Bringing Users or Building Product?
Tags: Investment, Traction, Startup, Funding, Startup Lessons

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The Bullseye Framework

Insight number two finds the most effective marketing channel.

Specifically, I reference the bullseye framework, which comes from this book.

This is a four-step process that you can use to select and execute your business’s best marketing opportunities. And this is important because, in the grand scheme of things, all the different marketing channels out, there might be a handful of three or four far better than the rest. There might be one channel that is far more effective than two, three and four combined. You must do what you can to identify the best marketing opportunity for your business and the bullseye framework; it’s something that I reference. It’s a four-step process.

Brainstorm

The first step is to brainstorm marketing ideas for all the different marketing channels that seem interesting to you.

This book happens to cover 19 different marketing channels, and it covers in quite a detail. So, you’ll definitely want to read this book still if you want more detail on the 19 that they cover. But the idea behind the first step in the bullseye framework is to focus on each of these channels and pretend you live in an alternative universe where you have to use one specific channel, work your way down the list, and assume it is okay. If I had to use this one channel, let’s say hosting live events, how would you use that channel to promote your business?

Spend 10, 20 minutes coming up with a realistic scenario of how you would use that specific channel and work your way down the list and cover every channel you can think of. Brainstorm them, not because you’re going to pursue all these channels at once that would spread your efforts way too thin, but this is just an exploratory process. You want to see what you could develop if you were forced to use any one of these channels, just as an exercise to brainstorm interesting ideas.

Pick a few out of the many listed.

Step two in the framework is to select three to five of the most promising options, narrow down the list, and focus on the ones that seem most appropriate for your business.

And the name of the game here is speed.

Especially if you’re a start-up business and need to find the one channel that’s going to be hyper-effective for your business, you want to see the channel that can attract customers quickly, attract customers profitably, ideally enough customers to make an impact for you with your business.

Test Test Test: Inexpensively

So, select three to five of the most promising, and then you move to step three, which is to perform inexpensive tests. And this is the step that it’s straightforward to skip over as an entrepreneur. I know myself, it’s tempting to look at the list and say, okay, here are three or four that seem promising.

I’ll figure that out later; I’m going to go back to focusing on the product.

But the reality is that if we don’t test the marketing channels, A, we don’t know if they’re going to work. And if we’re going to be able to attract customers and B, we can’t identify which is the best opportunity.

So, the idea here is to perform inexpensive tests, depending on your project’s size, that might be 500 bucks, that might be 1000 dollars per channel. And let’s say one of the channels was running a Facebook ad campaign.

Well, you would perform an inexpensive campaign, test it over a few days. And the main thing you’re trying to identify is A, are there enough customers to make things exciting and to be worth your time and B, trying to get a sense of, are you confident that you could make this a profitable marketing channel if you were to focus on optimizing it, improving your ad copy, improving your website or landing page and just optimizing the whole marketing funnel in general.

You don’t have to obsess about optimization here.

You want to get a sense of, are there enough customers?

And if you were to spend more time and energy optimizing things, is it likely that you could be profitable in converting those prospects into customers? So that’s step three.

Finalize one of them

Step four is pretty simple.

You look at all your tests, and you choose the most promising channel that seems best for your business. And this is very important because you mustn’t spread your efforts too thin, especially as a start-up. You focus all of your time and energy and the time and energy of anybody else on your team around really mastering one marketing channel.

This is a massive differentiator for businesses.

If you can have a founder, a co-founder, or a lead marketer, that’s an absolute master at one marketing channel; it gives your business incredible strength and confidence. So, as quickly as possible, once you’ve identified an auspicious marketing opportunity, you want to hone in on that and focus all of your time and energy on maximizing the potential of that channel.

And eventually, once you hit diminishing returns or the point at which spending more time and energy wouldn’t necessarily give you more results, you can pull away from that channel, leave your efforts as is and restart the process and find the next marketing opportunity to expand your business. You’ll still support the original channel, and obviously, you try not to exhaust it.

Nevertheless, once you hit diminishing returns and it’s not worth ramping up your ad spend or ramping up your amount of time involved in trying to optimize it, then you find the next best marketing channel and restart the process. This is a compelling and straightforward framework, but one of my favorite insights from the book is that I strongly recommend using it.