Driving startup growth by choosing the right marketing traction channel.
An introduction to finding the right marketing traction channel for your startup.
Why is building the right marketing traction channel something that’s often overlooked?
They get that growth is important but it usually comes way too late.
It’ll usually look a little like this:
Scenario 1:
A founding team believes in their product so much, they adopt a “build it and they will come!” mentality. In other words, “we’re not going to put any marketing investment in, all your efforts need to be creating the perfect product - so perfect, in fact, that everyone will be talking about it”.
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Scenario 2:
Some money is set aside for marketing but just because it doesn’t deliver results immediately it’s deemed a failure and investment is pulled.
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Scenario 3:
Worse still, they’ll mistake what marketing actually is (i.e. a crucial part of growth) and hire a sales person to come in and sell a low value product. Thus, losing money.
If you’ve experienced these...run, my pretties; run for the hills.
Or at least, get to the root of the problem.
Why is growth told to take a backseat in the pursuit of getting the product just right?
Especially in a startup when you’re not 100% who your customer is and how they derive value from you, you need to invest in both the product and building marketing momentum.
I’m not suggesting anything groundbreaking here.
‘Many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy’ - Marc Andreesen
Then you’ve got Weinberg and Mares in Traction who state that product development and traction strategy must work in tandem.
Just like customer development needs to work with product development right at the start.
What’s the implication of building traction and getting your distribution channels till after you’ve sorted your product?
You build your product... and you realise there’s no market for it.
You build your product… and you realise you’re building it for a customer segment that won’t pay.
You build your product… and you realise it is going to take 3-4 months to get any sort of data to feed into a wider marketing and sales plan. But you’ve only got 3 months’ cash in the bank.
In other words, you’ve left it too late.
The thing is, it takes time to test marketing traction. It can take a while to build growth, to get really good at that one growth channel and rinse it for as long as you can until a competitor becomes savvy and nicks your idea / approach.
And, depending on which growth approach you pursue, it could take months to get real tangible data.
Growth marketing won’t generate results immediately. It takes time. It takes weeks to test paid marketing, it takes months to test virality, it can take even longer to test SEO.
Which means you’re going to have to get really good at spinning multiple plates.
Now I’ve had my usual moan, let’s look at a few ways to decide which growth channels could be right for your startup.
Choosing the right marketing traction channels to start building growth
“To be successful, you must match the way you market your products with the way your prospects learn about and shop for your products”.
Brian Halligan, HubSpot.
Ways to think about growth and traction
Back to Weinberg & Mares who suggest that there are 19 channels available to startups which you can use to drive growth. They also provide a useful framework that helps you to select which three you should focus on.
Examples of these traction channels include: SEO, email marketing, sales, trade shows, social and display adverts, speaking engagements etc.
Drive Growth by Picking the Right Lane - by Hockenmaier and Rachitsky - talks about the three lanes that make up the majority of new customer acquisition. Whilst they are talking about consumer products, the thinking I feel can be applied if you’re in b2b also.
These lanes are:
Performance marketing -
Facebook, Google Ads, LinkedIn (think Booking.com)Content marketing -
YouTube, SEO (think Instagram)Virality marketing -
Referrals, WOM (think Air BnB, dropbox)
Personally, out of the two approaches I’ve just included, I prefer the latter framework to work towards. It allows you to test a few tactics under one wider umbrella, all united by one sentiment.
How to decide which growth channel to pursue for your startup
There are a few questions to ask yourself to determine which approach and which tactics are a starting point for your startup’s growth strategy.
These are:
Q. How do your customers search and buy?
Q. What naturally feels right to you & your team’s capabilities?
Q. How much time do you have?
Q. What are your competitors doing?
The idea is being that once you’ve sat down and discussed the answers, you may find yourself swaying towards a particular route.
Don’t forget, you’re biased!
This is something to consider, especially if you’ve held a marketing role before. Just because one channel worked in a previous business does not mean it’ll work in your new business.
