The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics: How to Model Viral Growth

The 3-Step Startup Marketing Framework We Created to Grow KISSmetrics: How to Model Viral Growth

Marketing is a crucial aspect of any startup's success. In the early stages of your business, it's essential to answer three important questions about marketing: How do you identify your target audience? Where can you find them? And how do you engage them? These questions were at the forefront of our minds when we were growing KISSmetrics.

At the beginning, we had a general idea of who our target audience was, but it wasn't specific enough. We realized that building a business on assumptions is a mistake, and we needed to identify a place of opportunity where we could listen, learn, and give value. This is where the concept of content marketing came into play.

Content marketing is all about providing value to your audience, ideally for free. We wanted to do the same with KISSmetrics. Our tool was designed to provide actionable metrics, so our marketing had to be valuable for marketers. In order for our platform to be successful, there needed to be a give and take between us and our potential customers.

This is when we turned to Twitter. In 2008, Twitter was still in its early stages, but hashtags were gaining popularity. We discovered that by using hashtags like WeFollow and measure, we could easily attract new followers who were marketers. We started sharing useful marketing and analytics content, and our Twitter audience grew rapidly. Eventually, our website was booming with referral traffic from Twitter.

This brings us to the first actionable advice: identify underused opportunities in the selected platform. Hashtags were a relatively new concept at the time, and by utilizing them effectively, we were able to attract our target audience. Today, the hashtag strategy alone wouldn't work to attract customers. It's important to identify emergent trends within those tactics to engage with your target audience.

Another example of identifying underused opportunities is Airbnb. They knew that their target audience was searching on Craigslist, so they hacked Craigslist to promote their listings. Snapchat is another great example. They identified their target audience in the high school demographic and incentivized popular students to share the app with others.

The second actionable advice is to focus on a single channel at a time. It's tempting to try multiple marketing channels at once, but it's more effective to find one method that works and give it your full attention. This allows you to optimize and scale your efforts on that specific channel.

The third actionable advice is to focus only on the users that matter. Not everyone who follows you or engages with your content is a potential customer. It's important to identify your target audience and confine your reach only to them. Anyone else is a waste of your time and resources.

Now let's shift our focus to viral growth. YouTube is one of the most famous examples of virality. Before it became the massive platform it is today, YouTube videos were often embedded on news sites or personal blogs. At the end of each video, viewers were invited to email the video to people they know or embed it on their own sites.

However, true viral growth is incredibly rare. Most products have a viral factor of less than 1, which means they don't achieve exponential growth solely through word-of-mouth. A sustainable viral factor of 0.15 to 0.25 is considered good for a consumer internet product, while 0.4 is great and around 0.7 is outstanding.

To calculate the total number of users acquired through viral channels, you can multiply the number of users acquired through non-viral channels by the amplification factor, which is calculated as a = 1/(1-v), where v is the viral factor.

In conclusion, marketing is an integral part of growing a startup. By following a 3-step framework that includes identifying your target audience, finding underused opportunities, and focusing on delivering value, you can effectively grow your business. Additionally, understanding the principles of viral growth can help you leverage the power of word-of-mouth to expand your user base. Remember to focus on the users that matter and continually adapt your strategies to emerging trends.