Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

Several sources have mentioned that an average CTR for an AdWords campaign is around 2 percent, and that Google assigns a low quality score to ads with CTRs below 1.5 percent. If any of your keywords are getting such low CTRs, rewrite those ads, test them on a different audience, or ditch them altogether.

You should also consider luring people back to your site by retargeting through Google AdWords, or other sites like AdRoll or Perfect Audience.

Another advanced tool is Google’s Conversion Optimizer. It analyzes your conversion tracking data and automatically adjusts your ads to perform better. After you’ve been running a campaign for a while, using this tool can make your CPAs and keyword targeting better than you would be able to on your own. If you decide to use the Conversion Optimizer, know that it can take time for Google to build a robust prediction algorithm for your campaign.

Use search engine ads to test product positioning and messaging (even before you fully build it!). Do not expect your early SEM ad tests to be profitable. If you can run an ad campaign that gets close to breakeven after a few weeks, then SEM could be the traction channel for you to focus on. A test ad campaign can be as little as four ads that you use to experiment. Measure conversions so you can test SEM variables against profitability. Areas you should be testing include keywords, ad copy, demographic targeting, landing pages, and CPC bids. Cost per acquisition (CPA) is how much it costs you to acquire a customer, and that is ultimately what you need to be testing against. Use longer keywords. Known as long-tail keywords, they are often less competitive because they have lower search volumes. As such, they are cheaper and so can be more profitable—you just may have to aggregate a lot of them to get the volume you need to move the needle. Pay close attention to your ad quality scores. High quality scores get you better placement on the page and better pricing on your ads. The biggest factor in quality scores is CTR.

One application that is unique to social ads and where they have performed exceptionally well is when they are used to build an audience, engage with that audience over time, and eventually convert them into customers.

The interesting thing about display advertising is that somebody doesn’t have to be directly related to whatever your product is to find out about it. For instance, if you’re selling some sort of weight-loss product, you don’t have to use terms in your display campaign about losing weight. You can use terms relating to nutrition or carbohydrates, because you know if someone starts to read about those things, they have an interest in maintaining or losing weight in some way.

Instead of looking at every click and how it converts, indirect response says, “Let’s create an environment within the social context that’s geared toward the specific product or service you’re trying to offer, build affinity there, build loyalty there, and then migrate that audience toward some conversion element we want to occur at a later point in time.”

People visit social media sites for entertainment and interaction, not to see ads. An effective social ad strategy takes advantage of this reality. Social ads give companies the opportunity to start a conversation about their products with members of their target audiences.

If you have a piece of content that has high organic reach, when you put paid [advertising] behind that piece of content the magic happens. As more and more people see it, more and more people engage with it—because it’s a better piece of content…. Paid is fundamentally only as good as the content you put behind it. And content is only as good as how many people actually see it. Content only goes anywhere if people care about it…. With social, it’s word of mouth on crack. You should only employ social advertising dollars when you’ve understood that a fire is starting around your message and you want to put more oil on it. Getting that spark started is based on what you’re trying to say: startups do the opposite of this all the time where they waste tens of thousands of dollars trying to push a message that nobody cares about. With social platforms, the burden of success is on the advertiser as opposed to the platform.

one of the most effective approaches on Twitter is to turn on paid advertising around real-time events that your audience cares about (e.g., sportswear ads during major sporting events).

The most successful reddit advertisements are controversial or funny.

Contact small sites directly for display ads. Ask them to run your ads for a small fee. This is an underutilized strategy in display ads, especially in phase I. Study your competitors’ ads to get good ideas for A/B tests to run on your ads. Use social ads to build awareness of products and create demand. The goal with social ads should be to build an audience, engage with that audience over time, and eventually move them to convert to customers. This indirect response strategy usually leads to more conversions than a direct response strategy that tries to get people to convert immediately. Create compelling social content. The best way to build a presence and engage your audience on social sites is to concentrate on creating less content, but making it highly shareable. When your content is getting naturally shared, that’s the time to promote it further with social ads.

You’ll want to think about location, gender, race, age, income, and occupation—and how each matches up with your target audience. You should be able to answer many of these questions by asking for an audience prospectus (sometimes called an ad kit) from whatever company is selling the ad inventory.

If dealing with national magazines, consider using a print or “remnant ad” buying agency such as Manhattan Media or Novus Media that specializes in negotiating discounted pricing of up to 90% off rate card. Feel free to negotiate still lower using them as a go-between.

