knew right away that we should focus on Search Engine Marketing and Content Marketing so that people searching for services and ideas would find us.

As for any others, we also thought about testing Public Relations, Unconventional PR, Business Development and Offline Events.

A quick discussion with the team, however, made us realise that we’d need to employ extra staff to generate such amount of content for realising the idea under Public Relations, while the Unconventional PR and Offline Events ideas rather work as one-off activities under Business Development, not as separate traction channels, in our case.

So that left us with three channels to test through the next few months, in the path to figuring out which one to focus most of our time.

Saying that we will still use other channels for specific actions, such as Social Ads to promote the content written. But only on ad hoc basis to help out other channels.

Let’s see how it all works out and how will all this affect the business!

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