A case study tells you: What customer acquisition methods should be used to acquire new users

Today's article comes from a real problem around us.

I have a friend who started a fitness meal business last year. The earliest batch of users were converted from his previous colleagues in the company. The business was well received, and the business grew tenfold within half a year. He also successfully obtained financing - overall it seems to be a good start. However, when we wanted to continue expanding our scale this year, we tried advertising on food delivery apps, but the results were not ideal. After that, we bought several soft articles from big Vs and spent a lot of money, but it did not cause the viral effect we had imagined.

Now the question arises: Given his current situation, what customer acquisition method should he use to acquire new users?

Taking advantage of consumption upgrades, fitness food has flourished in the past three or four years. A number of brands have emerged. New players must carefully formulate strategies for customer acquisition in order to achieve scale.

Acquiring new users is an important issue for all businesses (including the Internet industry and traditional industries). Previously in the growth hacker series, I used two articles to introduce the operational means and product means of acquiring customers (Quick Entry: Operations & Products). However, whether it is content, exchange , advertising, sharing, SEO or ASO , etc., these customer acquisition methods are not a panacea. Whether they can truly attract new users does not depend on the method itself, but on how to choose and use it.

In addition, the channels themselves are changing . Even if you have indeed acquired a large number of new users through some method before, times have changed and users may no longer be attracted by this method, or the channel itself may have changed, which will greatly reduce your customer acquisition effect.

There are many ways to acquire customers, but which ones are suitable for you? How to choose?

1. Six evaluation dimensions

Brian Balfour, vice president of HubSpot, offers a crude and simple method for screening. In both HubSpot and his startup project Boundless, he evaluates different customer acquisition channels using the following six evaluation dimensions.

1.1 Reach

Reach refers to the ability to deeply reach different types of target users . Are the users that this channel can reach the ones you need? How close can this channel reach this group of users? How many ways does it have to reach users? For example, if your target users are anime fans aged 15-25, Sina Weibo can help you accurately locate this group of users and provide multiple ways of reaching them, such as advertising space , headlines, and private messages. In comparison, Baidu's traffic may be greater, but the reach of SEO may not be as strong as that of Weibo.

1.2 Fees

Cost refers to the cost required by the channel in the early and ongoing stages of customer acquisition . Are there any upfront costs to this channel? Is there a minimum overhead? Are there any subsequent additional charges? For example, if you want to spend money to buy soft articles from big Vs, it will cost thousands or tens of thousands of yuan to start an article, and it is very likely that you will have to buy two or three articles before you start converting new traffic; but Sina Weibo's fan headlines service can be done for just a few dozen yuan.

1.3 Input time

The evaluation of customer acquisition effectiveness must have a time dimension. How long does it take to prepare before starting the first batch of test launches? How long does each additional test take? Are there any technical costs involved in starting a test? Need creative or content support? Many advertising channels require very little input time, no technical input, and can be prepared within a day. For content marketing , creating a high-quality content and finding a suitable distribution channel for cold start requires a lot of input time.

1.4 Output Time

Accordingly, once your delivery test is launched, how long will it take to get your test results? How many tests are needed to get meaningful data? Generally speaking, advertising services on large-traffic platforms will provide very timely and detailed data feedback. However, methods such as publishing soft articles and public relations articles, on the one hand, you are far away from the data source, and on the other hand, most of this data is targeted at reading rather than advertising conversions, and manual data processing is required, which takes relatively more output time.

1.5 Controllability

Controllability means that you can start or stop this customer acquisition method according to your needs . For example, the controllability of acquiring customers through marketing and public relations is very poor. You cannot open or close the operation immediately according to your own wishes. Most of the control is in the hands of others (such as those writers who write public relations articles). More control means simpler and more agile testing.

1.6 Scale

The final dimension of evaluation is size. How big is the traffic scale of this customer acquisition channel? Can the channel be scaled based on your time and resources?

2. How to make decisions

Now that we have determined the above six evaluation dimensions, let’s see how to use them to determine the customer acquisition decision that’s right for us.

2.1 Determine the optimization goal

First, answer the following two questions: What points in your current customer acquisition methods force you to make changes? (That is, what are your current customer acquisition pain points?) And why do you want to optimize these points?

It should be noted that it is best to identify 1 to 2 most critical optimization goals . If you pay attention to everything, it's like having no focus, and having no focus means you'll get half the result with twice the effort.

2.2 Determine the constraints

The next question to ask yourself is: “ What are my limitations on acquiring new users? ” Your limitations may vary by industry, product, platform, and cost, but the most common limitations include:

• Time : Is there a specific window to reach your users?
• Cost : Is it within your budget? Do you need to expand other customer acquisition methods?
• Reach : Do you have to reach very specific target users?
• Legal policies : Will your industry and the products you want to promote cause legal and policy problems for your company or team? (For example, the sensitive Internet finance industry, the original content/music industry that is prone to copyright disputes, etc.)

