This sounds like a simple question and in some cases, it might be really easy. But in other cases like when you’re operating a two-sided marketplace, you might have to think about whether you have the right consumer of your products & services. Let’s say you’re doing a marketplace for buying and selling homes. Is your customer the buying agent or the selling agent? Is it real estate organizations? Or is it ultimately the home buyer and you should optimize all pathways for them? In this case the buying and selling agents are conduits to the end customer rather than the end customers. This is the same with different types of real estate organizations or even past buyers who become sellers themselves. It is worth taking the time to survey and evaluate every person you interface with since they can end up being a very important conduit you’ll rely on to reach your end customers.
Once you have identified your end customer with various conduits to them you should lay out specific pathways through each with different tactics tailored to each path. Let’s say you’re a health tech company and you get customers either from medical practices or through health insurance companies. What you’d have to do here is draw out of a user flow or chart that shows step-by-step how customers eventually reach you.
- Next we stack-rank all of the growth channels you are currently using to see which ones are organically high-performing looking at volume, level of effort, conversion rate, repeatability and more factors.
- Then we start asking questions about every single channel. Could this channel be stronger than it is today? If so, how? Can we replicate the performance of this channel via a different method?
- For two-sided marketplaces, we also ask questions about how to leverage network effects emerging from each side. Can we use one side of the marketplace to disproportionately benefit or attract more customers from the other side? For example, let’s say you’re selling car parts. If you add brake suppliers in addition to muffler suppliers, will that enable you to attract a larger volume of buyers looking for one stop shop instead of using multiple vendors? If you do reverse channel analysis, you have to ask yourself, can your customers promote you to their customers?
- Lastly, make sure you utilize your networks to see if friends and family have large followings or know “influencers” in your industry to help with getting the right message out.
Examine the ROI for each channel. After looking at the effectiveness of each channel, you’ll want to look at how much ROI you get for dollars AND resources spent. If it’s very early on in your company’s lifecycle, you might not be able to calculate a dollar amount but you can think analytically about data like — how many members or attendees are at a given conference or trade show to make it worthwhile to set up a booth or how many hours will it take to hire a temp compared to the effort needed to train. Understanding who your customers are, how you will interact with them and if you are truly solving their pain points is the key to determining the right channel to pursue.
The goal of any customer acquisition activities is to grow your customer base, reduce your customer acquisition costs and lengthen your customer’s lifetime value to your business. We know that the easiest and most cost effective way to bring on more loyal customers is through customer referrals. Based on interviews with business owners, many state that they often forget to ask for referrals or don’t feel comfortable with asking. For those who do ask for referrals, they often forget to follow-up and to reward their existing customers when they do submit referrals to them. Solving a pain point of providing an app-based system for consumers to submit referrals of their family and friends to their favorite businesses,
The goal of any business should be to solve a problem or pain point for a targeted group of customers. Dealium will provide an easy to use, intuitive and rewarding app-based that will allow for the aforementioned group. Customer acquisition is the #2 pain point for small business owners (only behind cash flow). Consumers like referring their family and friends but they also really like to be rewarded with discounts on future purchases as well as securing a reward for their new referral on their first purchase. Dealium creates a efficient and rewarding referral process for small businesses and consumers all in one(1) click! Go to Dealium.io to checkout our soon to be launched offering (coming January 2022)!
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