Budget hacks we used to grow our startup’s reach by 25 fold in a month

Photo credit: Bruno Soares

In today’s startup environment, it helps to be prudent with cash. Deep discounting models can be fatal, especially in low margin categories. So, startups need to figure out cash-efficient hacks to reach not only more customers, but better quality customers, customers that are more likely to come back, customers that have a higher lifetime value (CLV).

Our startup, Yummade, is a managed C2C marketplace where consumers can buy natural food products from local artisans. Bootstrapped since its inception in 2015, our growth has been primarily organic. A few months back, our team did a few experiments and realized that the use of clever online marketing hacks can help startups expand reach without burning too much cash.

Before getting into what hacks worked for us, here are some results of these hacks:

• 25 times growth in website traffic through social media
• 30 percent week-on-week growth in customers
• 50 percent lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) through Facebook ads as compared to other channels
• 25 percent increase in average ticket size from new customers
• 200 percent higher click-through rates (CTR) through Facebook ads

Now, this list of hacks is by no measure exhaustive or a copy-paste model for every startup, but if it can get your minds racing, then it serves its purpose.

Here goes.

1. Define your customer (like, to the extent that starts sounding creepy)

This is easier said than done. Most startups feel everyone is a potential customer, just so that they can build a larger market potential for investors. But that is the worst thing you can do to your business.

“You cannot be everything to everyone. It’s a recipe for failure.”

When it comes to social media ads, especially on Facebook, this is the most critical defining point of any campaign. Facebook has a treasure trove of data about everyone’s personal habits, what devices they use, what they like and what they don’t like. If it weren’t so good for marketing, it would definitely classify as creepy!

Accurately defining your customer doesn’t just mean attributes such as age, gender and location. It means building a digital profile of what your customer does on a daily basis, where they go, what they eat, who they follow, even what their family members may like or dislike. It’s almost like playing Second Life, just with your customers’ avatars instead of your own.

Create not one, but many such customer cohorts (profile groups that share similar characteristics) – as many as it takes to allow customized targeting of products or offers for every cohort. For Yummade, we built 20 different cohorts with customized products and offers for each cohort.

2. Quality over quantity

This is the foundation of acquiring customers in a cash-efficient manner. A simple corollary to the point above, is that each cohort will be small in size, but it will be much better in quality. And that’s exactly what you want – quality over quantity.

3. Customize your ad messages

4. Choose the right channel for your target customer

5. Specify when you’d like for your ad to be delivered

6. Think retention, even during acquisition