Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

Targeting Blogs Publicity Unconventional PR Search Engine Marketing (SEM) Social and Display Ads Offline Ads Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Content Marketing Email Marketing Viral Marketing Engineering as Marketing Business Development (BD) Sales Affiliate Programs Existing Platforms Trade Shows Offline Events Speaking Engagements Community Building

There are three reasons why founders ignore potentially profitable traction channels: Out of sight, out of mind. Startups generally don’t think of things like speaking engagements because they are usually out of their field of vision. Some founders refuse to seriously consider channels they view negatively, like sales or affiliate marketing. Just because you hate talking on the phone doesn’t mean your customers do. Bias against schlep—things that seem annoying and time-consuming. Channels like business development and trade shows often fall into this category.

Lay out your milestones. Determine your traction goal and define your Critical Path against that goal, working backward and enumerating the absolutely necessary milestones you need to achieve to get there. Stay on the Critical Path. Assess every activity you do against your Critical Path and consistently reassess it. Building such assessment into your management processes is a good idea. Quantify traction subgoals and put them on a calendar so you can properly monitor your progress over time. Actively work to overcome your traction channel biases. Being on the cutting edge of the right traction channel can make a huge difference in success. Which traction channels do you know most about? Which traction channels do you know least about? Mentors can help here.

Search Engines—Simply search for things like “top blogs for x” or “best x blogs.” YouTube—Doing a simple search for your product keywords on YouTube shows you the most popular videos in your industry. These videos are often associated with influencers who have blogs, and you can use references to their videos as icebreakers to start building relationships with them. This tactic can be applied to other video sharing sites, such as Vimeo and Dailymotion. Delicious—Delicious allows you to use keywords to find links that others have saved, which can unearth new blogs. Twitter—Using Twitter search is another easy way to find blogs in a niche. You can also use tools like Followerwonk and Klout to determine the top Twitter accounts in your industry. Social Mention—Social Mention helps you determine the sites that have the most frequent mentions for your keywords. Talk to People—The most effective way to figure out what your target audience is really reading online is by asking them directly!

Run tests on a variety of smaller blogs. See what type of audience resonates best with your product and messaging. There are a variety of tools you can use to uncover relevant blogs, including YouTube, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Twitter, search engines, Google Alerts, and Social Mention. You can also ask people! Sponsor small blogs, especially personal blogs. Providing influential bloggers early access or offering early access in exchange for spreading the word are other effective strategies. Offer something unique to your best targets. Build a special offer just for them and put together a draft guest post that they can run with.

Submit the story to link-sharing sites (reddit, Hacker News) with larger audiences. Share it on social networks to drive awareness, which you can further amplify with social ads. Email it to influencers in your industry for comment. Some of them will share it with their audiences. Ping blogs in your space and tell them that you have a story that’s getting some buzz. These writers may then want to jump in themselves to cover you.

Blendtec is a blender manufacturer located in southern Utah. In 2007, its team decided to create a series of videos called “Will It Blend?” In these videos, Blendtec’s CEO stood by one of its blenders and blended items like a rake, golf balls, and even an iPhone. The series took off shortly after the videos were posted to YouTube. The iPhone video alone has received more than 8 million views, and the “Will It Blend?” series has become one of the one hundred most-viewed on YouTube. All for a company that makes blenders! Dollar Shave Club, a subscription shaving startup, got similar attention for its launch video titled “Our Blades Are F**king Great.” It also has millions of views on YouTube and was the main source of the more than 12,000 customers it acquired within two days of launching. The video was also shared more than 31,000 times on Facebook, received over 9,500 comments, 12,000-plus likes, and more than 16,000 tweets.

Do something big, cheap, fun, and original. A publicity stunt is anything that is engineered to generate a large amount of media coverage. They are often hard to do consistently well, but just one well-executed stunt can move the needle for your company. Publicity stunts need to be creative and extraordinary to succeed. Some types that have been successful repeatedly are competitive stunts and viral videos. Be awesome to your customers and good things follow. Common ways to do customer appreciation well are through gifts, contests, and amazing customer support. Excelling in this area is a way to do unconventional PR over a longer period of time. Prepare for failure. Success in this channel is unpredictable. You should have a defined process for brainstorming and selecting ideas, but also understand that not every idea will work.