I touched on this very topic in my talk, 3 things every marketer needs to know before joining a startup to preserve their sanity.
Focusing on the right marketing traction channel: A startup example
I am going to talk you through some of the ways we approached setting up the growth channel for our B2C offering.
Remember those questions I put to you? Here’s how we used them to guide our growth strategy.
Business: Careercake
Growth channel: Content Marketing
Tools: Video + SEO.
Why it made sense for Careercake to pursue content marketing as its primary growth lane:
Careercake started out as a YouTube channel. It reached 6 million hits and 35k subscribers, which led to the repositioning as an online platform in 2016.
[FYI: I was not involved in Careercake when it started. Kudos to Aimee, the Founder, who realised that YouTube was a place to build a community. In 2016, I joined the startup’s founding team whereby I was brought in to help commercialise it].
So, you could say, I had a pretty good foundation to build upon.
Before I go any further, I am not claiming big bold results. Early on, it doesn’t quite work that way.
Plus, I can’t stand people that boast:
WE INCREASED SALES BY 1,000,000,000 PERCENT!
WE INCREASED ALL THE MRR BY 16000000000%!
Stuff like that isn’t helpful when it’s out of context, and when you don’t use the actual figures.
What we did learn was 1) how to work out what topics work best in terms of converting paying customers 2) how to identify the most profitable subscribers, and 3) how to increase the inbound link profile of Careercake. This all ultimately helped us to build confidence around our brand which had a great impact on the b2b growth strategy. .
How do our customers search and buy?
We provide content to those early on in their careers, those dubbed the ‘YouTube generation’. If they ask a question and it’s taking too long to get an answer, they’ll jump on Google or YouTube to search for an answer. They’re also really comfortable with creating content themselves.
A look into search trends, using tools like Google Keyword Planner, reveals the nature of questions people type in to help them in their career.
“What do I do in the first days of a new job?”
“How do I tell my boss they’re micro-managing me?”
It’s almost like the search engine is their confidant.
What naturally felt right to our team’s capabilities?
The team’s background naturally fell towards content, with SEO, writing, audience research and presenting.
Our content and tactics comprised: YouTube episodes, blogging, newsletter and automation to nurture those sign ups to reduce churn.
The idea being, we’d connect search queries with further titles. We’d look at search themes and extend our titles, and we’d use the requests that came into us directly for further video content ideas.
Careercake’s YouTube channel
How much time did we have?
I won’t sugar-coat it, the content growth lane can be timely, whilst you wait for indexing, inbound links, and also having to deal with changes in algorithms, the impact of a rebrand and redirect plan… oh, and competing against BIG market leaders for particular products.
We were fortunate enough to have raised investment so we were able to focus on one lane and give it time to bed in.
What were our competitors doing?
Interestingly, not many of our competitors had a b2c offering. If anything, we were advised by several people to drop the b2c offering. (We didn’t, obviously, and that’s totally another post).
That meant we couldn’t really ‘copy’ / stalk / delete as appropriate.
What we could see they were investing in, however, was events and paid advertising. To be fair however their businesses were far more mature than ours, therefore they were already using a few channels.
It was here however that we learned that you can have competitors and you can have competitors.
E.g. whilst may have considered ‘training company 101’ our main competitor, in fact, there may have been another organisation that was clearly making progress in terms of SEO. They were a different type of competitor.
What happened next?
We are not at the scale part of growing a startup, we’re still relatively early-stage, however, what we went onto learn was this:
60% of our signups came from organic activity, of which 80% went on to become paying customers.
Some of our channels led to increased sign ups, however, they brought in the type of traffic not necessarily worth optimising for at that point.
It took us around 4 months to start seeing profitable returns on our work.
Good thing we were also plugging away at developing out the product too.
If we’d only focused on the product development and not how to reach potential customers, we’d be really, really behind.
