There are four common situations where you could build something people want, but still not end up with a viable business. There is just no real market. Second, you could build something people want, but there are just not enough customers to reach profitability. Third, you could build something people want, but reaching them is cost prohibitive. As your startup sees more traction, things that worked early on may not scale well or be worth scaling later.
Over time, all marketing channels become saturated. To combat this reality, you should consistently conduct small experiments to answer questions like:.
These first tests should be very cheap a few hundred dollars. Then, quantify your results in a spreadsheet to rank and prioritise your traction channels. These metrics are universal and you can use them to easily make comparisons across channels.
It is highly dependent on your business. Then, enumerate the intermediate steps milestones and order them. However, your original plan will often be wrong: after the first steps are complete, reassess your Critical Path using the market knowledge you just learned. Every activity is either on the path or not.
Good mentors help you stay on your Critical Path. It is hard to predict exactly which traction channel will be best for your company at a particular time. Until you start running tests, try your best not to dismiss them as irrelevant for your company.
There are 19 traction channels. Viral marketing consists of growing your userbase by encouraging your users to refer other users. There are several types of viral loops:. Public relations PR is the art of getting your name out there via traditional media outlets like newspapers, magazines and TV.
Major news outlets are often looking to major blogs for story ideas, which are looking at smaller blogs and forums. Target the right smaller sites and generate buzz on them to increase your chances of climbing up the buzz ladder. Unconventional PR involves doing something exceptional like publicity stunts and customer appreciation to draw media attention.
Publicity stunts need to be creative and extraordinary to succeed. Competitive stunts and viral videos have been successful repeatedly. Customer appreciation is simply a way of delighting your customers in unexpected ways, such as gifts, contests, and customer support.
Excelling in this area is more sustainable than publicity stunts over the long-term. Use search engine ads to test product positioning and messaging, even before fully building it. Test your keywords, ad copy, demographic targeting, landing pages, and CPC bids. Longer keywords aka long-tail are often less competitive, because they have lower search volumes, and cheaper.
Ads on popular sites like reddit, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and hundreds of other niche sites can be a powerful and scalable way to reach new customers. The goal here should be to build an audience, engage with them over time, and eventually convert them to customers. This indirect response strategy usually leads to better conversions than an immediate, direct response one.
Compelling content that people want to share is the best way to engage your audience on social. Offline ads include TV spots, radio commercials, billboards, infomercials, newspaper and magazine ads, as well as flyers and other local advertisements. These ads reach demographics that are harder to target online, like seniors, less tech-savvy consumers and commuters.
Run cheap tests by first targeting local markets, and then scale up to regional or national. Use unique codes or web addresses to track the effectiveness of your offline ads.
Search Engine Optimization SEO is the process of making sure your website shows up for key search results. Two high-level strategies to approach SEO are to focus on the fat-head short search terms or the long-tail longer search terms. Either way, SEO comes down to two things: content and links. Link building is often the more challenging of the two. One way to get quality links is to produce amazing content.
Many startups write posts that receive hundreds of comments, lead to major PR, result in thousands of shares and, ultimately, lead to new customers. You need to create quality content to succeed here. Reach out to influential industry leaders, do guest posts, write about recent news events, and create shareable infographics to increase the rate of growth of your audience.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to convert prospects while retaining and monetising existing ones. Utilise email marketing at any step of your relationship with a customer: customer acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue generation.
It draws on inter-views. Choose the book you like when you register 4. You can also cancel your membership if you are bored 5. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard.
For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Traction will teach you the nineteen channels you can use to build a customer base, and how to pick the right ones for your business. They offer a three-step framework called Bullseye to figure out which ones will work best for your business.
But no matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs. Short-link Link Embed.
0コメント