Getting new customers can feel like some sort of level 10 black magic. There seems to be no clearcut way to just identify the people who want your product, show it to them, and then have them buy it.
And while that’s mostly true, there is a way to systematically come up with marketing ideas, test them and identify the best channels for growing your customer base!
We’ve got a system we use to brainstorm new ideas, figure out what to focus on next, test that growth idea and then repeat until you’ve found a number of solid sources for new customers.
A while back I read a book called Traction by Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares. It’s jam packed full of ideas for growing your business with a framework they call “Bullseye”…highly recommended reading. The framework really is great and influenced a lot of the system we developed and now use at Baremetrics to get new customers.
Ultimately, getting new customers comes down to marketing. And I’m using the word “marketing” in very broad “making customers aware of your product” terms. If customers don’t know your product exists, then you’re up a creek.
So let’s walk through the system we use to identify marketing channels, brainstorm strategies, test those strategies and then convert users in to customers!
First, let’s talk marketing channels. Channels are essentially the various types of customer acquisition you can use. These are the basis for any ideas you’ve got. And actually just talking through these channels will likely give you a ton of ideas. Let’s walk through those 19 channels now.
So, there are the 19 core marketing channels. It’s easy to write off some of these channels. “No way would a trade show ever work out for us!” But when you’re brainstorming ideas, it’s important to put it all out on the table. Mix in a scoring system for your ideas and magic!
To get the ball rolling, you and your team should sit down and brainstorm. Go through each of the 19 marketing channels and think of all the ways you could market to customers.
These should be very specific ideas, because you’re going to test them. The more precise you are with the idea, the clearer the outcomes of your tests will be. They’ll also be cheaper to test.
Put all of your ideas in to a spreadsheet, and categorize them by channel.
After you’ve got at least a few dozen strategies, next up is to prioritize them. Almost all companies are strapped for resources in one way or another: team size, time, money…usually combination of all those things. You certainly can’t tackle every one of these ideas at the same time, so prioritizing what to do first is crucial.
To help you prioritize, we’ve created a scoring system based on four factors.
Yes, that spells LICE, and lice makes everything nice. 😉
We use these four factors to generate a score where the lower the number, the more accessible the marketing idea is. Let’s take a look at the four factors.
Not all sources are created equal. Usually your highest quality leads will come from a source that sends you the lowest number of leads and the lowest quality leads will come from a source that just hammers you with traffic.
Your AirBnB for Hamsters service may get lots of traffic from TechCrunch, but lets be honest…very few of those visitors will, you know, need that. But a writeup from Petco?!?! Those leads would be fantastic!
Impact will, many times, match up to your Lead Quality, but it’s geared more towards what the purpose of your marketing is. For instance, maybe brand awareness is a much larger focus to you as opposed to lead generation. In that case, a marketing idea could have a lower lead quality score but a high impact score.
Not all great ideas are expensive (in fact, many times your best ideas are actually dirt cheap). But the fact is, some ideas really can be pretty expensive (trade shows, advertising, sponsorships).
If cost isn’t a big factor for your company, you can lower the weight of the “cost” in the final score (which I’ll talk about momentarily).
How much work will this idea take? Does the idea rest on convincing someone else to do something? Does the whole team need to get involved to pull off the idea? All of those things affect how much effort something takes.
Every company is in a different stage and what factors have an impact on you will vary. Maybe you’ve got all the time in the world but no money…that makes cost a huge multiplier. Maybe you’ve got limited time but lots of money, in that case effort would be a big multiplier.
In the spreadsheet mentioned earlier, there are settings where you can adjust all four variables based on importance.
Once you’ve set Lead Quality, Effort, Cost and Impact (and adjusted the various multipliers) what you get is weighted score that helps guide what marketing ideas you should try next!
The lower the score, the more in line the idea is with the current stage of your company!
At this point you should have a spreadsheet full of ideas, all scored and automatically prioritized. Now? Time to test!
The purpose of testing is to figure out if a channel is worth spending more time, effort and money on pursuing. While the LICE score helps prioritize, the testing phase is what actually decides if a particular strategy will actually work for you.
Not all ideas are testable or even repeatable in any sort of scalable manner, but if they are, there are a number of additional data points you’ll want to track.
To start a test, you need to figure out the cheapest way to stick your toe in the water to get some data around cost and conversion rates.
As an example, say Facebook ads targeting dog owners is what you want to test. You’d run a small campaign spending, say, $20 over the course of a couple of days and then analyze the results.
If you find it’s cost effective to acquire customers that way, then you can up your test. Double your spending, and then analyze the results.
Testing is not a one time thing. It’s an ongoing process that requires constant adjustment to get the most out of it. But the great thing is that as long as you’re tracking the data points mentioned above, you can always tell not only if a strategy is working for, but it’s easy to identify when a channel stops working.
Once you’ve started driving new signups, it’s time to get them converting! This is when you start seeing a cycle to the things we’ve been teaching and the processes you’ve been putting in to place.
Many of the same things you’ve done to reduce churn, retain customers and grow your MRR all apply to actually converting users!
Just like retaining customers, converting users all comes down to engagement. When users are actively using your product during a trial period, they are exponentially more likely to become paying customers.
Work with your users to pinpoint the things that drive home the value you’re offering to them. For Baremetrics, that’s connecting a data source, which ultimately gives our users hundreds of insights they’ve either never had before or spend an inordinate amount of time getting.
Identify those things and then use one-on-one onboarding, email drip campaigns and in-app messages to help your users succeed with your product and understand the value they’re getting.