Are you doomed if you are not an expert in digital marketing. It sure seems so based on what I see all startups focusing on. Everyone is trying to get traction online and its more difficult than ever to do so.
We all think of traction as doing some Search ads, Social Media Marketing, content marketing or email marketing. These channels are great, scalable but they dont give you result in 1 week, unless obviously you are an expert, unlike most of us. Hence I rolled out an offline activity to get traction. I am a business guy and can talk and understand my customer really well. Hence I did it using an old school method. Absolutely stupidly old way, but boy it worked great.
I had a language learning app for people to learn english with songs and by the end of 1 week I had enough revenue to pay my salary 200 paid downloads and more than 800 qualified leads yet to be processed.
I did a feet on street activity. Where I got promotors on corwded spots to promote my app. Here its broken down.
Guide:
Flyer: Had a simple bold words — Learn English with your favorite songs. With Download icon for ios and Android with links to website.
Promotor: I hired 10 promotoras to work for me for 5 days, I got most beautiful girls possible. Good looking girls increases the chances that more people will talk to them and hence higher performance.
Script: I gave simple and to the point script to each promotor. This is a broad outline of the script?
— Hand Flyer
— Would you like to learn English?
— If they say, Yes: would you pay 5 $ for an app to learn english using your favorite songs.
Leads: If they say Yes to the last question, Promotor will offer them with a 50% discount code in exchange of their name and Number / email.
Spots: We picked spots like outside Mall, Outside Metro in rich neighborhood, Financial districts.
Callers: I hired 4 callers to call these leads we had collected. Callers will remind them that their coupon code will expire soon if they don’t use it. And if they had any questions, they could ask the callers. This was game changer. We called usually during the time when they are expected to be free or relaxed. Like weekends, never in the mornings.
Outcome
We had 10 promotors for 5 days that gave us 2200+ leads. 200 downloads and a revenue of 1000 US$.
Learned a lot about what kind of questions our customers had, why our customers liked us, which helped us iterate in our product and our communication.
Here are some tools that will get you off the ground in no time.
Alephants: Uber for temporary staff for office (data entry, reserach), marketing (promotors, callers, waiters, hostess) to name a few. You get one invoice for all your hiring.
Mangcorta: Print awesome tshirt for your promotors.
Kameleon: Print sexy flyers. Near Startup chile office.
Costs:
Promotor: We paid 25000 CLP per day.
We paid 5000 CLP per tshirt. So for 3 promotor you will spend 15000
Flyers cost us 200 pesos per flyer / coupon.
Callers: we paid 18000 CLP per day.
So to summarize its possible to get good traction in a short time without much expertise on digital marketing. All you need is some ideas and great execution.
Thoughts suggestions?