EP #101 - Nicholas Hänny: The Bootstrapped Way To Success

The first commandment of bootstrapping: do it yourself. Don’t pay agencies or lawyers for things you can do yourself or copy paste from templates.
Don’t start with branding, start with the performance marketing of your product. This way, you’ll earn back your ad spend immediately (if you do it well).
Use cheap CPM media (cost per 1 million clicks) such as Pinterest or snapchat for brand awareness. Facebook and Instagram for retargeting.
A lot of world class knowledge about social media marketing is freely available on the Internet. Use it!

Experimenting and tracking success

Experiment with a broad variety of channels to find out what works. Be sure you understand the basics of how the platform’s algorithm works, so you are able to interpret your data (e.g. how long does the algorithm take to learn, i.e. how long until it produces significant results).
Run experiments over 1-4 weeks. External events such as the weather or other events can significantly influence the performance and skew your data.
Branding ads should have at least a return of 1x, performance ads a return of 2x or higher. This means, with every $ spent, you earn 2 $ in purchases or customer value.
Watch the CTR (click through rate), engagement and ROAS (return on ad spend) to gauge how effective your campaigns are.

Tracking offline marketing

Usually a billboard alone won’t cut it. Combine off- and online marketing to build strong brand awareness.
Use custom links or discount codes in order to track your offline marketing.

Finding your target audience

Google analytics or Facebook audience are great tools to help you with this.
You can create “look alikes” based on your Facebook pixel. Be sure to integrate it on your website early, so it can collect data.
Look into the other Facebook pages that your audience likes and build your targeting based on them.

Scaling your social media marketing

If an ad performs well DON’T just double the ad spend. This will throw off the algorithm and it will start learning from scratch again (and you’ll pay again for the learning). Instead, increase your spend slowly or duplicate your campaign and launch a second one with the same spend, to immediately duplicate your spend.
Don’t go too broad. When expanding, do so in narrowly targeted locations to help build word-of-mouth.

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