Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

Avoid “black-hat” SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines, especially buying links.

The most common hurdle in content marketing is writer’s block. To overcome it, simply write about the problems facing your target customers.

Unbounce found that infographics are shared about twenty times more often than a typical blog post and have a higher likelihood of getting picked up by other online publications.

If what you’re writing isn’t useful, it doesn’t matter how hard you try to spread your content on Twitter. It just won’t spread.

The secret to shareable content is showing readers they have a problem they didn’t know about, or at least couldn’t fully articulate. A solution is nice, but it’s not as good for drawing in readers as showing them they’ve been going about some aspect of their life all wrong.

One of the best methods of growing your audience is guest posting. This tactic is especially powerful in the early days when you essentially have no audience to work with yourself.

Email marketing is a personal channel. Messages from your company sit next to email updates from friends and family. As such, email marketing works best when it is personalized.

Email marketing can be used for all stages of the customer life cycle: building familiarity with prospects, acquiring customers, and retaining the customers you already have.

We urge you to build an email list of prospective customers through your other marketing efforts.

Traction channels such as SEO or content marketing can help you build your email lists.

In addition to your own email list, consider advertising on email newsletters complementary to your product.

improving your activation rates can have a significant effect on your business.

Email marketing is a great way to improve your customer activation rates. A popular approach is to create a sequence of emails that slowly exposes your new customers to the key features in your product.

For these emails, you should determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product.

Email marketing is also one of the best channels to surprise and delight your customers.

Any sort of communication telling your customers how well they’re doing is likely to go over well.

an effective email sequence will be meaningless if you don’t have great email copy.

Copywriting is an art on its own, but we suggest checking out some of the resources and information that Copy Hackers provides.

Personalize your email marketing messages.

Build an email list of prospective customers whether you end up focusing on this traction channel or not.

Set up a series of automated emails.

Use online tools to test and optimize email campaigns.

Viral marketing is the process of getting your existing customers to refer others to your product.

In the context of startups, literally “going viral” means that every user you acquire brings in at least one other user.

As great as your product may be, true viral growth is unlikely.

A nonuser’s first exposure to a product often occurs when a current user sends an invitation.

Invitations that work best are short and succinct.

some companies allow people to use portions of their product without signing up. This allows potential customers to test-drive the product without making any sort of commitment.

The pages that prospective customers land on from invitations are called conversion pages.

Here are some of the more common items to test and optimize: Button vs. text links Location of your call to actions Size, color, and contrast of your action buttons Page speed Adding images Headlines Site copy Testimonials Signs of social proof (such as pictures of happy customers, case studies, press mentions, and statistics about product usage) Number of form fields Allowing users to test the product before signing up Ease of signup (Facebook Connect, Twitter login, etc.) Length of the signup process (the shorter you can make the process, the higher your conversion percentage will be)

With all viral (or near-viral) growth, there will be subgroups of customers growing far more rapidly than your total customer base. We call these subgroups “viral pockets.” Figure out if you have viral pockets by calculating your viral coefficient on distinct subsets of your customers, such as those from a particular country, age group, or other trait.

Since most viral loops are not self-sustaining, you need a constant stream of new customers entering your viral loop. This process is called “seeding.”

Build a viral loop into the product.

Shorten viral cycle time.

Look for viral pockets.

More than in any other channel, test, test, test.

Your team’s engineering skills can get your startup traction directly by building tools and resources that reach more people.

You make useful tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.

Engineering as marketing creates lasting assets that can serve as the engine for your growth.

Create a stand-alone, low-friction site to engage potential customers.

Look internally for site and tool ideas.

Make them as simple as possible.

Pursue mutually beneficial partnerships.

Focus on meeting your startup’s core metrics.

Create a pipeline of deals you’re constantly working on.

Sales is the process of generating leads, qualifying them, and converting them into paying customers. This channel is particularly useful for enterprise and expensive products because often customers desire some form of interpersonal interaction before a purchase.

Situation questions.

Problem questions.

Implication questions.

Need-payoff questions.