October 2018

In the previous post of our Growth Hacking series titled, Growth Hacking for SaaS, SMB & Startups Bootcamp Part IV – What is CONVERSION – Getting the MOST from Every Encounter’ we discussed about Conversions, A/B testing and how to get the most from every encounter a business has with the customer.

We are now in the fourth week of the Perfect Funnel Challenge series. This week, we will learn about building a growth program, culture and mindset. If you haven’t already, take a moment and sign up for the “Perfect Funnel” CHALLENGE so that you can see firsthand what a best-practices Funnel looks like.

GROWTH CULTURE

Inculcating a growth culture in your organization is essential for building a growth engine and boosting your business. As a business you need to find the fuel for your growth engine and that is not a simple process. Companies that consistently show top line growth have an investor mindset. Basically, they squeeze funds from underperforming areas and allocate these funds to areas with high scope.

Growth culture starts at the top. The leadership team must ensure in creating a culture of growth by making experimentation a part of everyone’s jobs. Only when individuals are motivated to experiment and try out different things, they would know which are the high performance initiatives and which areas have higher potential.

Such experimentations would result in continual improvement across the organization. Emphasize the importance of experimentation, constant improvements to all the stakeholders of your organization.

GROWTH HACKING TEAM

Companies have started embracing a new role, Growth Manager or Growth Hacker and also a growth hacking team. Their role in the organization would be to define company’s growth plan, implement growth programs and optimize the sales funnel.

An internal growth team is important but having said that fresh outside perspectives and expertise are also necessary to enhance business growth. As it’s rightly said, homegrown is good but sometimes they ‘can’t see the forest for the trees’.

However only larger enterprises hire a dedicated Growth team or seek growth consultants who charge a fortune. Small businesses should integrate the growth culture into every role. New ideas and experiments by employees should be given embraced. Bonuses could be announced to motivate them to experiment different initiatives. Successful initiatives could be highlighted and rewarded.

KPIs or KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Defining the right KPIs is critical for a company’s success. Top management should identify the important goals for the company. Once the overall company’s primary goals and KPIs are identified, the next steps would be cascading down the KPIs to groups or Line of Business (LOBs); then to individuals and then finally to campaigns or initiatives.

Cascading could be through functional structure of your organization or through business processes of your organization. It is important to cascade KPIs to support functions like finance or HR too.

While cascading KPIs the management should ensure that everyone in the organization should have one primary KPI against which their performance is measure. It is equally important to make sure that businesses should not cascade by duplicating the efforts or measure, instead they should cascade by building the cause-effect chain.

All marketing or sales campaigns and initiatives should also have one primary KPI to measure their success. Businesses should create a visual model of how the KPIs relate to business goals at each level in the organization. The KPI flow should be such that every individual’s KPIs feed up to groups’ and LOB’s KPIs and then these finally map on to the KPIs of the organization.

SET UP BASELINES AND DECIDE ON THE LIFT %

Establish baselines for your business goals and these baselines will act as a starting point. Before you begin implementing actions that would help your business improve growth, you must first establish a baseline. Baselines are metrics that show your business performance. For instance, if you consider your social media profiles, number of fans, likes, comments, shares are the metrics you should set baselines for.

Once you set baseline values, decide on the lift you want to achieve. For example, if your baseline Facebook fans is 20000 and you want to lift it by 10% to reach 22000 fans in 6 months.

Post your KPI metrics along with the baselines and expected lift at highly visible places in your office, so that everyone knows what are the higher level KPIs for the organization as a whole and what are the KPIs for their respective team like the marketing team, etc. It is a great idea to have a whiteboard or a video screen to report baselines, results, positive or negative changes on the key metrics.

Online KPI dashboards like Geckoboard also make it easier for organizations to create tailor made dashboards for different teams. These online dashboards can then be displayed on a TV with minimum fuss.

GROWTH EXPERIMENT TRACKING TOOLS

Tracking various growth experiments is critical in knowing how different experiments have performed and which are the ones that yield desired results. One of the best options for tracking your experiments would be to build your own tool in Google sheets. This doesn’t involve any costs and you can customize as per the requirements of various teams in your organization. You can learn more about how to keep track of your growth experiments with Google sheets here. Airtable’s Growth Experiment Chart is a brilliant example that you could refer.

Trello is also yet another popular tool for tracking tasks. You can track all your growth experiments from inception to completion without spending a dime using Trello. Their growth template is quite popular. You will be able to monitor experiments real time to get an idea of how they are performing.

