As Gabriel Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, put it in his book “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth”:
“Almost every failed startup has a product. What failed startups don’t have are enough customers.”
According to him, the number one cause of failure isn’t the product, it’s the poor distribution.
He argues that many entrepreneurs who build great products simply don’t have a good distribution strategy.
In his view, when it comes to startup success, the only essential thing is growth. Everything else follows from that.
We agree with this perspective because you can have the best product in the world but it won’t matter if you can’t get enough customers to keep your business afloat.
That’s why today we want to share our complete guide to customer acquisition for startups…
Founders often make the mistake of going after the largest possible target audience when they should be doing the opposite and zeroing in on the smallest possible niche.
For example, Facebook, which had over 3 billion monthly active users in the last quarter of 2023, started out as a social network for Harvard University students in 2004.
It then gradually expanded to other Ivy League universities, then to all universities in the United States, and then finally became available to the general public in 2006, two years after its launch.
Facebook almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to gain traction if the company had gone after everyone in the world who had Internet access right from the get-go.
So figure out the smallest possible niche that you could target that is still large enough for you to generate enough revenue to keep the lights on. Once you dominate that initial niche, you can start gradually expanding your target audience!
We’ll be blunt:
You probably don’t understand your dream customers as well as you think you do. And the further removed you are from your target audience, the more likely that is to be the case.
That’s why we recommend conducting extensive customer research before you start thinking about customer acquisition:
You want to immerse yourself in the online world of your dream customers as much as possible because that will give you the context you need to create effective marketing campaigns and write persuasive sales copy.
Pay special attention to the exact words, phrases, and metaphors that your dream customers use to describe the problem that your product can help them solve. You want to use the same language when selling your product!
As our friend Alex Hormozi loves to say, the first rule of entrepreneurship is “Use what you have”.
That’s why we want you to take stock of the resources that you have at your disposal.
Marketing strategies that we are going to discuss in the next section all involve a trade-off between time and money to some extent: the less money you are willing to spend, the more time you will need to invest.
Choose a strategy that will allow you to capitalize on the resource that you have more of, whether that’s money or time.
Beyond that, you want to look at everything else that you have that you could use to your advantage, including your talents, skills, and connections.
Ideally, you want to go with a marketing strategy that will allow you to play to your strengths and won’t require learning completely new skills from scratch because that will enable you to hit the ground running.
Of course, that isn’t always possible, but try to make the most of what you already have!
We recommend choosing one of these marketing strategies and focusing on it exclusively until you hit the point of diminishing returns:
Cold email is the most accessible marketing strategy but it is also extremely time-consuming and best suited for B2B as opposed to B2C.
It’s impossible to predict conversion rates in advance but you should be prepared to send 100 cold emails per day to schedule 10 sales calls and make 1 sale.
And just to be clear: we are talking about personalized cold emails where each message is customized for that particular recipient.
Don’t send potential customers low-effort copy-paste spam. Not only does it not work, it can also get you in legal trouble!
Set Up a New Domain Name and Email Address
Start by setting up a new domain name that is similar to the main domain name of your startup and then create a new email account associated with that new domain name.
This is a precautionary measure in case your cold emails get marked as spam and you end up getting blacklisted by email service providers like Gmail. It’s best not to put your main domain name and your main email address at risk.
Also, before you start your cold email campaign, use a service like lemwarm to simulate back-and-forth email activity. That should make you look more legit in the eyes of email service providers and hopefully help you avoid spam filters.
Find a Lead Generation Expert and Buy 100 Leads
After that, go on Fiverr, find a B2B lead generation expert, and order a spreadsheet with 100 leads based on your dream customer criteria.
That spreadsheet should include a list of target companies, a contact person for each of them, and their full name, job title, and email address.
If that lead generation expert does a good job compiling leads, you can order a spreadsheet with 1,000 leads the next time.
Start Cold Emailing Leads
It’s best to start slow – perhaps with just 3 cold emails per day – because a sudden spike in your email activity can seem suspicious and might get you blacklisted by email service providers.
Gradually increase the cold email volume until you are sending 100 cold emails per day. Don’t go beyond that because that may be crossing into the spam territory.
Use Justin McGill’s QVC Framework
We recommend following the QVC framework that Justin McGill, the founder of LeadFuze, used to go from zero to $30k in monthly recurring revenue in just one year:
Here’s a sample template that follows this framework:
Continue Following Up Until You Get a Response
The odds are that the people you are reaching out to are pretty busy so you may not get a response straight away.