Click-Through Rate (CTR)—the percentage of ad impressions that result in clicks to your site. For example, if one hundred people see your ad and three of them click on it, you have a CTR of 3 percent (3/100). Cost per Click (CPC)—the amount it costs to buy a click on an advertisement. CPC is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay to get a potential customer to your site. Cost per Acquisition (CPA)—CPA is a measure of how much it costs you to acquire a customer, not just a click. For example, suppose you buy clicks at $1 and 10 percent of the people who hit your site after clicking on your ad make a purchase. This puts your CPA at $10: CPA = $1/10% = $10. You are paying $10 to acquire each customer. The 10 percent in this equation is known as the conversion percentage, which is the rate at which people “convert” by taking the action you want (in this case making a purchase). For paid search in particular this measure is calculated with the following formula: CPA = CPC / conversion percentage.

Bing Ads (with its ads running on Yahoo!, Bing, and DuckDuckGo)

With Google’s Keyword Planner, you can discover the top keywords your target customers use to find products like yours.

Other tools such as KeywordSpy, SEMrush, and SpyFu are valuable for discovering keywords your competition uses to attract customers.

You can use tools like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages.

When you set up a campaign, you can choose to advertise on the Google search network (traditional paid SEM), the Google content network (ads on non-Google sites), or both. For beginners and for those just testing this traction channel, the content network can be difficult to navigate. Yet once you have established profitable campaigns, you should consider expanding them to the content network, which includes millions of non-Google sites that serve Google’s ads.

AdRoll or Perfect Audience.

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.

The largest display ad networks are Google’s Display Network (also known as the Google content network), Advertising.com (owned by AOL), Tribal Fusion, Conversant, and Adblade.

Niche ad networks focus on smaller sites that fit certain audience demographics, such as dog lovers or Apple fanatics. One such network is The Deck, which targets the niche audience of Web creatives. As an advertiser, you know exactly the audience you’re reaching.

Another network, BuySellAds, offers advertisers a self-service platform for buying ads directly from publishers. In addition to buying and selling display advertising, BuySellAds allows advertisers to purchase space on mobile Web sites, Twitter accounts, mobile apps, email newsletters, and RSS feeds. With its flexibility and low starting cost, BuySellAds is an easy way to start testing this traction channel.

The goal of social ads is often awareness oriented, not conversion oriented. A purchase takes place further down the line.

LinkedIn—LinkedIn’s social network is made up of more than 250 million business professionals. LinkedIn ads allow targeting by job title, company, industry, and other business demographics, all factors you can’t easily target elsewhere.

Tumblr—Tumblr is all about helping its 100 million–plus users discover high-quality content. Its ad platform allows brands to create and promote sponsored posts, which Tumblr’s many users can reblog and engage with.

reddit—With more than 5 billion monthly page views and a thriving platform of more than 175 million monthly uniques, reddit is one of the most popular content sites in the world. reddit ads can take the form of sponsored links that hover at the top of reddit’s pages or sponsored ads along the sidebar. The most successful reddit advertisements are controversial or funny. These types of ads encourage redditors (the official name of reddit users) to engage with them by leaving comments and upvoting/downvoting as if they were any other content on the site.

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 need to understand the reader demographics, circulation, and publication frequency of any magazine you’re considering. To get this information, just ask the magazine for its ad kit (also known as a media package, media kit, or press kit).

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.

Moz Beginner’s Guide to SEO

tactics. In SEO, there are two high-level strategies to choose from: fat head and long tail. Let us first explain these strange names.

Fat-head Strategy 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 can also get keywords by looking at your competitors’ Web sites and seeing what words they use in their home page titles and headers.

Using tools like Open Site Explorer,

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.

A second way to evaluate a long-tail strategy is to look at the analytics software you have on your site (such as Google Analytics or Clicky).

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.

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.

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.

