How do you plan and measure your marketing campaigns?

Hey Craig,

Great question. I'm no expert, but I can tell you what worked for me in my recent side project (i.e., Pareday.com). Note that this advice depends on what stage you're at with your product, but it sounds like you're at phase 1 – making something people want. In any case, I'd recommend the bullseye framework by Gabriel and Justin.

The gist:

1/ Define a traction goal that will move the needle for your SaaS app. This could be $5,000 MRR in 6 months or 1,000 users in 3 months. Whatever it is, you first need to figure out your traction goal to help measure each marketing campaign.

2/ Brainstorm 19 traction channels defined by Gabriel. The goal here is to force yourself to think of 3 traction strategies for each traction channel that will move the needle on your traction goal.

3/ After you've brainstormed strategies for each traction channel, choose the best strategy from 3 to 5 traction channels and come up with a next to free test. The test should be timeboxed for ~30 days.

For each test you should measure and answer three things:

Thing #1: How much does it cost?
Thing #2: How much volume does the channel attract?
Thing #3: What is the conversion (i.e., from visitor to customer)?

4/ Based on the highest conversion and the least amount money spent, choose the channel that performed the best and double down on employing different strategies. At this point, you've found your bullseye traction channel. Optimize the crap out of it and share how you reached your traction goal. :-)

I'm consideirng writing a blog post about how the bullseye framework in practice worked for Pareday. Let me know if this would interest you.

Best of luck!

Hey Craig!

Take my advice with a grain of salt, but here's my philosophy for my SaaS app launch.

1. Find as many ways as possible to get free exposure. Build an email list and send an email announcement. Build a beta tester list and ask/incentivize them to share. Launch on directories and forums like Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, etc.

2. Viral/referral marketing. Even before you launch, build hype with a landing page and run some cheap twitter ads. Use a service like Viral Loops (viral-loops.com) to collect email addresses and then incentivize them to share on social media or through email. Basically, find ways to incentivize potential users to share in their network.

3. Set aside a chunk of money and devote it to cheap ads. Look on growthhackers.com to find cheap twitter ad hacks. At some point, you're going to have to use paid acquisition. It's the easiest and fastest way to get face time. You don't have to go crazy, just set up 3-5 ads on 1-2 networks and see how they work. If nothing's performing, pull the plug and try again later.

4. SEO/Content Marketing. This is more of a long-term strategy, but it can also have a viral effect. Using something like Medium or even just your blog, writing and giving away great content that has appeal to your target audience is a great way to start getting exposure, building trust, and getting traffic to your website.

Overall, like Royce suggested, figure out 3 strategies you want to invest in and then commit to them for 3 months. Track all your progress, but make sure you're investing enough time and money to really test them and find traction in some.