Channels

I’ve read many times that being a founder of a startup is a mix of dread, panic, exhilaration and excitement.

My belief is that the most important part of this business strategy is channel, distribution and how we can reach the numbers of business leaders that share our vision and want to be part of a movement to “lead with impact, grow with purpose”. Product quality is paramount to customer success and retention but we first need to find and onboard prospective customers.

Every element of this business plan is crucial, but the channel strategy contains the most unknowns. How will we reach our customer-base, raise their awareness and convert them into paying subscribers so that we can fund future innovation and create more value?

Objective

The objective of this strategy is to build a Product-led Growth pipeline that can convert 250 leads into paying subscribers in each business quarter. That is over 20 new subscribers a week and I do not underestimate the scale of that challenge in the early months of the company.

I believe the way to scale the funnel to achieve this velocity is to continually remind our prospective customers that we are building a movement, not selling a product.

💡Key point: We are building a movement of business leaders that want to lead with impact and grow their teams with purpose. Every piece of content will reinforce this key message

Customer segmentation

We have two customer segments that we want to reach - “Manager as a team buyer” and “HR Leader as a corporate buyer”. Both of these segments are reachable through LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the best suited channel for us as we are selling an aspirational vision about better leadership and career development. Every manager I have ever met takes their credentials as a competent, trusted leader seriously and they are invested in their LinkedIn status, profile and network.

My growth plan is to grow a subscriber base of “manager as a team buyer” customers before launching a B2B enterprise offering. I believe that a channel for one segment can overlap into another and raise overall awareness of the value proposition.

The economics of paid advertising

One source of exhilaration (and dread) is understanding the economics of paid advertising on LinkedIn. Working out Cost-per-lead (CPL) and overall Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) I know that paid-advertising alone isn’t the way to grow a subscriber base.

The CAC payback period for a customer acquired through paid advertising will be around 1 year based on the subscription revenue. Even before calculating a realistic churn rate I’m worried that we could lose money if we rely heavily on paid advertising to recruit customers.

Blending organic and paid customer acquisition

The answer to the problem of 20 subscribers a week has to be a content-led, community building approach using LinkedIn as a platform.

💡Community building is a key customer acquisition growth strategy

This approach will use a number of content strategies that support each other

Blog (same content pushed to website, LinkedIn articles)

• Posting strategy to highlight and reuse blog posts
• Recutting blog posts into shareable quotes, graphics and memes. The multi-page document posts on LinkedIn are popular and are reshared often.
• The blog is about the movement and not the product, but we will always have a call-to-action to learn more about the platform.
• Newsletter that will reshare blog content into email addresses.
• The newsletter will contain “exclusive” content to drive email address collection and new leads generation. We will promote exclusive content (interviews, articles, infographics etc) via LinkedIn posts

Audio and video podcast.

• Via the standard podcast channels (Apple, Spotify etc) build a community through podcast content about “leading with impact, growing with purpose”. The podcast will feature interviews with inspirational but everyday leaders and how they engage their teams. Hopefully with a growing customer base we will never run out of people to interview!

Webinars

• These will be more platform and product focused but will still tell stories about better leadership. We will run a series of webinars covering individual processes on the platform (“How to run better 1:1’s” and “How to take your team through annual goal setting”)

Proactive outreach.

Our Customer Success team will contact people that engage with our content to help drive them through our funnel.

Objectives and Key Results

Objective:

Build a funnel of prospective customers that will yield over 20 subscriptions a week

Key Results:

• Through our digital channels (LinkedIn, Website, Newsletter, Podcast platforms) we will publish at least one written and one video/audio segment of thought leadership content each week.
• Each piece of published content will have a call-to-action to drive users into the top of the funnel
• Customer Success Advocates will reach out to prospective customers
• Paid advertising will perform at a click through rate (CTR) of 0.3%
• We are targeted to convert 10% of leads into subscription customers.
• Once we have a baseline of Cost-per-lead (CPL) and Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) we will aim to reduce that cost through scaling our content operations.

This is part of the series on our Open Business Model