Personalize your email marketing messages. Email marketing is a personal traction channel. Messages come into your inbox along with email from your friends and family. Build an email list of prospective customers whether you end up focusing on this traction channel or not. You can utilize email marketing at any step of your relationship with a customer, including customer acquisition, activation, retention, and revenue generation. Set up a series of automated emails. Often called life cycle or drip sequences, this technique works best when the series of emails adapts to how people have interacted with your product. Use online tools to test and optimize email campaigns. These tools have built-in templates and A/B testing ability and will track open and click rates.

A customer is exposed to your product or service. That customers tells a set of potential customers about your product or service. These potential customers are exposed to your product or service, and some portion become customers themselves.

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)

Build a viral loop into the product. There are several types of viral loops, including word of mouth, inherent, collaborative, communicative, incentives, embedded, and social. Startups can combine and change types over time, but generally these loops need to be built into the product to work successfully. Shorten viral cycle time. The shorter this time, the more loops will occur and the faster you will grow. Look for viral pockets. You might already be viral in a subgroup of your customers. Find that subgroup and focus on it. More than in any other channel, test, test, test. Successful viral strategy involves constant testing, measurement, and trying new things. It is a numbers and creativity game. No test is too small, as small changes can have big effects over time. Viral loops that work well often have extremely simple components (forms, copy, email, etc.).

Your team’s engineering skills can get your startup traction directly by building tools and resources that reach more people. We call this traction channel “engineering as marketing.” You make useful tools like calculators, widgets, and educational microsites to get your company in front of potential customers.

Marketing Grader

Another company that nails engineering as marketing is Moz, the leader in SEO software. Two of its free SEO tools, Followerwonk and Open Site Explorer, have driven tens of thousands of leads for Moz.

TARGETS Pursue mutually beneficial partnerships. In a

standard partnership, two companies work together to make one or both of their products better by leveraging the unique capabilities of the other. Other major types of BD deals include partnerships focused on joint ventures, licensing, distribution, and inventory. You need to understand why a potential partner might want to work with you. What are their incentives? Just as you are evaluating potential partnerships in terms of your core metrics, they will be doing the same. Focus on meeting your startup’s core metrics. Good business development deals align with your company and product strategy and are focused on strategic product and distribution milestones. Avoid deals that don’t directly align with your traction goal. Create a pipeline of deals you’re constantly working on. For initial testing, you can reach out to a variety of potential partners to gauge interest.

Commission Junction, Pepperjam, ShareASale,

Commission Junction—CJ has many of the largest

Internet retailers on its platform. It is also somewhat pricey: it costs upward of $2,000 to sell your product through its network. This high cost, combined with the fact that CJ curates both affiliates and publishers for performance, creates a high level of quality in its network. ClickBank—The leading platform for anyone selling digital products online (courses, e-books, digital media). ClickBank is relatively cheap to start with, as you need to pay only $50 to list a product on its platform. Affiliate.com—Affiliate.com promises a very strict affiliate approval process, which it claims means higher-quality traffic for its advertisers. Pepperjam—Started by Kris Jones (whom we interviewed for this chapter), the Pepperjam Exchange encompasses multiple channels (mobile, social, offline retail, print, etc.). Pepperjam promotes its customer support and transparency as selling points for its network, which costs $1,000 to join. ShareASale—This affiliate network has more than 2,500 merchants and allows advertisers to be flexible in determining commission structures. It costs

about $500 to get started. Adknowledge—Adknowledge offers traditional ad-buying services in addition to affiliate campaigns. It also works in mobile, search, social media, and display advertising, giving advertisers access to affiliate and CPC outlets through one platform. LinkShare—LinkShare helps companies find affiliates and builds lead-gen programs for them. Companies like Macy’s, Avon, and Champion use them to manage affiliate programs. MobAff—MobAff is a mobile affiliate network that utilizes SMS, push notifications, click to call, mobile display, and mobile search to drive conversions for its advertisers. Neverblue—Neverblue is targeted toward advertisers that spend more than $20,000 per month. It also works with its advertising partners on their advertisements and campaigns. It counts Groupon, eHarmo...

Test using an existing affiliate network. It already has affiliates, so you can start using this traction channel immediately. Keep your payouts simple. Know how much you can spend to acquire a customer and keep it below that. As you get deeper into this channel you can test more complicated payout programs. The next place you should look for more affiliates