Unorthodox strategies like hanging flyers in areas where your potential customers visit can be a surprisingly effective way to get some early traction for your company. For example, InstaCab hired cyclists to bike around San Francisco and hand out business cards to people who were trying to hail taxis. These were well targeted (it’s a good bet that someone hailing a taxi would appreciate an easier way of getting around) and got the company some good buzz and customer adoption early on.

Transit ads are placed in or on buses, taxis, benches, and bus shelters. Most ads of this kind can be effective as a direct-response tool because people in transit are a captive audience.

Another advantage of billboards and transit media is that they are replaced only when there are new ads to go up.

Traditionally, products in the following categories have used infomercials to gain serious traction: Workout equipment or programs Body care products Household products (kitchen, cleaning) Vacuum cleaners Health products (e.g., juicers) Work-from-home businesses

One thing I learned at Smart Bear is that I have zero ability to predict what’s going to work. There’d be a magazine where I thought, “This is just some piddly magazine, surely no one reads this,” and sure enough it was cheap (due to small circulation) and it’d do terrifically! Our ROI on some of those were incredible. And you just couldn’t predict, whether on circulation size or media type, how it was going to go. And it changed over time—an ad might be good for a quarter, or a year, and then decay slowly until it wasn’t valuable anymore. It was unpredictable and decayed over time: so the only thing we were left with was trying everything and measuring what worked. TARGETS Run cheap tests by first targeting local markets. It is hard to predict what will work, so it is often useful to run several small offline ad tests in parallel. Each offline ad medium is testable locally. Then you can scale up to regional or national campaigns if warranted. Seek out remnant ad inventory for the highest discounts. You can use remnant ads for both initial tests and scaling this channel. The downside is less targeting ability, both in terms of demographics and timing. Use unique codes or Web addresses to track the effectiveness of different offline ad campaigns. Make sure before you set up tests or campaigns that you can trace conversions back to specific offline ads.

At its base, SEO is starting with a content strategy and finding a way to attract relevant visitors through search engines. You have to intelligently design this kind of [content] and make sure search engines can find and rank that content.

To determine if a fat-head SEO strategy is worthwhile, first research what terms people use to find products in your industry, and then see if the search volumes are large enough to move the needle. Google currently provides a useful tool for this process called Keyword Planner (part of Google AdWords). You can type in search terms that describe your products and then see the search volumes for these terms.

You want to find terms that have enough volume such that if you captured 10 percent of the searches for a given term then it would be meaningful.

The next step is determining the difficulty of ranking high for each term. Using tools like Open Site Explorer, examine the number of links competitors have for a given term. This will give you a rough idea of how difficult it will be to rank high. If a competitor has thousands of links for a term you want to rank for, just realize it will likely take lots of focus on building links and optimizing for SEO to rank above them.

Next, take steps to narrow your list of targeted keywords to just a handful. Go over to Google Trends to see how your keywords have been doing. Have these terms been searched more or less often in the last year? Are they being searched in the geographic areas where you’re seeking customers? You can further test keywords by buying SEM ads against them. If these ads convert well, then you have an indication that SEO could be a strong growth channel using these keywords.

Finally, get other sites to link to your site, ideally using the exact terms you want to rank for. For example, an article may read something like “XYZ Company releases version of small business accounting software” (where an underline denotes the link). Exact matches give you a significant boost, and also links from higher-quality sites matter more.

As with the fat-head strategy, the Google Keyword Planner is the first way to evaluate whether a long-tail strategy may be effective for you. But this time you are seeking information on more specific, long-tail terms. What are search volumes for a bunch of long-tail keywords in your industry? Do they add up to meaningful amounts?

you could look at competitors’ Web sites to determine whether they are getting meaningful long-tail SEO traffic. Here are signs that they are: They have a lot of landing pages. You can see what types of pages they are producing by searching site:domain.com in a search engine. For example, if I wanted to see how many landing pages Moz has created targeting long-tail keywords, I could search site:moz.com and get a sense of how many landing pages they have. Check out Alexa search rankings and look at the percentage of visitors your competitors are receiving from search. If you look across competitors and one site receives a lot more visitors from search than others, you can guess they are using some kind of SEO strategy.

Another way to approach long-tail SEO is to use content that naturally flows from your business. To evaluate whether you could use this tactic, ask yourself: what data do we collect or generate that other people may find useful?

Getting links is often more difficult because it involves people outside of your company. Here are some ways to build links: Publicity—when you are covered by online publications, reporters will link to your Web site. Product—with some products, you can produce Web pages as part of your product that people naturally want to share. A great example is LinkedIn profile pages. Content marketing—creating strong, relevant content that people want to read, and thus share. Widgets—giving site owners useful things to add to their sites, which also contain links back to yours.

