Customer Acquisition Strategies for Startups

Customer Acquisition – it’s easy to waste a lot of money in the wrong channels, especially ones where you go hand-in-hand with the big firms and can easily be outspent. As a startup, the majority of your time should be spent on customer acquisition and product development – the things that will move you forward. “Startup growth happens in spurts. Initially, growth is usually slow.

 

Cold emailing? SEO? Content Marketing? but at this point you’re just shooting in the dark. What works initially might not work later on, and what doesn’t work now might be worth revisiting in the future.

1. Establish your Goals
2. You create a process / system to work within
3. Then you fill it with strategy / ideas to align with your goals,
4. Lastly, you’ll break those down into specific tactics to execute…

1. Define your Ideal Customer - Prospect and Analyse your user and user markets.
2. Define your Goals = S.M.A.R.T. Goals may be monetary, user count, or activity based goals.
3. Define your Acquisition Funnel = Running multiple landing pages and you’re sending traffic to them from SEO, content marketing and paid acquisition, funnel to be measured individually
4. Know your Metrics = Start implementing Campaigns, you’ll know fairly know whether something is worth pursuing or not
5. Track everything from day one = Most Startups don’t begin this process early enough, and they pay for it later, start to build the history as early as possible. The best customer acquisition plans have measurement strategies organized in advance.
6. Reverse engineer your Growth = Look for bottlenecks in your metrics: is your visitor to trial rate low? Is your churn rate high? Do you need to drive traffic?
7. Create your growth ideas list = Prioritize your plans
8. Execute your plan = By using the following (some more) strategies

• Using Big Content to Generate Buzz
• Focusing on Long Tail Keywords
• Tools usage and Analytics
• Engaging in Forum Marketing
• Tracking and Reacting to Competitor Mentions
• Developing Online Partnerships
• Networking
• Reviving Old Customers

How to make a Mobile App Product – Big, Bigger and Biggest!

New products torrent the app store marketplace each day. Entrepreneurs are rolling out new ideas and new stuff. Billions of dollars are invested yearly to develop and launch new feature-rich products. But did you know that only one in 10 will prove triumphant? And even fewer will enjoy a long shelf life.

That’s the cold reality. But you can greatly enhance your chances for business success if your “new and improved” product shares a series of few important qualities. Ask yourself these questions before going public with your “revolutionary” or “must have” product or service. The sizzle won’t last if it doesn’t stand up to this test.

Does it have unique features or the USP’s? You can’t roll out the “same-old, same-old.” Your product has got to have a look n feel with a great user experience, that’ll make the shopper sit up and take notice.

Does it have mass appeal? In other words, is it something that is social, try to make it social.

Is it multi-functional? Think like your competitor. If you come out with a product that has just one function, your competitor can steal your thunder – and your sales – with a similar product that offers more functions.

Does it unravel a problem? Think of something that’s troublesome and invent a solution. If your product doesn’t solve a quandary, you’ve got a potential problem – customers aren’t as likely to install it.

Have you identified target markets and users? Be clear on what mobile and wearable platforms you want to develop your product, roll out the revenue model too.

Can you easily explain how it works? There has to be an easy-to-understand elucidation of how and why your product works. Get your elevator pitch deck and business plan ready. You only grab people for a couple of seconds – so you have to please, appeal and seize the Investor. Add reports from Google Analytics, Flurry, Localytics, Mixpanel, Preemptive.

Is there a product presentation and a demo ready? Before-and-after spots – showing easily noticeable differences after beta-launch and testing, get a more professional look short video also prepared for App stores.

Have you started marketing in advance? Don't make the mistake of starting your marketing plan once your app is developed. Successful apps are promoted way before they even hit the app store. Divide your marketing plan into three phases: pre-launch campaign, launch campaign and post-launch campaign.

Release the App, Capture Metrics, Upgrade your app with improvements and new features.

See the funny side of an Entrepreneur's Life!

An entrepreneur doesn't have good days and bad days; s/he has adventurous days! An entrepreneur's brain is differently wired from the rest. Here's a series of graphs that give you a little sneak peek into an entrepreneurs life.

Images: Inc. 42