Asana is another tool that can be repurposed to track growth projects and tasks. Asana facilitates connected work with your teammates, saving time and improving collaboration.

Northstar by GrowthHackers.com is an amazing tool that aids discovering new and better ways to accelerate growth. However this is an expensive tool and large enterprises are ones who predominantly use this tool.

A/B TESTING AND MULTIVARIATE TESTING PLATFORMS

Businesses could analyse various platforms where they can track their growth experiments. Google Optimize is Google’s new website testing and experimentation platform, a free tool that facilitates tracking and testing your experiments. Watch this video to see an overview of how the tool works. It is definitely great to get your feet wet and A/B test your experiments to optimize performance.

Visual Website Optimizer (VWO), Unbounce and Optimizely are other great experimentation platforms or A/B testing tools available in the market.

GROWTH PROGRAM PROCESS AND PRIORITIZATION

The growth engine process is simple. You start by indicating the metrics you want to focus on improving. Then evaluate how your growth engine is impacting the selected set of metrics. And finally validate the experiments based on how successful they were and focus on scaling your best opportunities.

Businesses may have several growth experiments that they have to run and test. Hence it is important for businesses to prioritize experimentation tasks based on their expected impact and level of efforts required. Certain tasks have higher confidence levels based on their likelihood of success while the rest may have average or low confidence.

DURATION OF GROWTH EXPERIMENTS

Now that you have a wide range of ideas to set up growth experiments, what is the ideal recommended duration for growth experiments. The majority of experiments won’t reach statistical significance. Generally, they yield only directional results, so you should specify with certainty (e.g. 95%) as to whether the particular experiment can be declared as a success or failure. The recommended duration for running various tests is around 4 weeks or 28 days. This is the suggested best practice that is followed by large businesses like Google.

REPORTING RESULTS

Businesses could opt for hypothesis testing for various growth experiments. It is of utmost importance to share the results of the testing with the team so that they can understand the impact of the initiatives taken. It is also equally important to talk about the recommended follow up actions that have to be taken.

Employees should know what these tests proved and what you’ll be doing next or what are the kind of tests to run in future. While explaining the outcome to the team members, always tie impact with the identified KPIs like revenue growth, CPA etc. Results have to be reported to the organization using whiteboards or geckoboard.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Growth culture is important and has to be imparted across various levels in the organization. This mindset will drive experimentation attitude among all individuals in your team and successful experiments in-turn would fuel business growth.

This is the end of this 4 part series on growth hacking for SaaS, SMB’s and Start-ups. We hope this was helpful.

Hurry and sign up for our Perfect Funnel Challenge. In our next article , we will be starting a 3 part series on the AMEX Small Shop 2018.

Welcome to the 3rd week of the Perfect Funnel Challenge series. Hurry and get your copy of the Funnel guide soon! In last week’s article ‘Growth Hacking for SaaS, SMB & Startups Bootcamp (4-part Series) Part II: What is Funnel? The Right Customer, the Right Message in the Right Channel’, we learned about sales funnel mapping, the AIDA model and various approaches that will help you drive different buyer personas from the top to the bottom of the funnel.

This week we will cover Conversions, their importance and how to get the most from every encounter a business has with the customer. After reading this article you will be able to understand the evolution of marketing programs and the shift towards A/B testing.

WHAT IS A CONVERSION?

The most common misconception about a conversion is that it only takes the form of a purchase or a sale. If we explain it like a logical reasoning question, then we can say ‘all purchases are conversions, but not all conversions are purchases.’ Conversion simply means that someone has graduated to the next phase of your sales funnel. This often takes place long before an actual sale.

In its essence, a conversion has occurred when a visitor to your website completes a desired goal, like signing up for your email newsletter, filling out a form, downloading a resource or making a purchase. Goals and their accompanying conversions vary depending on the campaign and business, and can be as simple as opening an email or clicking on a particular link. Basically, conversions are the stepping stones that help companies achieve their main aims.

WHY IS A CONVERSION IMPORTANT?

Conversions serve as indicators to help businesses separate window shoppers from truly potential customers. They also help you understand which stage of the buying journey your website visitor is in based on the action they’re taking on your website.

On a grander scale, conversions help businesses understand if their overall marketing funnel is working as intended. When analyzed, conversions helps business owners identify where there might be leaks in the sales funnel, and gives them the tools to patch it up. For example, if you see a high percentage of customers falling off at the demo stage of the funnel, that will tell you what needs to be fixed. With a properly functioning sales funnel, cued by conversions, you can drive more sales.

