What is your best growth channel?
Anil Matcha
62 replies
Replies
Julien Zmiro@zmiro
Intercom
Top Product
Word of mouth! It worked great on my previous startup and we're seeing good early signs on AskMore.ai (although we're super small so it's not very significant).
Share
Skinive AI: Skin Scanner, health checkup
I think in this discussion it would be more useful to specify the type of product and target customers, so that it is clearer which channels work best in which cases.
As an example, I can describe our Skinive.com (Skin Health AI screening service):
- Skinive Consumer app (B2C) - Google Ads is the fastest way to get new users
- Skinive for professionals (B2B2C/B2B): SEO/Linkedin
SEO is, by far, the most fruitful one!
We start with SEO to get the most engaged visitors then we remarket to them heavily.
We've had some luck launching a niche newsletter. We're still small, but we've grown it to about 12k active subscribers in the past two months. All of our conversions come from the newsletter.
We also have a following on TikTok, but hasn't done very well on the conversion side. If anyone has tips, I'm all ears.
I'd say emails because all the social media channels you are renting out the space that is given by the social media and you can get banned anytime especially in today's era where everybody has a problem with something you say
But if you get them in an email list and back it up every now and then it is the only traffic you have that you actually own!
@persuasionkid i prefer SMS marketing to email marketing these days, better penetration. I have to ignore a large % of my inbox, but i never miss a text message. ofcourse, not always appropriate - depends on your marketing strategy and audience
The LinkedIn Inbound Playbook
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@persuasionkid And how did you manage to build that email list up?
@leo_from_london I'm starting to get interested in SMS marketing But I think some people find it offensive when you text them especially as a business. I think Sms is still reserved for intimate communications. So how do you get them to receive your S M S as a business?
@olena_bomko of course you need both I agree with this!
But the ultimate goal is to turn the audience that you rent into an audience that you own. so even if they ban you from social media you will be able to get back to the platform that you own - your own email list
SEO! :) takes time, but works best in long term in my experience.
The LinkedIn Inbound Playbook
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@hey_its_kas I agree BUT not the best one for early stage strategy!
I would recommend investing on personal branding on SM
@olena_bomko top of the funnel content to begin with! :) and then niche it down.
DaoLens
LinkedIn and Email
The LinkedIn Inbound Playbook
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I'd say SEO, especially when you're starting out in a completely new country/field. Combine it with tools for keyword research, and you're all set (well, not all set... but that's already cool for a start)
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@aurther_bella do you use any tools to expand your word-of-mouth referrals?
SEO has a slow start, but provides a continuous amount of leads to hit your site. But you have to target the right audience with good content.
Dependent on your audience (more B2B) I had good experience with shared posts on Linkedin. The content was on my site, as I want to build up a direct connection (newsletter) to the potential customer. Linked work only for a limited amount of time, as they move down the time line and get lost. Sometimes it's worth to repost - even if you have updated the content.
I try to hit different channels and find out, which one is worth the effort for the specific product. Sharing content from your site is a good way to try different channels (social media, ads, ...).
@fa11enangel how did you start your SEO journey?
@leo_from_london This started long ago - old man :). I wrote content on my blog which got good reputation in Google and was ranked well. People were asking for backlinks and bought me even books from my Amazon wishlist for the content (mostly tutorials for tech people).
The one thing I saw quit early was the amount of continuous traffic my site got for years for the good content, which was even linked by other people.
Later people asked mit to build websites for them and I tried to get the content right (before 2000). I tried to create valuable content instead of just technical optimization like %x of keywords, etc. Dependent on the target audience it worked or not.
The other things are more research, where to find your audience and how to reach/attract them the best way. It may work or not. You have to try it (not only once).
One thing I recently improved on is:
1. Write a tutorial how to do something or improve on something.
2. Find a very good question to share your content like: Are you using this technique and what is your experience results?
3. Share the tutorial with an engaging question (2.) on social media, Groups (Linkedin, Reddit, ...) and ask for feedback from users.
This increased the engagement, reputation, number of views and email subscriptions, as the content was valuable for the reader and the question on the shared post asked people for their experience/feedback. It's hard to compare the different posts/questions in numbers. But the results were far better except just sharing the content with a link and a short summary of the content without any engaging question.
You can even improve the content based on feedback and repost it with an other question or hint, what you have improved and why. This worked well and search engine like updated pages too.
@fa11enangel thank you for this detailed reply :)
Kraftful
Twitter has been really powerful for Kraftful!
The LinkedIn Inbound Playbook
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Kyligence Copilot
To work with influencers on social media, especially tiktok and youtube.
Anyone with me? Please let me know. :)
Facebook Ads have been solid for us, though not without their challenges.
I've been using LinkedIn more lately, with intro messages when connecting that are relevant. Twitter too, but not much luck.
Congratulations to Kas Szatylowicz. We agree with you. The best growth channel is Google and SEO studies that act simultaneously with it. Be sure to consider this process with a professional SEO team. You will see that you get successful results.
SEO and Email are probably the best growth channel overall