Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth

by Gabriel Weinberg

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.