That’s why it’s so important to follow up with them. Justin McGill said that he has seen a lot of success with this four-email email sequence:
McGill would also add this “P.S.” section to all his emails, starting with the initial QVC one:
This is a great idea because it enables you to continue following up while also being respectful and providing that person with a way out if they don’t want to hear from you anymore.
Make Sure to Stay Organized!
When you are only sending a few cold emails per day, keeping track of everything is easy.
But once you start increasing the volume, it can get out of hand really quickly as the replies, the back-and-forth, and the scheduled demo calls start piling up.
That’s why we recommend setting up some sort of customer relationship management (CRM) system right from the start.
Our software includes a CRM functionality that can be really helpful here!
Cold calling is similar to cold email in that it’s an accessible but time-consuming marketing strategy that works best for B2B businesses.
All you need to get started is a list of leads that meet your dream customer criteria, your phone and a cold call script.
We recommend using Patrick Dang’s five-step cold calling framework:
If they say yes, ask them for their email address and tell them that you are going to send them a calendar link with available times, then thank them for their time and end the call.
Once you hang up, send them that calendar link immediately and then continue following up once a week, the same way you would if it was a cold email instead of a cold call.
Factors like energy level, tonality, and cadence of speech matter a lot in cold calling. You might want to record your cold calls and then listen to how you sound so that you’d have a better understanding of how you are coming across.
Just make sure to check whether that’s legal where you live because the laws regarding recording phone calls vary between jurisdictions.
Also, just as with cold email, it’s important to stay organized when you are making a lot of cold calls every day, which you can do with our customer relationship management (CRM) system!
Affiliate marketing is about getting other people to promote your product to their audiences and then paying them a commission from each sale.
It’s another affordable but time-consuming marketing strategy, though a big difference between affiliate marketing and cold outreach is that affiliate marketing can work well for B2C as well.
If you do enough customer research, you should already know who your dream customers are following online. Make a list of these influencers, thought leaders, and content creators, find their email addresses, and start cold emailing them.
For example, you can create a webinar funnel for your product, reach out to potential affiliates, and pitch them a partnership that looks like this:
That’s what our co-founder Russell Brunson did during our first year in business and it worked really well!
Also, once you have success with one affiliate partnership, you can use it as social proof in your cold emails and leverage it to get more affiliates on board!
Social media marketing is super affordable and less time-consuming than cold outreach. However, it will likely take you a few years to gain momentum.
As such, this marketing strategy is perhaps best suited for people who have full-time jobs and are working on their startups on the side.
Pick a social media platform that allows you to play to your strengths, which is going to boil down to the choice between the text medium and the visual medium.
Then, create a content schedule that you can keep up with indefinitely. Ideally, you want to post at least once a day, but quality is more important than quantity.
You should also incentivize engagement by rewarding it. If someone leaves a comment under your post, like it and reply to it. That will serve as positive reinforcement.
Be warned that social media marketing can be demoralizing because, in the beginning, your follower growth is likely going to be extremely slow.
However, if you stick with your content schedule, keep the content quality high, and reward engagement, eventually, it will start accelerating!
Video marketing is similar to social media marketing in the sense that it will likely take you a few years to gain momentum. However, it is also both more time-consuming and more expensive.
That being said, a YouTube channel has more staying power than a social media following, which makes it a more valuable asset from a business perspective.
This marketing strategy is best suited for people who not only have full-time jobs and are working on their startups on the side but who also either have video production skills already or are genuinely interested in learning them.
You want to publish one YouTube video per week, target a keyword that your dream customers are searching for, and make sure that your video is better than all the other videos that are currently ranking for that keyword.
Production quality doesn’t matter much as long as the audio is decent so no need to overthink it. What’s important is content quality. Your video needs to meet the search intent of its target keyword.
Once you publish your video on YouTube, cut it up into shorts and then publish those shorts both on YouTube and on TikTok.
Video marketing can be demoralizing at first due to slow channel growth, but if you continue publishing one video per week and make sure that it’s good, your channel will eventually start gaining momentum.
Also, if you want to grow your channel faster, we recommend watching this video by Vanessa Lau where she shares a bunch of tips and tricks that can help you accelerate growth:
Search engine optimization can still work well in 2024.
However, we wouldn’t recommend this marketing strategy unless you either have previous experience with it or are targeting a niche where your competition is clueless about SEO. Why?
