Ask HN: What is your repeatable marketing process?
I'm curious about what repeatable marketing process startups are using to reach out to and acquire customers. Is it AdWords, affiliate marketing, social media marketing, blogging, PR, etc.?
This worked amazingly well for me with my fantasy football website. I made software to let people do free mock drafts. Over the last five years it's grown substantially with virtually zero advertising. I then sell premium fantasy football software to those visitors. Also, I aggregate data and have become a reliable source that people link to. Building the free app and becoming a source of data has led to my site becoming the #1 result in Google for just about any search term that I care about.
It's sort of a twist on the freemium model. The conversion rate is very low, but the customer acquisition cost is virtually zero, so it is still profitable.
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/01/24/startup-seo/
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/07/17/seo-for-software-compani...
Repeatability is a core, baked-in element of the strategy.
1. Identifying your customer 2. Creating a fulfilling customer experience
Now there's a ton of ways to support #2, but if you've truly understood #1 you know which ways to follow with. The hard part is making the experience consistent yet unique for each customer/customer type you have. Measure everything, or create proxy measures and plan before acting.