My Startup Customer Acquisition presentation given to the AngelCube Startup Accelerator teams for 2013.
I give an overview of the various startup customer acquisition channels available as well as pros and cons of each channel. We cover things such as PPC, SEO, Facebook ads, Retargeting, Email, Business Development and Growth Hacking.
I also jump into the importance of building great marketing systems so that founders can fire themselves from the process and scale up fast.
4. Startup Customer Acquisition
There are very rarely any silver
bullets in startup marketing
Startups need to commit to
trying lots of different things
and failing at most until some
methods stick.
8. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Fast setup
- Quick validation
- Highly targeted
- Expensive & Saturated
- No long term asset value
- There are incumbent advertisers
- Requires active optimization
Search PPC
10. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Targeted audiences
- Fast setup
- Generally very poor engagement
- More likely to complete Naval Seal Training than click a banner ad
- More likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad
Display advertising
11. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Targeted audiences
- Fast setup
- Generally very poor engagement
- More likely to complete Naval Seal Training than click a banner ad
- More likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad
Display advertising
12. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Targeted audiences
- Fast setup
- Generally very poor engagement
- More likely to complete Naval Seal Training than click a banner ad
- More likely to survive a plane crash than click a banner ad
Display advertising
14. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Some of the cheapest advertising inventory out there
- Strong engagement audience
- Highly targeted segmentation based on visitor actions
- Cool factor and makes you appear bigger
- You need visitors first
- Requires regular refreshing due to ad fatigue
- Requires active optimization
Display Retargeting
19. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Cheap inventory (but is rapidly rising)
- Super awesome for consumer products
- The most powerful demographic targeting available
- Great for persona testing
- Facebook users starting to experience ad fatigue
- Requires even more ad refreshing
- Can get expensive very fast if not monitored
- Best results come from driving traffic to a FB page
Facebook Ads & Custom Audiences
21. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Cheap inventory
- Some large publishers
- Decent engagement powered by email effectiveness
- Great for identifying future partnerships
- Limited by inventory of publishers
- Monthly minimum of $500
Launchbit Email Ad Network
23. Startup Customer Acquisition
Paid
Pros
Cons
- Strong ROI potential
- Outsourced salesforce strategy
- Pay for results
- Potential SEO benefits if configured correctly
- Around 10% of total affiliates do the work
- Affiliate networks can be expensive to enter
- Can get lost among sea of other advertisers
Affiliate Marketing
31. Startup Customer Acquisition
Pros
Cons
- Building long term asset
- “Free” traffic
- Viral Potential
- Positioning tool
- Competitive advantage
- Good for lead generation
- Typically a Long Game
- Typically Poor direct ROI
- Becoming increasingly saturated, requires Awesome not just Good content
Content Marketing & SEOContent & SEO
38. Startup Customer Acquisition
Pros
Cons
- Still one of the most engaged marketing channels
- Drives significant revenue through timely offers
- Trigger based email
- Strong lead nurturing capability
- Cheap Cheap Cheap
- Need a sizeable list to be big
- Can’t hammer with offers all the time, focus on value
Email marketingEmail
56. Startup Customer Acquisition
Growth Hacking
Josh Elman
We dug in to our data for our most engaged users and tried to learn what the “aha” moment was for
them. We then rebuilt our entire new user experience to engineer that moment more quickly.
It turned out that if you manually selected and followed at least 5-10 Twitter accounts in your first day
on Twitter, you were much more likely to become a long term user, since you had chosen things that
interested you. And if we helped someone you know follow you back, then even better. As we kept
tweaking the features to focus on helping users achieve these things, our retention dramatically rose.