Rand suggests using infographics, slideshows, images, and original research to drive links, as these are all things people naturally share. Since the end goal is to get links, you’ll want to specifically target people who will link back to you. This group of people will vary depending on the product, but in general people who run blogs are big social sharers. Reporters are usually good targets as well.

Find search terms that have enough search volume to move the needle for your company. If you can’t find enough search volume, or can’t rank high for those terms, SEO won’t be a great strategy for your business. If you identify some terms that could work, you can further qualify them by running search ads against them to test whether they actually convert customers. Generate long-tail landing pages by using cheap freelancers. Or, if your product can naturally produce good long-tail content, use it to create the landing pages yourself. Focus on how you will build links. Whether you pursue a fat-head or long-tail strategy, SEO comes down to two things: content and links. Link building is often the more challenging of the two. Creating amazing content is one way to quickly build links. Avoid “black-hat” SEO tactics that violate search engine guidelines, especially buying links. These banned tactics will eventually come back to bite you.

The Unbounce team relied heavily on social media to drive readers to their blog. After every post they wrote, they’d ping influencers on Twitter asking for feedback. They also engaged with their target customers by writing useful answers on targeted forums like Quora. Though actions like these may not scale, they’re okay when getting started because you’re building toward a point where your content will spread on its own.

Unlike Unbounce, the OkCupid team wrote longer posts with less frequency. Each of OkCupid’s posts took a month to write and drew on the data they had from studying the usage patterns of their members. They intentionally wrote controversial posts (e.g., “How Your Race Affects the Messages You Get”) to generate traffic and conversation.

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.

Both Rick and Sam made it a point to say there’s no shortcut to creating quality content. 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.

Unbounce engaged in any online forum where conversations were taking place about online marketing, and did its best to contribute. It was particularly successful reaching out to influential people on Twitter. It would simply follow marketing mini-celebrities and ask them for feedback on recent posts.

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. Unbounce started doing guest posts on other popular blogs after just three months of blogging on its own. As you move forward, monitor social mentions and use analytics to determine which types of posts are getting attention and which are not.

how a popular blog can make a company a recognized industry leader in a highly competitive space. Recognition as a primary voice in an industry leads to opportunities to speak at major conferences, give press quotes to journalists, and influence industry direction. It also means your content is shared many more times than it would be otherwise.

When they were just starting out, they tried contacting popular companies to arrange partnerships. These types of business development pitches were ineffective early on, but that changed after their blog started getting readership. Now, they have numerous integrations (including some major ones with companies like Salesforce), and a backlog of companies who want to work with them.

Having a strong company blog can positively impact at least eight other traction channels—SEO, publicity, email marketing, targeting blogs, community building, offline events, existing platforms, and business development.

If you blog, dedicate at least six months to it. A company blog can take a significant amount of time to start taking off. Do things that don’t scale early on. Reaching out to individuals to share posts, for instance, is okay, because you’re building toward a point where your content will spread on its own. Contacting influential industry leaders (on Twitter, etc.), doing guest posts, writing about recent news events, and creating shareable infographics are all great ways to increase the rate of growth of your audience. Produce in-depth posts you can’t find anywhere else. You need to create quality content to succeed in this traction channel. There is no silver bullet, but a decent approach is to write about problems your target customers have. Another approach (not mutually exclusive) is to run experiments or use data from your company that leads to a surprising conclusion.

If you’re running a real business, [email] is still the most effective way to universally reach people who have expressed interest in your product or site. For that, it really can’t be beat.

At the bottom of your blog posts and landing pages, simply ask for an email address.

In addition to your own email list, consider advertising on email newsletters complementary to your product. Many email newsletters accept advertisers, and if not, you can contact them directly and ask for a special arrangement.

[Y]ou create the ideal experience for your users when they sign up for your trial. You then create all of the paths they can go down when they fail to go through the ideal experience. And you have emails in place to catch them and help them get back on that [ideal] path.

Any sort of communication telling your customers how well they’re doing is likely to go over well. Patrick McKenzie, whom we interviewed for SEO, calls this the “you are so awesome” email.

Some consumer apps, and even some B2B companies like Asana, will ask their customers to import their address books to share the site with their friends. This marketing tactic touches elements of both viral and email marketing and can be extremely effective.

many marketers suggest sending emails between nine a.m. and twelve p.m. in your customer’s time zone or scheduling emails to reach them at the time they registered for your email list (e.g., for people who signed up for your list at eight p.m., email them at eight p.m.).

Last, 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. An email campaign can easily go from a waste of time to wildly profitable just by tweaking a few words and headlines.