Structure your Zero-Dollar Marketing Strategy

In the last couple years, there’s been a lot of talk about zero-dollar marketing — how startups aren’t spending on marketing while still growing!

I was a guest in a podcast InConversation with Vivek Khandelwal, Founder of Datability Solutions where we discussed how you, the business owner or marketing head, can devise a strategy, structure your processes, and align your team for zero-dollar marketing.

You can listen to the full podcast here.

IS ZERO-DOLLAR MARKETING REALLY A THING?

To understand how zero-dollar marketing became a thing, think about what were the marketing channels available to you a decade ago — print media, TV, and out-of-home media. Because of the nature of these channels, real-estate was limited leading to higher prices.

The ubiquity of the internet has opened up numerous ways to reach your audience — mobile, email, social networks, other websites, etc. There are, now, multiple channels that you can leverage in creative ways to reach your audience at costs that are significantly lower than before.

This advancement in technology has lowered costs and is challenging marketers to get creative and spend as little money as possible to reach their audience. But be ready to double down on efforts and time.

DEVELOP THE MENTALITY

If you’re convinced that a zero-dollar marketing strategy is right for your company, understand the mentality you need to develop.

A zero-dollar marketing strategy is a process, not a bag of tricks.

Let’s say, a Twitter tactic of following your competitor’s followers helped one company get a million users in a month. You think that implementing the same tactic will work for you as well? In most cases, a resounding no. To be successful, you need a scientific mind to uncover what works for you.

It involves setting up a culture of rigorous experimentation, learning from data, and being ready to fail a lot. Without a scientific process, you will try a lot of things without capturing your learnings to improve with time. An experimentation process will help you stay on track and optimize your learning.

To be clear, though a zero-dollar marketing strategy is not about buying clicks, it requires investment — time and resources.

Read what Brian Balfour suggests the first steps in building the growth mentality.

THE GROWTH FUNNEL, TEAM STRUCTURE, AND METRICS

Traditionally, marketers have concerned themselves with the top-of-the-funnel. However, when you’re crunched on money, you want to make the most of the users you get into the funnel. Thus, it’s imperative that you must have an air-tight funnel. To ensure an air-tight funnel, you need to identify the most important metric for each step and understand which part of the funnel lies with which team.

Let’s say that we’re a B2B product. The following table shows the classic 5-stage growth funnel, the main metric for each stage a founder should be concerned with, and the team accountable for that stage.

BUILD YOUR EXPERIMENTS

Once you have a clear idea of how to track success for each step of the funnel (the customer’s journey), you need a clear experimentation process.

The Bulls Eye framework, as discussed in the Traction book is a great framework. Imagine the framework as 3 concentric circles.

• Outermost Circle: Brainstorm ideas with your team to affect a single metric within a step of the funnel. Estimate the cost and impact (potential upside) for each of them.
• Middle Circle: Choose 2 or 3 ideas with the least cost and the highest impact. Set-up the experiment and execute it.
• Innermost Circle: Take the results from the previous step and see if you achieved success. If you achieved success for one of the experiments, double down on that idea and optimize it to get the most you can out of the idea.

How to setup your experiments?

The main crux of this process is to design effective experiments, with the ability to call whether the experiment is a success. You need to keep the following things in mind -

1. Write an experiment document: Document why are you running this experiment and what the experiment consists of.
2. Timelines: An experiment has two timelines — the setting-up time and the running time. The setting up time is governed by what resources you have available, the running time by how long it will take to reach statistical significance.
3. Goal: Start with a modest, but quantifiable, goal. If you hit this goal, you’ll call the experiment a success.

LOW HANGING FRUITS

A zero-dollar marketing strategy is a systematic way to uncover what works for your business. Nevertheless, there are some channels you can use straight away to get the process started.

1. SEO: This is a long-term strategy, and does not reap rewards immediately. But it doesn’t cost anything and can be potentially very rewarding in the long term.
2. Virality: Finding a way to nudge your users to invite friends doesn’t cost money. However, it’s hard to get it right. Get your basics right about referral marketing to start with.
3. Social: Get a Facebook page, Twitter handle, and Snapchat handle to get started. You won’t get astronomical results from this but can get the ball rolling.
4. Customer Service: Embed the culture of great customer service. Nothing fuels better word-of-mouth than awesome customer service.

BENCHMARKING

There are no holy grail benchmarks. Every business is different and so are benchmarks for them.

You should find published benchmarks around the kind of metric you’re trying to experiment on, but don’t make it your end goal. Your end goal is always your historical performance. Try to improve upon them.

However, be aware of diminishing returns. Once you hit a number and haven’t been able to affect it significantly with newer experiments, it’s time to move on — you’ve reached the maximum.

For more discussion and real-life case studies, listen to the podcast.