How to find performing growth channels
When it comes to the Growth stage, the questions are getting harder. Almost all founders ask "How to identify the best channels for my business?"
SMM? Facebook ads? Hold on! There is no silver bullet.
80% of all digital agencies can prepare for you a perfect presentation, how SMM will solve all your problems: generating you leads, closing all deals, growing the loyalty to the brand, and curing cancer.
But let's be honest, there are so much different markets, business models, target audiences, etc. And believing that only one tool can be a universal solution for everything is not right.
Ok, what to do?
Analyze your business. What problem are you solving? For whom? How do people solve this problem now? What tools do they use to find the solution? There are so many behaviors inside your business, and each one can be a hint for your growth tactic.
Here is the table with five examples of possible channels.
Let's look closer.
Case 1. Imagine that we have a business for buying a property. How often people do this? Probably, less often than buying clothes. Where do they go when they want to do it? Google. So, it's reasonable to increase your presence on Google. SEO can help you with this. Sure, it's a long game (first results not earlier than in 6 months), but it works.
Case 2. Imagine, that you have a popular fitness service. All your users share it with friends, inviting them to try. Perfect situation, right? But we can even boost this process. Let's implement referrals mechanics: each user gets $10 per each invited member. It still less than your CAC, but can give you much more new users. People still share their happiness with friends, but now they can do it even with more passion, earning money for this.
Case 3. Let's look at Facebook. Do you know Facebook’s “7 friends in 10 days” rule? The more users you have in your friends - the better experience you get via Facebook (you start to see a feed with posts, photos, videos, etc.). Facebook found out that a user needs to get at least 7 friends in 10 days to stick to the service. That's why they push him to find all his friends from the real world in the social network. To stick person to it.
Case 4. If you do a B2B business, probably you know that sales are hard. Sometimes you need to spend months to close a deal. But what is so good about it? If you are building, e.g., an engineering tool for rocket science, definitely you know all companies who operate in this field. So, make a comprehensive list of these companies and give it to your Sales department. Identify the decision makers in those companies and the channels how to reach them. Do outstanding sales.
Case 5. If you have a high LTV (Lifetime Value) from each of your users, you know how much you can spend to get a new one on the board. E.g., you have LTV = $500. So, you can spend no more than $500 to get a new user via paid channels, like AdWords, Facebook Ads, etc. Estate development companies are good at this. Real estate is costly, and the сlear profit from each deal is quite high for the company. That's why they can spend a lot on ads, tv campaigns, etc.
“Don’t do growth and scaling before Product-Market Fit is found”
We hope this article can help you identify possible growth channels. BUT.
Please note, that all these examples are connected strictly for the Growth stage. Idea validation stage has other tools and triggers.
Always remember — don’t do growth and scaling before Product-Market Fit is found. Otherwise - you will be pouring water into a leaky bucket.