Startup Bootcamp, Part 13: Play in Traffic
You’ve built the infrastructure. Now you’re ready to reach 100 people within your target audience to collect honest feedback, apply the Agile method to your concept and iterate based on the feedback you receive. Remember the user personas you developed earlier in this guide? That’s who you need to talk to, not your friends. Collecting feedback from your friends and family is not recommended for a few reasons. First, asking them will skew your experiment. Odds are, your close connections aren’t your target audience and won’t provide real insight needed to iterate. Second, they’ll lie to you. Not because they’re bad people (unless your friends are the worst, but that’s a topic for another guide), but because they think you’re pretty great and they don’t want to hurt your feelings. You won’t collect the useful, honest data you’re looking for. Capisce?
When engaging with your target audience:
Don’t be lazy! Make your messages unique to each user persona. They have different care-abouts, interests and ways of thinking. Trying to create a one-size-fits-all message will fall flat with all of them.
Use calls to action. Start a dialogue with the content you posted in your social media groups, ask people to sign up to your mailing list, even get people to sign up for pre-sales. Click that buy button!
Review your minimum success criteria you developed earlier. Remember, we have two goals in the MVP phase-- to drive traffic to your landing page for feedback (% positive feedback) and get a specific number of email sign ups over a set period of time and spend (CPA). When trying to drive traffic, make sure your calls to action and content align with these goals.
Organic growth hacking:
While the term growth hacking is often thrown around by engineers, sales VPs (who in your sales org isn’t a VP?) and product managers, when we talk about growth hacking we’re referring to rapid customer acquisition. Our goal is to quickly experiment to determine the most effective and cheapest way to get your idea in front of your target audience for quick feedback. At this phase you’re combating lack of cash flow by leveraging known channels, groups and places where your target market lives, works and plays.
This list isn’t exhaustive, but we’ve provided a smattering of ideas to get your brain churning:
Share your landing page on forums like Reddit (like you weren’t already deep in a subreddit), Hacker News, Product Hunt and indie Hackers.
Find local communities/meetup groups to pitch your idea.
Troll Facebook and Linkedin groups and add value by posting thoughtful comments/suggestions. The goal is to be seen as a reputable source. Of course, add a link to your landing page.
Follow hashtags and thought leaders on Instagram. Leave comments and ask for feedback on your concept.
Search Medium and Quora for relevant posts and leave comments or ask questions to engage. Or, write a post yourself and promote that in the comments. Answer questions on Quora. Again, include a link to your landing page.
Join Slack groups. These could be local, (or not) but focused on your target markets. Ask for feedback on your concept.
Send an email announcing your landing page to the contacts you collected in the market feedback section.
Stalk key influencers on your social platforms and ask them to coffee/lunch/convos. The key is not to “sell” them. Build a relationship and add value before asking for a favor.
Seek out mentors. They have more experience and insight than you do. Utilize the wisdom of others when you can.
Paid traffic
If you’ve hit a wall trying to stand out organically, you’re not alone. Take social platforms for instance. Simply posting really great content and expecting people to see it is becoming more and more difficult; organic social reach is at an all time low of 2-6%. And as you’ve probably noticed as you scroll through your personal news feed, the posts you’re served aren’t in chronological order; each platform uses an algorithm to score and rank content based with the hope of the most “engaging” content rising to the surface.
To quickly get feedback, we recommend spending a little cash on paid social during the MVP phase, no more than 100 clams. You can increase the spend and develop more robust content once you’ve proven there’s interest in your idea. Until then, this is duct tape marketing at its finest. Some tips and best practices for getting the most bang for your buck:
Post content that’s social and shareable. Consider imagery that educates, entertains or creates intrigue so people will want to share it. Include a question so people will be compelled to respond.
Understand the ad options for the platform and optimize your content to those specifications. Since we’re still in MVP phase, choose an ad option that you can quickly and effectively execute. Are you able to create a compelling video? Do it! Is a photo more in line with your skill set? Start there.