2.3 Establish a channel matrix

The next step is to integrate all the above information.

What you need to do at this time is: open Excel, write down all the customer acquisition methods you are using or want to use in the row headers , write down the above six evaluation dimensions in the column headers, and then start evaluating each channel.

Please note that you should not only list the common customer acquisition channels, but also their alternatives for evaluation. For example, for feed flow advertising, you can consider Sina Weibo as well as Maimai; for posting soft articles, you can consider official accounts as well as Toutiao , Baidu Baike , etc.

The next more advanced approach is that customer acquisition channels need to be further segmented. For example, content marketing can be broken down into original articles, reprinted articles, infographics, online lectures, e-books, and so on. SEO can be subdivided into head traffic, long-tail traffic, etc.

For example, you may get a matrix like the one above.

2.4 Fill in the ratings in the channel matrix

The next step is to research each customer acquisition channel and rate it. You can use a three-level scoring method of "high, medium and low" or a five-level scoring method of "1-5 points", whichever you prefer. The scores don't need to be very accurate, they just need to provide enough information to allow comparisons between different channels.

The ratings may mean different things to different companies. For example, in terms of reach, a SaaS company with a high customer lifetime value may define reach as the user starting a trial, while an app for general users may define reach as the user starting a trial.

Furthermore, the evaluation of the same attribute in the same channel may be different . Take scale for example. When choosing to place advertisements, Baidu Ke, which started out as a CRM company, may give SEO a low score because it can only convert very limited effective traffic from the top traffic. For Tuniu Travel , its travel products are aimed at a wider range of users (few people travel abroad, but many people go out to climb mountains on weekends), so its SEO score is high because a bunch of long-tail keywords are enough to bring it a large amount of effective traffic.

Continuing with the example, after filling in the ratings, you can get a matrix table like the one shown above.

2.5 Decision Making

A perfect customer acquisition funnel might look like this:

• Reach: High
• Cost: Low
• Input time: Low
• Output time: Low
• Controllability: High
• Scale: High

Unfortunately, you may find that there is no perfect acquisition funnel, so the key is to initially determine your optimization goal, as well as your constraints — which is what you do in steps 1 and 2. Use your constraints to categorize and sort these channels. If your biggest constraint is cost, then take out the channels with low costs and find the one with the most satisfactory other attributes.

3. Case

Let’s go back to the original example.

For fitness meals, its target group is actually very clear: between 22 and 35 years old, with a higher income level, pursuing quality of life, and the proportion of women is higher than that of men. The most pressing issue he needs to solve now is: for this very specific user group, he needs to improve the reach of the customer acquisition channels .

So what are his limitations? Considering the business itself, it is actually easier to acquire new users in spring and summer than in autumn and winter (if you don’t lose weight in April, you will regret it for the whole year), and there are certain requirements on the input time and output time of customer acquisition. In addition, in the early stages of starting a business, financial resources are limited, so save as much as possible.

In summary, his status is suitable for choosing a customer acquisition channel with low input/output time, low cost, high reach, controllability and reasonable scale . I assembled his channel matrix of the customer acquisition methods he was using and wanted to use. After several rounds of comparison, I helped him narrow down the customer acquisition channels to the following three options:

(1) Expert Advertising

Find a group of fitness experts on sports or food apps, and let them embed advertisements in their feeds at a relatively low cost.

Platforms in niche areas are more willing to promote their own big Vs and provide them with exposure and traffic. The advertising prices of experts in niche areas are cheaper than those of big Vs in the general sense, and their effective traffic is not necessarily less than the latter. You only need to provide them with some materials and post one or two updates, and the advertising can be quickly realized and take effect quickly.

Fitness apps have attracted a group of fitness meal experts with tens of thousands of fans.

(2) Sponsorship

Provide official sponsorship or even co-hosting of recent events on niche platforms that also require exposure. Mutual marketing leverages each other's strengths and also requires little cost while maintaining a high level of reach.

(3) Content

Become a content provider. As a founder, you can provide knowledge about fitness meals and content related to fitness meal production. This can be pictures and texts, lectures, or even live broadcasts . These are almost cost-free and quick-acting customer acquisition channels. Many people are already doing this and have reaped the benefits.

It is common to see various Os, VPs, and directors showing up in Maimai’s job broadcasts. By the way, the titles of this series of shares on Maimai are so small, and the headshots are so big, the page looks a bit scary = =

I hope this example can also help you better understand how to find a customer acquisition method that suits you.

Mobile application product promotion service: APP promotion service Qinggua Media advertising

The author of this article is @菌菌有神. It is compiled and published by (Qinggua Media). Please indicate the author information and source when reprinting! Site Map