ONBOARDING – GETTING A NEW CUSTOMER UP AND RUNNING

Once a customer has bestowed faith in your business by purchaing your products or services, it then becomes your responsibility to ensure that your customer achieves their desired outcome.

Just like any first impression, the initial contact your new customer has with your brand will set the tone for the business-customer relationship. If their initial impression is a bad one, it could all but kill your business. Having a smooth customer onboarding program is one of the best ways to set the tone to that perfect pitch of customer satisfaction.

Your business onboarding process should make sure that there is a smooth transition from the sales team to the project management team. You should also make it your business to understand your consumers’ preferences and to get to know them well. Identify and sort out challenges that may crop up during the onboarding process so that when you do get a customer, you’ll be able to help them achieve their desired goals with your products or services.

ACTIVATION – DRIVING CUSTOMERS TO USE YOUR PRODUCTS AFTER PURCHASE

So, you’ve made some sales and you’ve got some customers (hooray!), but you begin to notice that some of these people have become worryingly inactive after purchase. How do you get your new customers to use the products they’ve just purchased?

Firstly, it never hurts to understand who your customers are. Tracking customer usage patterns will help create customer profiles and identify the right buttons to push when they need some motivation. For example, you can send them emails about the benefits of using your products, but if you are aware of their specific pain points, you can provide them with more specific details for solving their problems, thus propelling them into action.

It’s also a good idea to map your ideal customer’s journey after purchase. That way you have a solid template to compare to the path taken by the majority of your customers. If the ideal journey and the reality of the journey taken by customers do not match up, you’ll be able to identify adjustments that need to me made. You can also take a magnifying glass to features of your product that customers do not use so that in the end you’re left with a lean, mean, converting machine that inspires action.

RE-ENGAGEMENT – REACTIVATION CAMPAIGNS AND TECHNIQUES

Reactivation or re-engagement is the process where businesses reach out to inactive customers or potential customers. The goal of reactivation is to encourage them to become active users.

Below are a few ways to re-engage with inactive customers and drive them to start using your products and solutions:

• Use email activation campaigns to re-engage with inactive customers.
• Include product tours as a part of your onboarding experience.
• Display ads driving them to visit your website/products pages.
• Social media sponsored posts that promote customer success stories.
• Identify the main pain points in using your product and fix those.
• Set up a re-engagement strategy for users who drop off.
• Entice users with the progress they are making.

A/B TESTING AND MULTIVARIATE TESTING

A/B testing is the process of examining different variables within your website for optimal conversion. Businesses today prefer testing various options of look, feel and design when it comes to their landing pages, ads, website pages, emails, email sign up forms, or in-app conversion forms. Nearly any aspect of your website can and should be A/B tested. Most businesses opt for A/B testing where they test two design options/formatting/URLs etc they may have created.

Sometimes businesses also go for multivariate testing that allows you to compare a higher number of variables and the interactions between them. A/B testing and multivariate testing boost conversion rates by helping businesses identify which options perform better.

Tools like Unbounce, KISSmetrics, Optimizely, and Maxymizer will help you run A/B tests to ultimately help you improve your online assets and drive sales.

TAGGING, TRACKING ANALYTICS & REPORTING

In order to identify conversions on your website, it is essential to add relevant tags on your website and mobile apps. A tag is a piece of code you can place in your website’s back end that gathers data about the behavior of visitors. Analyzing and reporting visitors’ activity helps businesses optimize their conversion rates by providing necessary insights into which stage of the buying journey a potential customer is in, how to drive them towards a sale, and how to activate them.

Tools like Google tag manager make using tags easy, especially if you have a lot that you need to manage. However, if you only have one or two tags, it’s simple enough to manually insert them into your website’s source code. If you don’t know where to start, try using Google Analytics and Google Ads conversion tracking, as these are two of the most important tags on the web. You can also use Conversion tracking, which is a free tool that shows you what happens after a customer interacts with your ads.

These tools promote conversion rate optimization, which is the process of increasing the percentage of website visitors who complete a desired goal on a website. Using tags and tracking, businesses analyze the behavior of visitors and focus on elements that motivate customer engagement so as to optimize conversions.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Conversions are one of the most important metrics that help businesses track their potential consumers as they move from the top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel. Various techniques like A/B testing, multivariate testing and re-engagement campaigns are sure to improve your conversion rates.

In the next post of this series, ‘Growth Hacking for SaaS, SMB & Startups Bootcamp Part IV: Growth Program Operations – Building a Growth Engine’, we will talk about what Growth Program Operations are, their framework (internal as well as external), A/B testing schedules, and how to build a strong growth engine for your business.

