The first step in Bullseye is brainstorming every single traction channel. If you were to advertise offline, where would be the best place to do it? If you were to give a speech, who would be the ideal audience? Imagine what success would look like in each channel, and write it down in your outer ring.

These interactions also get you additional data, like what messaging is resonating with potential customers, what niche you might focus on first, what types of customers will be easiest to acquire, and what major distribution roadblocks you might run into.

Building a scalable SEM campaign can take a long time because there are so many variables to test—keywords, ad copy, demographic targeting, landing pages, CPC, and more. However, this complexity can actually work to your advantage. As you test and optimize every element of your SEM strategy, you may find opportunities for huge gains. As Matthew tol

At Marketo, not only did we have SEO [search engine optimization] in place even before product development, we also had a blog. We talked about the problems we aimed to solve…. Instead of beta testing a product, we beta tested an idea and integrated the feedback we received from our readers early on in our product development process. By using this

Create compelling social content. The best way to build a presence and engage your audience on social sites is to concentrate on creating less content, but making it highly shareable. When your content is getting naturally shared, that’s the time to promote it further with social ads.

For these emails, you should determine the steps absolutely necessary to get value from your product. Then create targeted emails to make sure people complete those steps. For those who fail to complete step one, create a message that automatically emails them when they’ve dropped off. Repeat this at every step where people could quit, and you will

The most common unscalable thing founders have to do at the start is to recruit users manually. Nearly all startups have to. You can’t wait for users to come to you. You have to go out and get them.

If we had not started blogging at the beginning the way we did, Unbounce would not be here today…. Our content still drives customers. Something we wrote in January 2010 still drives customers today. Whereas if I had spent money on advertising in January, that’s it. That money is spent. If you invest in content, it gets picked up by Google. People

You can use tools like Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to run A/B tests on your landing pages. When we asked Matthew if the approach to SEM he discussed still applied to Inflection as it entered more competitive markets, he said: The fundamental concepts of keyword research, market discovery, running split tests, ad tests, controlling your b