How 2 Acquire Customers Online
The following post is from Yushan Lou ’18, a Butler Venture Accelerator team member.
Earlier this spring, we were lucky to have Dan Marques’07 for a #How2Tuesday! Dan is a data-driven marketer and entrepreneur and is currently the director of Online Marketing at Talbots. He started his career at Vistaprint managing SEO and SEM, and has previously led e-commerce marketing in the US for adidas Group. These were some takeaways I had from that session that can give you an insight on how to start online marketing and how to acquire customer online.
How to acquire your first 10 or 100 customers?
To get the first 10 customers, friends, families and their friends are your product testers because you might not be able to afford the product test. To get your first 100 customers, you should really start thinking about a customer acquisition strategy. Developing an Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is key; you should know why your product or service is great for your ICP and not for everyone else. It might be really hard the beginning, but once you can get three to five customers to start working with you, you can use that story to start the network effect.
How to start your online marketing and get your first 1000 customers?
All marketing fundamentals apply to online marketing. Before starting online marketing, you should always figure out who your customer is, how many of them exist, where they are and why they would buy from you. Make a 10-week framework to test out the best one to two channels for your online marketing. First, you can prioritize five channels to test based on likelihood of success, especially starting with channels your competitors/analogs are using. Some channels you should consider testing are Paid Search, SEO, Marketplaces and Paid Social Media such as Facebook or Instagram Ads. Test the first channel for the first two weeks and track everything daily. For week three and week four, you can spend 80% of time on next channel, 20% of your time on the prior as well as evaluating which channel is performing better. After this, repeating this process until you have your top one to two channels at the end of 10 weeks.
See you for our first #How2Tuesday first week of October!
What are #How2Tuesdays?:
Want to learn something really practical to get your startup moving in the right direction? #How2Tuesdays are short, workshop style sessions meant to bring you very specific, user friendly instruction on some of the most important things you need to know how to do for your venture. Every Tuesday at 5pm in the Blank Center!