Acquisition

Last weekend, team BAX was tasked to start building an audience for something that doesn’t exist yet. That’s right, our simulated startup experiment for study abroad travel is still in the process of being completed, and we’re already trying to attract people to it… odd.

However, it makes sense. Whatever we end up building — a service, a platform, and app — will increase in chances of being successful if an audience is already aware of who we are, and what we do, rather than waiting until our product is finished AND THEN start to let people know.

Our methods for starting to build an audience were:

1. Create a website landing page — This would give viewers a summarized version of our value proposition, our promise to them, and an option to sign up through email for future updates.
2. Create a Facebook for Business profile — Photos with descriptions of what we offer were posted, and boosted through Facebook adds, specifically reaching people who list travel and study abroad as part of their interests in their profiles.
3. Create an Instagram Business profile — High quality photos were posted, with hashtags related to travel and study abroad. Our goal was to make a fun and energetic profile that’s attractive for young traveler students. Just as with Facebook, add boosts were used to reach out to as many people as possible.

We only had our landing page and social media pages up for about 48 hours before we had to report back to our class and present out findings. However, I still had two main takeaways from these for the time we had them:

1. Getting people to look at who we are is easy, but getting them to sign up up in order to stay updated is hard. According to our website analytics, the traffic in our website was constant, but the number of people singing up through email was low.
2. Followers and likes make our social media are deceiving. Pretty, well edited stock photos make the site look sexy, but don’t have any meaning if the users’ likes and following don’t lead to actual interaction with what we’re trying to build — in this case, getting them to give us their emails through our landing page.

As we move along with our project, starting today:

• I’d like to figure out what is keeping visitors on our website from signing up. This can be simply be done by conducting a user test with target users (and perhaps non-target users) by leading them to our website, letting them freely interact with it, while we observe what their behavior and interactions are, and ask for feedback regarding likes, dislikes, keep, and changes.
• Start to look at other platforms that allow discoverability for our landing page, not reliant on followers and likes, such as Facebook and Instagram. As stated before, these small gratifications can be deceiving, as they tell us nothing about the user’s relationship to our product. Although we might not discard these social media platforms, as they have the potential to be sued for advertisement, it’s better if they’re not used as the central audience builder.