Regarding your growth process, it should start with a bunch of ideas that you’ll prioritize and test afterward. You need to get data from those tests as it will allow you to formulate new ideas based on analysis to start the whole process again.
Prioritize & evaluate your ideas with the I.C.E. methodology:
– Impact (do you want more users, revenue, conversions, etc.)
– Confidence (will it work)
– Ease (will it be simple, with limited costs)
Score from 1 to 10 your ideas and evaluate them in order to define your action plan. You can classify and organize your actions with tools such as airtable.com.
When launching a new product, you should focus on product development and customer acquisition/retention first.
Regarding customer acquisition/retention – do not forget to get out of the building and do things that don’t scale like participating in conferences & events or giving free samples.
Focus on your network and share your knowledge and product with them because you need user testing. Gather feedback and gauge the interest in your solution.
Experiment with pivots and A/B-tests to adapt your product based on the feedback gathered:
– “Pivots” are core changes such as your target customers, the market (it’s recommended to start with a niche), the user experience & design, your funnels, etc…
– “A/B tests” compare two versions of your offer put in the hands of your audience to figure out the better performing variation (more conversion, fewer dropouts, reduce bounce rate…).
Get on Social Media. You need to reach out to groups and communities via all the social media networks available to you. The idea is to get people interested in your product, ask specific questions about it. Go on groups/communities related to your company field and ask them what they think about it, offer trials, etc… Overall, gain users & visibility!
Consider your branding, according to the book of Simon Sinek “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action.”, you should present a brand message that emphasizes: the why rather than the how & what.
“People don’t buy “what” you do, they buy “why” you do it.”
Use the brand platform model to define your brand identity.
– Vision & mission statement
– Core identity concepts (values, personality, tone of voice)
– Unique Value Proposition (UVP)
“We help X to do Y by doing Z.”
– X = your clients
– Y = the problem you help them to solve
– Z = what you do
Focus on the end story results + numbers + obstacles or fears.
Regarding the brand story, control both the internal & external narrative structure of your brand to make it appear authentic and attractive.
The brand story is centred around a character who must overcome obstacles to achieve an important goal. This character takes the form in the customer. Customers are not rational beings, they always buy for emotional reasons before justifying their purchases through rationality. Get interested in the different types of customer archetypes.
Draft your Buyer Persona. In the case of B2B, your buyer is still a person. Try to observe over the months who buys your product & define what they have in common.
Create landing pages, they are one of the biggest levers of growth. In this context, landing pages represent the entry points of your traffic (from PPC, social media, SEO, email, affiliate, direct, signature).
The ultimate goal of a landing page is to convert. Visitors are led to perform a set of specific actions converting them into leads or buyers for example. As such, landing pages can be of different types, with purposes such as lead generation, eCommerce, click-through, etc.
No bugs & a fast loading site. You should verify the usability of different types of screens & devices. Inquire for low conversion rates or high bounce rates in Google Analytics.
Personalize your offers. Create 3 – 10 main use cases/personas and dedicated landing pages for each. Segment your traffic, especially from your ads & emails and redirect all the landing pages traffic to the same product.
– Hero section
– Trust-building section (logos of partners, certificates, reviews, testimonials, social proofs)
– Demo (video, GIF, calculator, interactive…)
– Benefits for the users
– Features of the product
– Scarcity (time/quantity limited, countdown)
– Contacts (phone, email, form, chat)
– Team (smile)
– Copy (how it works, FAQ, objection handling section, long copy, etc.)
– CTAs (have one CTA multiple times or multiples versions of the CTA – 2 to 3 / they can be aggressive or soft)
When it comes to cold outbound (messages, phone, email), if you don’t have the budget to wait for customers to come to you, you need to reach out to them.
The audience you desire to reach through cold outbound is the ideal customer(s) of your company, the one you’ve defined through your user persona.
– Scrap directories of data to find your leads’ contact info.
– Use tools* to find their phone number & email address.
– Send personalized cold email sequences.
– Send 100 invites per day on LinkedIn.
– Most importantly, SMILE & DIAL! In a day, you can engage in more than 100 dials.
*Tools: Fiverr (ask freelancers to scrape leads for you), Pipl (enrich your lead’s data), Lemlist (cold e-mails management), PhantomBuster.com (APIs & automation on all social media platforms), Lusha (databases of phones & e-mails), Crystalknows.com (personality assessment via LinkedIn), Close (CRM)
Then, you’ll want to invest in Facebook & Google Ads. You’ll get a lot of traffic from those and data as well, which will be useful to fuel your growth engine.
You should invest in social media ads while they’re still cheap. Worldwide spendings are increasing and so are the costs. It’s possible that in the near future, only big players will have the possibility to invest in them.
Based on David Ogilvy’s work, there’re a few points you should have in mind when copywriting/creating an ad.
– Does the visual content grabs attention & evokes a compelling emotion?
– What types of emotion are you trying to evoke: greed, fear…?
– Does the ad appeal to the ego of the audience?
– Is the CTA clear & does the ad encourage the viewer to engage?
Let’s talk about Product/Market Fit and how to identify its achievement.
“Product/market fit, also known as product-market fit, is the degree to which a product satisfies a strong market demand.”
Case #1: The evidence (strong growth, retention, word of mouth, good usage rate).
Case #2: No explosion but certain traction (customers are increasing, turnover is increasing but not exponentially / the target is not necessarily well identified but there is opportunism).
– In this case, you can use Sean Ellis’ test. If the amount of customers that are “very disappointed” is superior to 40%, there is a high probability of reaching PMF.
– The Net Promoter Score or NPS (How likely would you recommend [brand] to a friend or colleague?). It can become a Growth Hack if you send the form via email & ask your customers for a referral if they rate your offer high on the NPS.
Case #3: Lack of sustainable traction (product not used / few sales / high churn rate).
In this case, use pivots & strongly modify your offer until you reach PMF… or not. Not all products are made to thrive.
“The solution is not the product. The business model/product strategy is the product!”
Book: “Lean analytics – Use data to build a better startup faster.” To know if you’ve reached PMF, it’s the startup owners manual.
Tools: canvanizer.com – To create your Lean Canvas & define your business model/product strategy.
Thoroughly uncover your customers’ needs by joining us for our next workshop. We’ll present concrete use cases we’ve encountered when working with our clients!
– Growth formula & user needs
– User personas
– Customer journey maps
– Growth hacking experiments
EARLY BIRD – 25% OFF – Register via Eventbrite!
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