MAIN STAGE
Intelligent Growth:
Finding & Testing Your Marketing Channels
Hiten Shah
Founder, Advisor & Investor
Crazy Egg, KISSmetrics & Quick Sprout

If you can't explain it
simply, you don't
understand it well
enough.
Albert Einstein

What you’re going to learn in the next 20 minutes...
❏ A simple way to find the best marketing channels
❏ How to prioritize and test existing marketing channels
❏ All about my love for Emoji

Finding
Marketing Channels

What is a marketing channel?

Marketing channels
bring new people to
your product.

How do you find the right
marketing channels?

Three Questions Marketing Framework
Who is your target customer?
Where do they hang out?
How do you engage them?

Three Questions Marketing Framework
Case Study

People loved the Crazy Egg MVP
All in all, Crazy Egg is a great
product providing helpful data to
any website owner.
I’m impressed with how simple
Crazy Egg makes it for website
owners to visualize visitor click
activity.
Based on results, website owners
can learn how visitors see their site
and how they should improve it.

Before launch, we needed
people to try our early
prototype product.
We were creating a new type of
visual analytics product. It would
track every click on a website.
We needed thousands of websites
to use it before we launched
because we had to make sure it
worked with all types of websites.
We had to find people who would
give us lots of feedback on our
buggy product.

We got over 23,000 pre-launch sign ups

Who is your target customer?
People who design websites.

Where do they hang out?
In web design communities
and on CSS galleries.

How do you engage them?
Help them be more awesome!

Three Questions Marketing Framework
Case Study

People loved the KISSmetrics MVP

In the early days, we had a
great product and a big
marketing problem.
Companies were spending more
than $18 for every single ad click
using Google AdWords.
We had raised money but couldn’t
spend it on acquiring customers at
that cost.
We had to find a way to get signups
without spending too much money
on paid advertising.

The KISSmetrics blog is quite popular

Who is your target customer?
Online marketers with websites.

Where do they hang out?

How do you engage them?
#measure

Can products have built-in
marketing channels?

Yes, product-based marketing
channels are a thing!

Three Questions Marketing Framework
Case Study

KISSinsights was the first tool for on-page surveys

We wanted to find a way for
the product to grow itself.
To create KISSinsights we did 20
in-depth customer interviews,
created two landing pages to test
the value proposition and made a
hacky version that we used
ourselves.
That was when we stumbled onto
one of the most powerful engines of
growth a startup can create.

Before we sold KISSinsights it got 25,000 sign ups
without us having to spend any money on organic or
paid marketing channels.
The growth came exclusively from one single
product-based marketing channel.
Today, this is called a growth loop.

Who is your target customer?
Product people and online marketers.

Where do they hang out?
On each other’s websites and web apps.

How do you engage them?
Put a badge on it.

Three Questions Marketing Framework
Who is your target customer?
Where do they hang out?
How do you engage them?

Who is your target customer?
❏ What does your product do?
❏ What problem does it solve?
❏ Who wants this problem solved?

Where do they hang out?
❏ Create a list of potential places both online and offline
❏ Establish criteria for your ideal marketing channel
❏ Vet your list according to that criteria

How do you engage them?
❏ Identify your method of engagement
❏ Research deeply on how best to use the method
❏ Focus in on your target audience
❏ Aim to deliver a ton of value

Testing
Marketing Channels

Your website’s job is to
convert people who
visit into sign ups and
revenue.

Find pages with high traffic and high bounce rate

Find pages with high traffic and low conversion rate

Find sources with high traffic and low conversion rate

What you learned in the last 20 minutes...
❏ A simple way to find the best marketing channels
❏ How to prioritize and test existing marketing channels
❏ All about my love for Emoji