In last week’s post ‘Growth Hacking for SaaS, SMB & Startups Bootcamp PART I What is ACQUISITION – Getting the RIGHT Early Customers for Free’, we covered the various growth hacking techniques that work well and ones to avoid.

We are now in the second week of the ‘Perfect Funnel’ challenge series. This week we will discuss Funnels and how to acquire the right customers by sharing the right messages in the right channels.

A Funnel illustrates the ideal journey your prospective customers go through on their way of becoming your customers.

Businesses may market their products and solutions to several thousand or several hundred thousands of people, but only a small percentage share their contact details to become leads. Out of these leads, only a fraction will become customers. Out of these customers, a further smaller fraction will become loyal customers for your brand.

CUSTOMER LIFECYCLE – AIDA MODEL

The various stages a potential buyer goes through in a company’s marketing funnel is commonly referred to as customer lifecycle. The age-old marketing funnel model, more commonly referred to as the AIDA model, was developed by an American advertising advocate, E. St. Elmo Lewis in 1898.

As a business, you have to funnel down your prospects in the AIDA order to get amazing new customers. Moving prospective clients through the funnel to convert them to loyal customers is the main goal for marketers.

PERSONA DESIGN – KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER AND USE THE LANGUAGE

Before building the funnel for your business, a critical first step in the lead acquisition process is understanding your customers and potential customers and creating buyer personas. Buyer personas are fictional, generalized versions of your ideal customers.

In order to define buyer personas for your business, you need to understand your existing customers, their demographics, behavior, interests, and location.

Based on your understanding and analysis, group and define your ideal consumers’ characteristics and expected behavior. Create buyer personas for your business so you can design your marketing strategy accordingly. The success of your communication strategy with your target audience will largely depend on your full understanding of the buyer personas of your business.

FUNNEL MAPPING – CREATE AND CONTROL THE USER JOURNEY

Create or design the sales funnel for your business based on the user journey and control the way users pass from one stage to another.

Businesses should carefully map the user lifecycle with the sales funnel. Marketing messages have to be developed for various stages in the funnel such that potential buyers are able to move at ease, from top of the funnel to the bottom of the funnel and become customers.

You may assume that the funnel has a linear path based on the AIDA model. However, in reality, a funnel is not that simple. When consumers come across your products, they may first look at alternative products by your competitors. It may then take weeks or months for them to come back to your funnel and convert.

Here are 10 funnel mapping tools you should consider using for your business.

CONTENT MARKETING – CREATE CONTENT THAT IS HIGHLY VALUABLE FOR YOUR BUYER PERSONAS

Over the past decade, the Internet has transformed the way consumers research products and services. Consumers would prefer doing a comprehensive online research about the various ways in which their business problem can be solved.

Consumers these days trust brands only when the brand is able to provide them with valuable content. Brands must focus on creating high-quality content that is extremely valuable for their leads as they pass through various stages of the buying journey.

LEAD MAGNETS AND TRIP WIRES

High-quality content frequently acts as great lead magnets. Businesses could give basic relevant content for free and then gate the high-value content. Businesses can drive their target audience to fill in lead generation forms by offering lead magnets like eBooks and whitepapers.

Trip wires are a way of converting a lead to a customer by offering them a low-cost alternative. Once they are in the sales funnel, you could then upsell to them to improve the CLV.

RETARGETING – MAP AD CREATIVES AND MESSAGING TO EACH STAGE IN THE USER JOURNEY

Users may visit your website, follow you on social media and they may drop off at some point of the buying journey before completing the purchase. Create retargeting campaigns targeting such potential customers who are in various stages of the buying journey.

Based on the content your target audience consumes, you can identify which stage they are in. You could then create retargeting journeys motivating these users to consume similar content or driving them to take some action, move towards the bottom of the funnel and convert them to leads/customers.

DRIP EMAIL NURTURING CAMPAIGNS

Launch drip email nurturing campaigns based on the activity and online behavior of your leads and potential customers. Based on the stage of the buying cycle and sales funnel, your audience is in, create relevant marketing mailers that would drive conversion.

Drip campaigns help businesses in acquiring customers through lead nurturing techniques. You should set up email campaigns for various stages starting from indoctrination or introducing your brand to deliver value and build trust. The objective of drip email nurturing campaigns is to get your leads to know, like, and trust your brand.