Because getting organic traffic from Google Search is becoming increasingly difficult and this trend is likely going to continue in the foreseeable future.
Here are some factors that you might want to consider:
Realistically speaking, this means that in order to get organic search traffic, you need to not only reach the first page but also rank in the top three search results.
It’s unlikely that you will be able to do it by creating high-quality content alone since backlinks play an important role in search rankings. And link building can be difficult if you don’t have any connections.
Also, now that anyone can use large language models like ChatGPT to produce content at scale, the Internet is getting flooded with “AI slop”. This has sparked a lot of discussion on whether SEO as we know it is dead.
All this makes search engine optimization an uphill battle that may not be worth it, especially considering that you could be investing those resources into growing a social media following or building a YouTube channel instead!
Paid advertising is the best marketing strategy for those who have more money than time.
It can work really well for startups that have a substantial war chest as well as for solopreneurs who have high-paying jobs and don’t mind spending money on growing their side hustles.
Of course, it’s still a skill: you’ll need to invest time in learning how to run ads on your platform of choice, testing various campaign ideas, optimizing your campaigns, etc.
The learning curve can be pretty steep but the feedback loop is fast. You’ll know whether your campaign is working or not within a few days.
Mastering paid advertising is empowering because it gives you the ability to drive traffic wherever you want, whenever you want, which you can then use to promote anything.
If you have no previous experience with it, Udemy is probably the best resource for learning the basics because it has paid advertising courses for all major social media platforms.
Wait until the next sale and you should be able to get a course for less than $20!
First-time founders often spend too much time obsessing over which marketing strategy they should choose.
The truth is that all of the strategies listed above can work well if you are willing to put in the time to master them and have the patience to play the long game.
So pick one that makes the most sense considering the resources that you have and get to work!
We believe that the best way to grow a startup is to build a sales funnel for it and then drive traffic to it with your marketing campaigns.
A sales funnel is a system designed to convert visitors into leads, leads into customers, and customers into repeat customers.
A lead magnet is a freebie that you offer to the potential customer in exchange for their email address.
The most straightforward sales funnel that you can build is the lead magnet funnel which consists of just two pages:
Once you have their email address, you can use email marketing to pitch them your product.
For example, you could have a lead magnet that teaches them how to solve a specific problem and then use email marketing to pitch them your product as the best tool for implementing that solution.
This is what we do: we use our lead magnets to teach people how to build sales funnels and then pitch them our funnel builder software!
Once you have your sales funnel set up and ready to go, you can start driving traffic to it by using the aforementioned marketing strategies to promote your lead magnet.
Just because someone gave you their email address doesn’t necessarily mean that they are ready to buy your product. And that’s okay!
Continue building trust by providing free value via email and make sure that you stay top of mind with them.
The best way to do it is to launch a weekly newsletter. Send your subscribers an email that follows the same template every week on the same day at the same time.
Link roundup newsletter format can work really well for this. Share links to interesting content from around the web: blog articles, YouTube videos, podcast episodes, etc.
You can model it on Tim Ferriss’ “5-Bullet Friday” newsletter. Obviously, don’t copy his exact template. Instead, come up with something similar that makes sense for your industry.
Add a “P.S.” section at the end of every newsletter issue and use it to promote your product. Say, if you run a software startup, you can encourage people to sign up for your free trial.
Once you launch your newsletter, you can use it as a lead magnet and create a marketing campaign for it.
In his book “Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth”, Gabriel Weinberg discusses what he calls “The 50% Rule”.
The idea is simple: you should spend 50% of your time working on your product and the other 50% of your time working on customer acquisition.
We highly recommend adopting this approach, especially if you are someone who is great at creating products but not so great at marketing and selling them.
Otherwise, it’s easy to fall into a trap where you stay in your comfort zone, endlessly tinkering with your product, and then have to shut down your startup because it isn’t making any money!
Our co-founder Russell Brunson used sales funnels to take ClickFunnels from zero to $100M+ in annual revenue in less than a decade.
He is now widely considered to be one of the top sales funnel experts in the world. Want to learn from him?
His best-selling book “DotCom Secrets” is the best place to start because it covers everything you need to know in order to build sales funnels that convert.
This book is available on Amazon where it has over 2,500 global ratings and a 4.7-star overall rating.
But you can also get it directly from us for free…
All we ask is that you pay for shipping!
So what are you waiting for? 🧐
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