Andrew Hubbard on Customer Acquisition Strategies for Early Stage Companies

#BiteSize is a video series where leading experts answer some of the most pressing questions entrepreneurs have while building or marketing their startups.

In the latest episode of #BiteSize, Andrew Hubbard talks about his go to customer acquisition strategies for early stage companies.

Andrew Hubbard

Andrew Hubbard helps app developers & business owners generate new customers with Facebook advertising. He is also the founder of smartappmarketer.com and co-host of the App Business Podcast.

Transcript of the Video

When it comes to user acquisition, I would say generally the most leverage you’re going to find anywhere is going to come from researching your target audience, from understanding the user base you’re going after, finding where they are, finding what they like and what they’re interested in.

And this is going to set the foundation for all your future acquisition efforts. Not only does it help you with user acquisition by allowing you to target ads more effectively, but it’s going to help with almost every other aspect of your marketing and even the development of your app as well.

Regardless of the platform – Facebook, Google Adwords, etc, if you’ve got a clear picture of what your audience is interested in, how they behave and how they talk about their problems and desires, then you’ll be able to create better ads, your copy will use similar language – the phrases, the slang, the description is instantly going to be relatable to your audience.

If you think outside of the advertising space, the understanding of the audience will help you write better app descriptions, to appeal to them. The language will flow from the ad copy to the app description and this will make it feel linked and one as opposed to being completely separate. Your screenshots have to be appealing and ASO or App Store Optimization keywords will be based on the phrases your audience uses to describe their problem.

So how do you get started acquiring users? Usually the first thing I do, and this has been a game changer and it’s been around fairly recently and it’s called the Facebook Audience Insight Tool. What it does is it lets you look at all sorts of information like demographics, page likes and even income levels and behavioral patterns of a particular audience.

Go to the audience insights tool and enter a particular interest. Put in something like a competitors app – could be an influencer in your niche, it could be a popular website that’s linked to your niche as well. The key is to be specific and not general.

A good example is let’s say you’re developing a telemedicine application for the iOS devices, in the interest box, if you put telemedicine application as the keyword, it’s really not an effective strategy because that’s super general. Telemedicine application does not suggest whether it’s for a specific geography, for mental health or internal medicine, etc. It’s going to throw up results of a broad audience that isn’t interested in specifically your telemedicine application.

And so you have to get specific and competitive apps are a good way to start. What this gives you is demographic info, and most important thing you’ve got to find is if you head over to the page likes tab, it will show you all of the pages that people with that interest have also liked.

So you can use those pages to put them again in the interest box to get more results or you can check out those pages to understand how your audience is engaging or what they’re talking about and how they’re interacting. You can get links to websites and check out where your audience is congregating.

They might talk about products and you can go to Amazon, etc and read reviews of those products and understand them. And you can even start to participate in these communities. You might find some Facebook groups where your audience is hanging out, you can answer questions and help them out and this acts as a promotion tool for your app.

It’s really about understanding your audience, it’s about finding where they are and finding what they’re talking about, how they’re talking about it and then using that in all the different elements of both your user acquisition and advertising.