MARKETING AUTOMATION TO STREAMLINE YOUR MARKETING NEEDS

Use technology for messaging and ensure that human interaction is required only for high priority items. Automate your social media posting by scheduling the posts to go out based on high activity time.

Introduce techniques like ‘Lead Grading’, where your business can classify leads based on their location, demographics, industry, job title etc and ‘Lead Scoring’, where leads are classified based on the lead’s activity and online behavior. Here are 23 awesome marketing automation tools that your business should evaluate to simplify and streamline your marketing functions.

PROGRESSIVE PROFILING – GATHER MORE INFORMATION AS USERS CONSUME MORE CONTENT

Getting to know more about your leads is crucial for the success of your marketing campaigns. However, to know more, you need to collect more information from them through lead forms. This is where progressive profiling comes into picture. You can have dynamic lead forms that collect tiny bits of information as and when users download different content.

When a lead returns to consume more content, the automation detects what information we already have and generates dynamic web forms asking for the next level of details. As they move from one stage to the next stage in the buying journey different details are collected.

This comprehensive user profile collated by the automation tools will aid in creating highly targeted marketing messages for driving users towards conversion.

FINAL THOUGHTS

By designing a sales funnel tailored according to your business and industry, businesses can prioritize marketing campaigns and create relevant high-quality content for your buyer personas.

Stay tuned to the growth hacking series! Next week, we will learn about the importance of CONVERSION and how to get the most from every encounter with your target audience. Don’t forget to sign up for the “Perfect Funnel” CHALLENGE.

Welcome to our four-part blog series on Growth Hacking for SaaS, SMB & Startups Bootcamp. Over the next few articles, you will get some great tips for implementing a high-performance growth hacking strategy for your business.

PART I: WHAT IS ACQUISITION? – GETTING THE “RIGHT” EARLY CUSTOMERS FOR FREE

In the first article of this blog series, we will be discussing what growth hacking techniques work well, and which ones should be avoided.

Let’s briefly understand the various acquisition goals. The primary goals of acquisition are typically:

• Driving traffic to your website.
• Making the most of your traffic by engaging with your audience effectively once they visit your website.
• Converting traffic to leads and acquiring new customers.

Now you understand what the goals of acquisition are, we’ll now discuss various growth hacking techniques that will help to acquire new customers by driving traffic to your website.

GET YOUR FRIENDS AND FAMILY TESTING YOUR PRODUCT

Close friends and family always remain a great audience when you want early and genuine feedback about your product. They also won’t mind receiving product-related information from you.

So once you’ve built your Minimum Viable Product, ask your friends and family to test your product. This way you can get the first set of honest reviews. This will help you further improve your viable product and market it effectively to your future customers.

Since they are trying your product with an intention to help you in your business, their heart is in this task. However, you need to direct them to be “honest” and not “nice” with their opinions. You may need to pry them for more info and details in why they liked or disliked your product. These people are not professional testers so they will need guidance on how detailed and specific the feedback will need to be so it’s useful for you.

You should also motivate this close circle of people to visit your website and social media channels so that they give you valuable feedback from a “fresh eyes” perspective.

BETA PROGRAM – COLLECT EMAIL ADDRESSES FOR PRE-LAUNCH

Small businesses and start-ups often underestimate the potential hype they can create by marketing their beta products. It is essential for businesses to build a pre-launch email list. Start collecting emails specifically for beta releases through lead generation forms in guest blogs, Facebook and Twitter lead ads, etc.

You could also collect subscribers for your beta releases through your regular email campaigns by including an opt-in for beta releases. Focus on quality over quantity while building the list because the aim here is to attract early adopters for your products.

More companies are launching their beta products to early adopters. Hence, beta testing is not limited to the professional testing teams anymore. Instead, it has become community driven. And marketing your beta testing should go hand in hand with the actual product beta testing.

PARTNERS – CROSS PROMOTIONS AND JOINT MARKETING EFFORTS

Partnering with other companies in your space that may offer complementary products or services (not your direct competitors) is a great opportunity to attract a new audience. Or you could look for channel partners like wholesalers or distributors.

Through such partnerships, you could cross-promote each other on blogs, social media, etc to drive more website visitors. You could also run promotions on a partner website or cross-promote on each other’s email newsletters driving website visitors whom you can nurture to become leads. Co-marketing and creating ebooks or webinars with your partner can reduce the content creation efforts and at the same time reach a wider audience of both the parties.

