Common And Uncommon Channels to Reach out to Potential Customers

Common and uncommon channels to reach out to potential customers In this training we have aggregated all the learning that we have acquired in order to make business discoverable to potential customers. Let me give you a brief idea on some of the lessons that we'll delivering during our actual training sessions. There are various obvious methods that can help you to build your reach or in other words make yourself discoverable, such as Google adwords campaign or Facebook page campaign. The good part about these obvious methods is that various businesses have already tried them, which helps you to learn from their experiences. Additionally, there are also various case studies and resources available to implement these strategies. Moreover, most of these obvious techniques offer large enough reach. However, if we take it in the other way, there are already various businesses that are aware about of these methods. And if you really look at the success stories that have emerged in the past few years, you would find that most of them have picked up some of the not so obvious ways in their initial days but then when it was the time for them to scale it up, they actually used these tried and tested obvious methods to ensure that they actually get the numbers they are looking at. For instance, if we talk about Airbnb, which is a home stays marketplace, they initially relied on some of the unconventional channels. One of the channels which they used to build their reach was Craig list. But once they acquired a good volume of reach, they used Google advertisement programs in which they primarily relied on Google Display Network and True Value Ads offered by. They opted for these two advertisement programs basically because they had high quality images available with them, which can be distributed through these channels. These distribution channels helped them to scale up their night bookings from 0.8 Million to 2 Million in a year. Now they have reached close to a 10 Million night bookings in a year. So the idea here is that they did not start with the Google advertisement programs initially and relied on unconventional ways. After that,based on the kind of content that they had and the audience that they were looking at, they picked up the known channels which can help them to scale up their business. However, one thing that I would like to suggest over here is that before you use all these obvious channels it is quite important that you set up the DNA right. What exactly I mean here is that you should be clear about your end to end conversions at a small scale before you actually spend heavily on scaling your business by using these channels. To make this idea more clear, let me share an example with you. There are a lot of people that have a question on what is ROI of an investment that they are putting up on social media and if you are actually doing an internal selling or talking to any client, this is probably the most important question that you would be facing. Eventbrite which is a marketplace for events. They wanted to use Social Media for acquiring viral reach. Before, they decided to integrate social media in a big way on their website, they set up an internal analytics system; Using that they tried to measure the effectiveness of each and every link that was getting shared from their website on social media. They tried to measure the revenue add that every sharing is delivering to them. They did this study for a couple of months and figured out that if someone is sharing anything on Facebook from their website, it is giving them revenue of close to 2.5 dollars. On the other hand, if someone is doing a tweet from their platform, they are able to earn close to 0.43 dollars. Similarly, sharing on LinkedIn was delivering them close to 0.9 dollars. Now that they know the value of each share, they know how much they can invest & encourage their users to share it on Social Media Channels. Eventually, they integrated social media sharing at various places on their websites so that whenever the user finds it appropriate, they can share it on their respective profiles. For example, when someone is discovering a new event or when someone is buying the tickets for some of the events that are listed on their websites. So the learning here is if you do not set the DNA right, it is very difficult for you to figure out whether the returns that you are getting out of social media or any of the channels that you have adopted in order to build your reach is giving you a positive ROI or not. We will discuss more lessons on "reach building" during actual training program.