Experiment with your target audience. Start with a narrow target audience and see how it performs. Then, slowly add in interest categories to see what moves the needle to broaden your target audience.
Use quality photos and videos. You wouldn’t click on a crappy photo or video as you’re scrolling through your social feed, would you? Your content should grab a user’s attention, so make the first 5 seconds of your video epic or your photo compelling.
Include a call to action. What do you want them to do? Including a call to action ensures your target audience knows what you’re asking of them. And do it quickly; don’t wait until the end to tell them what you want them to do.
Design your ads for mobile. It’s how the majority of social media users use the platform. When you make content, be sure to design with mobile viewing in mind.
How will you differentiate? Stand out from the competition with your content. There are free tools that have compiled thousands of social ad examples across almost every industry. Search for ads that may exist in your orbit and design your content to look and sound unique.
Test everything. From post length, to image types, to hashtags used -- which variations are getting the most engagement?
Facebook ads step-by-step
We know, we know -- we recommended you choose the social media platform where the largest concentration of your audience is. And that’s true. The thing is, two billion people are on Facebook, so the odds are good that your audience is active on this platform. Plus, Facebook’s ad revenue in Q3 2017 was more than $10 billion, so it’s one of the biggest players in all digital advertising. With its robust targeting capabilities and huge user base, we chose the most pervasive platform with the best ROI to walk you through the process of advertising on social media. Each platform varies in its ad offering, targeting, cost and process of buying an ad, but this should serve as a good primer. Disclaimer: social media platforms and their ad options are ever-changing. We’ll update this section frequently, but it’s hard to keep up with Zucks.
Determine your campaign objectives. At the time of writing this guide, Facebook offers 10 campaign objectives broken into three categories: Awareness, (brand awareness, reach), Consideration (app installs, engagement, lead gen, traffic, video views) and Conversion (conversions, product catalog sales, store visits). What do you need your ad to do? Aligning your campaign objectives with your business objectives will help determine the best ad type to reach them. At the MVP stage, we’re looking to drive traffic to your landing page. We recommend establishing your campaign to get people to head to your page to gather quick feedback. Establishing brand awareness and reach is too broad of a goal right now; consider which goal will get the largest number of people to your landing page.
Select your ad type. You have multiple ad types to choose from: photo, video, carousel, slideshow and canvas. Which piece of content can you create quickly without leveraging a ton of external resources? Which one has the greatest potential of achieving your campaign objectives? We recommend starting with a single photo of video at this stage of the campaign. Now that you’ve determined what your ad needs to accomplish and the best format to reach your target audience, pop over to Facebook Ads Manager to create your campaign. Remember, you need to set up a Facebook business page first.
Set your campaign objective. Set your objectives based on what you’ve determined above. Again, in the MVP phase we recommend a campaign for quick feedback from 100 people.
Refine your target audience. Make sure you eliminate waste by targeting your ad to the people you want to see it. In addition to targeting by age, location, gender and language, you can further refine your target audience by demographic data, interests and behaviors. Facebook’s Audience Insights tool can tell you a lot about how your target audience interacts on Facebook. What pages do they like? How often are they on Facebook? What devices do they use? Post-MVP, you can import data from people who have already connected with you on or off Facebook with custom audience tools, or target people who are most similar to your most valuable audiences with a lookalike audience.
Set your budget and schedule. How much money do you want to spend on your Facebook ad? Set your budget (daily or lifetime) and schedule (a stop date or continuously). Facebook lets you get very granular in how you can apply spend to your ad (optimization for ad delivery, bid amount, ad scheduling, delivery type, etc.) Make sure you’re getting the most for your $100 by keeping an eye on the meter on the right side of the page, which indicates the breadth of your audience selection. At this stage we recommend setting your campaign to one day at a $10 spend, and letting Facebook do the bidding for you. See what worked and what didn’t, and allocate the rest of your $100 to target using this feedback.
Create ad and publish. Remember, Facebook (and all social media platforms) have specific rules for all ads. View their advertising guidelines by medium, and their advertising policies before you create your ads.
