I’ve been working in a startup for the last 8 months and this has given me an opportunity to take a deeper look at other aspects of business besides marketing. It’s all about growth, constant growth. Month on month, year on year. As a business owner, your vision is very clear – you know where you are and you know where you want to be. Both in terms of customer acquisitions and sales. And hence you try to acquire users from anywhere – any acquisition source possible because the numbers have been projected and now it’s time to deliver.
But the biggest problem with this trial and error methodology is that the bottom line gets affected because you’ve been burning up your marketing $$ by spending on all customer acquisition channels possible. And while you’re acquiring users, it’s not the most optimum way.
So sometimes, it’s important to stop. Take a step back and look intently on who your customers are, what they do, where they find you and where you find them. Once this is done, take your notepad out and do this small exercise.
Draw three circles – one inside the other.
In the INNER CIRCLE, write down platforms that have given you the best results.
Now, this could be totally different for different businesses. For eg: Organic search works best for HubSpot, but referral programs through incentives proved one of the best growth hack strategies for Dropbox. So identify what would work best for your customers and put it in this circle.
In the MIDDLE CIRCLE, write down other channels that will give you results but not your core lead nurturing channels. For e.g.: While blogs give us better search ranking and it helps us with discovery, but it does not translate into direct conversions. A lot of times, users might find our blog piece interesting and that could be their first contact with us (by us I mean InstaReM here. InstaReM is the company I work for), but they might not have the need to use the product.
*InstaReM enables individuals and business to send money overseas. Remittance is a need-based product, hence a user reading our content piece might not have the use case for it. But at the same time, they might suggest us to a friend who’s leaving the country for overseas education. So this becomes our indirect source.
In the OUTER CIRCLE, write other channels that might be a long shot like Instagram or Pinterest in our case. It’s just a light touch to the customer but I’m pretty sure a user is not looking for an overseas remittance product on Instagram or Pinterest.
And once this is done, just put your blinders on and use your resources, energy, and marketing $$ on the inner circle. This is called the BULL’S EYE FRAMEWORK OF CUSTOMER ACQUISITION.
WHY DO I USE BULL’S EYE FRAMEWORK?
Personally, it helps me focus my energy on the important acquisition channels while still casting a wide net. While my maximum priority goes to the highest performing channels, I run experiments with the middle circle which helps me identify new traction channels. And it’s a continuous process. With marketing being more dynamic than ever before, this is the need of the hour and it helps me justify my ROI.
Manceewrites 