Learn Startup Marketing and Growth
December 24, 2017
This course has 25 short, crisp tutorials on how to grow your startup — once done, you should have a good understanding of what the field of Marketing and Sales for startups looks like, have a good understanding of how to think and measure growth, as well as have about 20 “Traction channels” in your toolkit to help you grow your product.
If you like this course and want to dive deeper into the Traction Channels, we recommend you to read Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares. The Traction Channels in this course are summary of chapters from the book, which you should read to dive deeper with a number of examples around each channel.
Overview and Growth Metrics
This section provides a framework to think about growth, and what to look for to ensure you’re on the correct path. In addition to looking at how to pick the correct traction channels for your company, we will look at different frameworks for growth metrics, followed by a deeper dive into measuring Retention.
- Why do you need traction?
- How to choose a marketing channel?
- Google Ventures’ HEART Framework for metrics
- AARRR Framework for metrics
- What is Retention and how do you measure it?
- Tracking Growth with Growth Accounting & Triangle Heatmaps
Traction Channels for Startups
In this section, we will look at 14 traction channels that are useful for any startup. We advise you to go think about how each channel may be applicable to your business as you go along.
- Targeting blogs and link-sharing communities
- Content Marketing: Strategy and Examples
- Making widgets, tools and micro-sites — engineering as marketing
- Viral Marketing: the viral loop and viral growth
- Building an online community around your product
- Email Marketing
- Social and Display Advertising
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO): basics, strategies and link building
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM): basics, strategies and case studies
- Publicity & Public Relations (PR)
- Unconventional PR: Publicity stunts & Customer Appreciation
- Offline Ads: Print Ads, Outdoor Ads, Radio and TV
- Affiliate Programs for Retail, Information Products and Lead Generation
- Existing Platforms: App Stores, Browser Extensions and Social Sites
Extra Channels for Business-facing Startups
The following 5 traction channels are more relevant to business-facing companies (that sell products to other businesses, as opposed to individual customers). You may want to skip this section if you’re building a product for individual customers and are still quite early.