"If you can not explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." Albert Einstein
From advising startups like Linkedin, Wordpress, Gusto to founding 3 companies himself, Hiten believes in simplicity. If it is not simple, if it cannot be easily explained, it doesn't exist.
When it comes to marketing channels Hiten is known as the person to look up to. In his presentation he talked about two simple things:
- A simple way to find marketing channel.
- How to prioritize and test existing marketing channels.
Multi-million Marketing Framework
Hiten presented a 3 simple questions framework that helped to grow many successful startups.
- What is your target customer?
- Where do they hang out?
- How do you engage them?
During his talk, Hiten showed examples of applying his question tool and the outcomes from it.
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg has grown for 10 years, with no outside capital, by using one marketing channel discovered in 2007.
Crazyegg is a self-funded startup and works with 50,000 businesses around the world. Crazy Egg applied the 3 Questions Marketing Framework. What they discovered is that web-designers hang out on different online galleries. They engaged with the communities on those hangouts and generated impressive growth by word-of-month. With very little investment and a couple of hours of brainstorming a marketing channel was discovered.
Kissmetrics
VC-backed Kissmetrics found out the marketing channel has more than 5000% ROI.
From the early days, Kissmetrics identified that their target group is online marketers. What Kissmetrics did, was a list of 200-300 possible marketing channels. It took some time to test each channel. Yet, once tested, the company went all in for a most impactful channel. The takeaway here is to make a long list of channels or hangouts where it makes sense for you and measure your metrics from there.
Can products have build-in marketing channels?
A lot of successful products have the so-called virality loop within the product.
Uber - refer a friend and make money.
Dropbox - refer a friend and get more space.
Yesware - refer a customer and have access to use the premium product features.
KISSinsights - uses the tag in the product Powered by KISSinsights. Recently, they changed to a better conversion phrase - Not using KISSinsights? (embed a link to the app).
Amazon - recently started to use the referral loop, as well.
For example for my company Travod, the customers coming from referral has an ROI of more than 5000%.
Engaging the customer is the ultimate secret.
How do you engage them? Hiten takes 3 actions on answering this question.
(1) Identify your method of engagement.
(2) Research deeply on how best to use the method.
(3) Focus on your target audience. Aim to deliver a ton of value.
Marketing opportunities are inside.
High traffic/low conversion is how you find the opportunity.
Go into Google analytics. Find pages that have high traffic and a high bounce rate. This will mean that lots of people are coming to the site, but they are leaving quickly.
In Unbounce, Leadpages or Hubspot look at pages with High traffic but low conversion.
All these pages are opportunities to improve and capture value for your site.
To end with, as Hiten likes to say. "To be an entrepreneur you need 3 things: Focus, Focus, Focus."
Find out the right marketing channel and focus, stick with it, get the maximum benefit from that.
Keep on grinding.