today we are gonna talk about startup growth if you don’t know me my name is kaya I’m one of the founders and the CEO at sleeping a venture funded profitable multi-million dollar started one of my proudest achievements is having led our marketing and growth teams since the company was founded back in 2014 as a CEO you have to get involved in everything inevitably but it’s been the marketing and growth departments that have become one of my favorite tasks as part of running this company if you’ve seen some of our previous videos you’ve seen me talk about traction traction traction traction traction traction traction traction now you maybe understand why I value traction so much it’s not only about getting the metrics you need to raise your round of funding in the end funding is just a means to an end having a bigger more profitable business it’s growing your customer base retaining those customers and turning them into evangelists that really counts as a successful company this is how to grow a business [Music] alright so in this video we are gonna be

covering growth at the early stages unit economics basic growth tactics and finally the growth marketing or growth hacking mindset other topics that we will cover in part 2 of this video are building a marketing team the basics of SEM that is Google ads and social media marketing detailed conversion tracking and finally content marketing and SEO now why these topics because they relate specifically to our own experience and we consider ourselves experts in most of these our company slide beam helps other companies present ideas either through our automatic AI design platform or by getting our content and design teams involved in writing and structuring presentations for those customers so even though most of our customers are other businesses that is a b2b approach we don’t do a lot of traditional sales our customers come through us through marketing not via I would Bound reach its a b2c or business-to-consumer kind of customer acquisition so if the type of business you have requires a

long sales cycle or a bunch of salespeople then this video will only cover the demand generation part of your process sorry all right so you know if intro let’s get started growth at the early stages if you are just starting your business then figuring out your growth is well tough there is little money to spend the product is still early or unfinished and convincing people to join or pay is harder so here are some basics before you even think about growth first growth equals product at this stage your growth is not only related to your marketing outreach or sales effort but to the product itself if you’re just starting up then your product will probably be far far from perfect you have to understand that the stuff you learn as you try to position the product as to try to sell it and expand should also impact the product itself and the roadmap so next up do not do not hire an agency for now company growth is something that you need to figure out yourself at this stage the

person who is looking at the website conversion rate should be the same room as the person who designed the landing pages and the person who is picking out which features to develop next this means that one of your five or one of your very first hires should be that marketing or growth persona like I said I was that guy for a large portion of her company history while my co-founders focused on the product and yeah we were in the same room about 24/7 next point on the basics of marketing growth costs are not an expense I own a marketing agency back in Costa Rica and a large portion of our customers come to us thinking of marketing as an expense they have a budget that they’re willing to spend in marketing marketing is not an expense it’s an investment if you measure your efforts correctly you should be able to determine how spending $1,000 in a campaign will yield $3,000 in sales if you know these numbers are correct then spending meaning investing $10,000 instead of $1,000 is a no-brainer

because you know for a fact that that will translate to $30,000 so we’ll revisit this in our unit economics section finally be prepared to spend slash invest money back in 2013 when we started slide bean we were able to acquire or first 5,000 or so customers using mostly free social media advertising quality shareable content went a long way and it was enough to build an audience that eventually converted and tried our product well forget about that as a company you have to pay to play in social media these days it’s an extremely competitive space every single brand is trying to compete for attention and Facebook is greedy the actual organic reach of a page these days is less than 1% which means that if you have 100,000 followers less than 1,000 of them on average will see anything that you publish well you might be able to have early wins and newer platform say tik-tok or niche audiences like Reddit soon enough you’ll find yourself in the mainstream platforms competing for attention and being forced

to pay for those impressions more importantly marketing is a trial-and-error game some of your experiments will fail and the faster you can run more tests the faster you can figure out your growth plan and it’s not free it’s never free few companies can you get away with free truly free organic reach so yeah it’s time to get your wallet ready in summary if you’re an early stage company learn to do this yourself either you or one co-founders should absolutely own your communication be prepared to experiment a lot and set aside some money to do it once you find a channel that works double down on it alright so let’s move on to unit economics when talking about marketing your unit economics are the metrics that determine if your campaigns are profitable or not okay so some basic concepts here cost of acquisition CAC or CAC however you wanna call it that is the cost of bringing in a new customer if you’re calculating the cost of acquisition of a specific campaign then you should do campaign cost divided by number of customers if you’re calculating your average your broad

company-wide cost of acquisition then you should also include the cost of your growth team and the platforms that the growth team uses next up cost per sign up or cost per download for many businesses with trial periods or freemium business models a sign up or app download is very different from a paid customers so you should keep track of both finally the lifetime value that is the average revenue that you expect to make from a single customer on a SAS company this is calculated using your retention estimation or your churn on an ecommerce store this is calculated using the average order size the average margin that you will make from that order and the percentage of customers that make repeat purchases the most basic rule of marketing is that your LTV should be higher than your cost of acquisition that’s pretty obvious but depending on the industry you might want to aim for a 2x or 3x on your cost of acquisition – lifetime value ratio is this too dense well here’s a funny video from our team for you to take a break

I wonder what you carry we type in kaya calm and should always be used with a water-based contraceptive tail kind of beats about baby if you notice your qaeda is damaged in some way after intercourse please visit your doctor immediately okay carry on let’s do growth tactics my favorite book on growth is called traction I’ll link that in the description the premise is very simple there are only there exists in the world only 19 channels for any company to acquire customers that’s it and if you know what those channels are you can pick and create campaigns around them those channels are viral marketing that is your ability to grow from customers referring you to other customers public relations or PR the art of getting your name in blogs and newspapers TV or press

publications unconventional PR commonly known as publicity stunts search engine marketing those are the ads on search engines like Google Bing or even YouTube social and display ads that’s your Instagram Facebook Twitter type of ads based on a user’s interest offline ads that’s TV spots radio commercials billboards infomercials newspaper and magazine ads search engine optimization or SEO the very complex art of ranking your website in Google search will cover some of that on part 2 of this video content marketing if you’re watching this video you’ve witnessed and you’ve fallen victim of our content marketing campaigns email marketing not a lot to add here engineering is marketing that’s using apps and tech products for growth like the bank that makes a loan calculator to get customers and leads targeting blogs which you can even translate to influencer marketing getting people with niche audiences to talk about you business development pre obvious their sales pretty obvious again affiliate program so offering rewards in

exchange for your customers referring other customers existing platforms so leveraging your presence and relevance in existing platforms such as figuring out how to be promoted or featured on the App Store or the chrome store trade shows not a fan of those but they’re an option offline events meetups and such speaking engagements community building and that’s it 19 channels of girl are there any other channels of growth not covered there I really don’t think so I think they covered most of them so the book elaborates on each one of them and gives you some ideas on successful campaigns from different companies this brings us to our last topic for today growth hacking I don’t know if the internet has a definition for what growth hacking is my definition is mastering the art and science of coming up with campaigns for these 19 different channels measuring the unit economics of those campaigns diligently using the data to make quick decisions to pull the

plug or double down on campaigns optimizing copy design campaign concepts and landing pages to maximize that conversion and finally working with the product team to turn those marketing metrics and results into product changes the growth hacker is a bit of a mythical being but by no means impossible to find any up you should either become one or capture one early on the mindset is simple test test again rinse and repeat repeat on the campaigns then worked of course so next week we’re going to be looking into more specific examples of growth hacks you can do as you grow your business so hit that subscribe button to stay tuned also if you want to take our platform for a spin you can use this code to get three free months on any of our plants and we’ll see you next week 

source: https://youtu.be/k2rpBhMY0ys