How to identify and amplify your growth channels as a startup.

This article is the fourth in a series of weekly articles that detail what I learn in my currently ongoing Growth mini-degree scholarship with the CXL institute. You can read my previous submissions here: week 1, week 2, week 3.

First off, let’s start by defining what growth channels are.

Growth channels are the mediums through which a startup acquires new customers and retains them. The process of finding the right channel(s) is unique to every startup as there is no one size fits all approach.

To find the right mix of channels that work, startups have to rigorously test and experiment.

5 main growth channels for startups.

Here are five digital marketing channels that are great for exploding business growth;

1. SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Also known as Pay Per Click. Platforms used for SEM include Google Adwords & Microsoft Bing and online marketers spend more than $100 million daily advertising on these channels. Google alone owns about 60% of the PPC market share so that’s a channel you might want to focus on if that’s where your audience is.

Paid search requires constant optimization to look at keyword traffic, search trends and fluctuation on PPC cost. However, with a lot of attention, it can drive success.

2. SEO: Search Engine Optimization or SEO as it’s fondly called refers to the process of improving your website’s ranking on the search engine results page in order to get more people to visit your website. A study showed that when people search for something, 30% of CTR’s (click through rates) went to first position on the results page, 12% of CTR’s went to third position and for the lower positions 1–2% of clicks. As it’s said, the second page is where websites go to die.

3. Social & display ads: Social ads are the ads you see across your favorite social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc) and display ads are the banner ads you see on websites over the internet.

Social ads is a pretty important growth channel because over 50% of adults have more than one social account today and what makes it especially powerful is the access to demographic data it gives you to hone in on your target audience so when exploring social ads, you always want to ensure you have a clear grasp of who your audience is.

4. Email marketing: This is one of the oldest growth channels but it still converts really well especially when we are talking about the process of grooming prospects through your growth funnel, it’s a really great channel for retaining and engaging existing customers especially when it is personalized.

5. Content channels: This is primarily done through blogs, forums etc. To grow through content marketing, it is important to know your customers, your audience, where they’re at, what they’re reading and what they are doing online.

Now, it is super rare for a company in its early stage to be great at all these channels and it’s also rare for a company at a late stage to be doing great marketing with all of these channels at peak performance. You just have to understand where your customers are and what they are doing.

Don’t spread yourself too thin because that would lead to you not being successful with any. It is important to be able to identify the one to three channels that’s working for you.

How to choose an experiment with a marketing channel

When trying to run a growth experiment with any of the above mentioned channels. The biggest determinant is if your audience is active on said channel. If they aren’t then you probably don’t want to start with that channel. A safe bet to go with for growth is always SEO.

How to know when a channel has failed

How to figure out if you should just drop a channel is by just looking at your data. If the channel isn’t producing ROI for your business or it’s not producing enough revenue to meet your standards then you probably want to drop it.

Don’t keep a channel just because it’s a popular one. Just because everyone is advertising on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s right for you. Figure out what works.

How to measure the results of your channels.

If you launched a growth experiment via a channel, how do you know whether you should double down on the channel. The answer is simple; GREAT ROI & SCALE.

If the ROI on a growth experiment is impressive enough and it can scale, then it’s all the signal you need to double down on that channel.

Always have an eye out for emerging growth channels.

A benefit to working at a startup or early stage company is being able to look at what the bigger companies are doing and playing around with it. It’s having the speed to experiment as rapidly as possible and testing out new channels as quickly as possible because a good number of your competitors are bound to stay target focused on the channels they feel are already working for them. Examples of emerging growth channels are channels like Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality.

Myths about social media marketing’s role in growth

The first myth about social media marketing is that social media marketing ROI is difficult to track and it’s hard to put a dollar amount on the value of social media.

Actually, Google analytics lets you see where your traffic is coming from and what users are doing on your site so you can easily track just how successful your social media marketing activities are in driving users to your website.

Another myth is that social media is just for fluffy impressions and branding and that it can’t actually be used for sales, conversions or acquisitions. This is totally not true, not only can social media help you generate new leads but it allows you to build, create and engage in deeper relationships with your clients. eCommerce businesses easily use social media channels as one of their top drivers for growth.

An easy way to track how your social media activities contribute to growth is by A/B splitting a test on an Instagram or Facebook post to see which performs better at increasing traffic to your website. That way, you have essentially connected a social media post directly to sales and revenue and you can start to take action on this.

Essentially, social media marketing should be treated as any other channel in that you can track from the first point to LTV (lifetime value)

Conclusion

The only way to figure out what the right growth channels for your startup are is by testing. Not only testing with existing channels but also with emerging channels to see if they work. Also, social media activities have been relegated to the backburner in growth when that should not be the case in the least.

This part of the course was taught by Sophia Eng, Digital marketing strategist at InVision app and former head of growth at Workday.