DRIVING TRAFFIC THROUGH REFERENCE SITES

Reference sites like Quora and Reddit are a great start for small businesses that want to grow their website presence. Even founders of Airbnb, Dropbox, and Groupon used to spend a lot of their time creating content and answering questions on Quora and Reddit. This helped them drive a lot of website visitors.

Small businesses should invest their time and efforts on these platforms. Start by identifying relevant topics in Quora and industry subreddits in Reddit. Once you have narrowed down the list on where you could answer questions related to your industry, pick questions where you could talk about your products and solutions and start referencing your website.

If you feel the topic doesn’t warrant explicit mention of your products and solutions, you could give subtle hints motivating reads to take the desired action if they want more information.

HOSTING VIDEOS

Create “how to” videos, problem-solving videos, etc for your brand and share them on video sharing platforms like YouTube and Vimeo. You could also create thought leadership videos on industry-related topics to educate your target audience.

Comparison videos would drive top of the funnel customers to your website while product demo videos would drive bottom of the funnel customers to your website. Have a balance and create content for various stages to drive them to your website. Clear call to actions at various durations of the video is essential to get desirable results.

NEW PRODUCT REVIEW SITES

New product review sites like Product Hunt, Kickstarter, and GoFundMe are a great way to get more eyeballs on your newly launched products. These sites talk about the best new products in the market by reviewing them. Since there are high probabilities for early adopters to visit these sites frequently, it is a brilliant platform to engage with them and drive them to your website.

DRIVING NEW CUSTOMERS THROUGH REFERRAL PROGRAMS

Design and launch a referral program for your business such that it is mutually beneficial. DropBox launched a referral program where users can earn storage space of 500 MB by inviting new users.

This simple referral program became a viral loop and DropBox grew by 3900%. So a referral program where you could offer some concessions or exclusive benefits for your participants could prove to be a great strategy to acquire new customers for your business.

LINKEDIN – CONNECT WITH PROSPECTS

LinkedIn is a goldmine for list building prospective customers. Small businesses can send automated connection requests to their target audience using tools like LinkedAutomate and LinkMe Tool. You could then export your LinkedIn connections and then communicate with them by sending email marketing messages.

If you want to know more about using LinkedIn for growth hacking, please read our article LinkedIn Growth Hacking for Small Businesses, Start-Ups Solopreneurs and Bloggers, where you can understand the various steps involved in identifying and reaching potential customers via LinkedIn

USE INFLUENCER MARKETING TO DRIVE WEBSITE VISITORS

Influencer marketing continues to remain one of the popular ways of driving website traffic. People prefer listening to other people instead of brands or businesses. This is where influencers play a key role because they are industry experts or leading professionals who have a wide audience base that you could target. Identify the list of influencers who would be more apt considering the industry your business is in.

Narrow down the list based on analysis of their posts, reach, budget, etc and finalize the influencers you want to promote your brand. Then start reaching out and build long-term relationships with them. It can take time for them to eventually partner with you so be patient.

CRAIGSLIST IS A GREAT PLACE TO START

CraigsList gets over 10 million unique visitors per day and there is no question that Craigslist is one of the most powerful marketplace websites in the world. Businesses like Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy got their first 1000 customers by using this platform. Despite its simplicity, marketing on CraigsList would need some basic planning and strategy. As a small business, decide on the locations you’d want to market your products and then also understand which of the 300 communities should you be on.

Ads on CraigsList are either free or a very low cost (starting at $5). So start building ads for CraigsList and also get involved by interacting with your community on CraigsList. Respond to posts by others and participate in conversations across discussion forums where you could discuss with potential customers as well as other sellers and establish a presence for your business within the Craigslist community.

PAID ADVERTISING – SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING AND SOCIAL MEDIA ADVERTISING

Spruce up your lead generation efforts by launching paid advertising campaigns on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and search engine marketing platforms like Google AdWords and Bing Ads. Even though organic means can help you in driving traffic to a certain extent, if you want to boost your traffic in a shorter span, paid advertising will help.

Test your ads using A/B testing, now available with the platforms like Google AdWords and Facebook. Testing will help you understand which of your ad formats or what kind of messaging does well for your target audience so that you could optimize future campaigns based on the insights derived from testing and analyzing the results.

CONCLUSION

There are a variety of various acquisition techniques for your business in this article. One technique will not solve all your business growth issues. Experiment with some/all of the above-mentioned solutions to see what works for you. Planning carefully and strategizing is what would help you achieve the desired results through these techniques.

Stay tuned, next week we cover the best practices about creating FUNNELS. Don’t forget to sign up for the “Perfect Funnel” CHALLENGE.