After sharing our pitch deck with advisors, mentors, and potential investors in Q4, we learned that we needed a stronger user acquisition strategy if we really wanted investors to invest in GiveShop. In December, our Business and Marketing team decided that we would devote time and energy to do just that — understand our target audience and create a user acquisition strategy to support that.
Since our UX Design team had already created user personas earlier on during our testing phase, and our Illustrator had just recently created characters, we were able to reference back to these character profiles to understand our target audience.
Our Business and Marketing team agreed that we’d all spend the first two weeks in December to read through the book Traction by Weinberg and Maresy. Then together, we would work through a series of exercises to develop our user acquisition strategy.
The book helped us learn about the various different traction channels that startups can use to gain traction and acquire new customers. The book included detailed discussions for each of the channels and examples from real companies and people. It also provided actionable guidance and a framework that our team was able to use for our exercise.
We began by coming together to identify and create our traction goal. We looked at our current numbers and determined what our 2021 goals and stretch goals would be for our email list, sign-ups, active, and matched volunteers. Then once the team finished reading the book and had a good understanding for each of the 19 traction channels, we worked through the Bullseye framework.
This was our process:
- In our first brainstorming session, we came up with 3–5 ideas for each of the 19 traction channels.
- Once we generated ideas for each of the channels, we needed to narrow down on the ones we wanted to test. Each person was assigned six votes. The goal was to identify the top three traction channels that seem most promising for us, so that we can test them.
- After that, we synced again to review and discuss the votes. From there, we concluded our top six channels, which are: social ads, search engine optimization, content marketing, viral marketing, business development, and community building.
Surprisingly and unsurprisingly, the team unanimously voted for almost all the same traction channels. This was a really good sign, knowing that the Business and Marketing team were all in alignment. This also made it easy to for us to narrow down on the top three traction channels for us to focus on in the new year.
As we kicked off the new year, our team met together again to finalize the top three traction channels that we’d be focusing on in the early part of 2021. We started discussions around each of these traction channels, identified metrics and created goals around each of these; and are now in the process of developing test plans. Over the next several weeks and months, we will be rolling out new campaigns and content to share with our community. We will even start doing some webinars. We hope you will enjoy them!
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