How to gain customers like a Super Hero?

Is it really possible to drive traffic or generate leads in 1/1000 of the cost?

Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketeer I guess your'e always expected to find creative ways and reduce costs while increasing performance.

During my journeys at startup companies like Culture Trip, Funzing and The Student Hive there is one thing which I have always done very well. That thing is to save myself precious time when I want to outreach or drive traffic for a certain goal and instead of approaching them one by one - try and approach them in 1-2-many methods.

It could be leads to sign up for your service, consumers purchasing a ticket or product on your site or event signing up venues to create events with - the truth is there is always a shortcut on how to hit many birds with one stone.

I am talking about The Network Effect Pyramid - enabling you to strategise your lead generation or customer performance marketing and with one effort/paid campaign/outreach reach many people. It's silly to think how simple it is!

Let's say you want to sell an E-commerce product to young professional females at a certain geographic location. These individuals could surely be signed up to a mass Whatsapp group about health & lifestyle, have a membership to a local gym or attend a monthly art conference. Wouldn't it be great if instead of trying to drive each of them through content to your website you could just gain access to the Whatsapp group, enjoy the credibility of the admin and get them all to visit your website with super low cost. Well, you just can!

Same could go for any other industry - if your'e a freelancer looking for customers, try and think where you can find them. Won't it be easier to just approach the admin of the specific group and incentivise him to advertise?

You can always try and analyse - which group does that individual belong to. It could be Online [eg: a Facebook group, a Meetup community] or even a local neighbourhood committee [Offline]. The whole purpose of this pyramid is to observe your end consumer.

I'm not going to say much just to leave you with an example. If you were the supply side Growth marketing expert at Uber; How can you minimise your efforts and contact many drivers in one go? You could plan and deliver a traditional lead generation campaign sending to a landing page. But wouldn't it be more efficient if you get an affiliate deal with a freelancer network website that is commission based on sign ups?

I'm not going to feed you with a spoon. Just give you some food for thought.

So the next time you plan your campaign, assess your yearly budget and think how to reach an audience, drive clicks or generate leads - build your own pyramid, A/B test how you approach and what you offer that group and if it doesn't exist - you can even create it yourself!

I bet if you opened a group on Linkedin or Meetup called 'Uber Taxi Driver Support community' and drive traffic to that - it would be much more cost effective than sending people to a page and paying per click.

at Funzing we did similar things when wanting to look for hosts for a PR stunt called 'the world's first Full time Pokemon Go Hunter' where we just ran job listing ads and that way got a lot of potential leads. We also established relationships with chains of bars and restaurants instead of signing up one by one when we searched for event venues. At Culture Trip we built some great relationships with startups and niche marketplace websites that already have amazing communities with talented people which we could work with.

Whatever you do, open your mind and don't spend your acquisition budget solely per click or conversion as it will just fly away!

Peace out and Happy Purim;

Yaron