Startup Marketing Lessons: Ubiqi Health Part 2

Ubiqi Health is a new company building tools to track migraines, triggers, and treatments online or on your mobile phone. Their current biggest challenge is acquiring new users that match the same eagerness and intensity as their early-vangelists, in a low-cost manner. As a startup marketing guy, I felt I could help out. In Part One of our conversation we talked about how to setup a user acquisition tracking system. This post recaps our discussion of driving new visits and users through the system.

Ok, once we build our AARRR dashboard, how do we attract new users?

Ubiqi is still attracting new users by building partnerships with people who can recommend the product to chunks of people – moderators of online user groups, influential doctors, and offline communities. While that’s a great way to get some early hypotheses validated around your market and MVP, I recommend that Ubiqi start incorporating an Inbound Marketing Strategy (Lite). Doing Inbound Marketing “the right way” requires a huge time commitment that won’t pay off for a startup before the money runs out. However, the inbound, digital channel shouldn’t just be ignored.

Ubiqi uses their blog to talk about the product and their Facebook page to talk about the problem their product solves. I recommend to flip that approach. As David Meerman Scott so eloquently puts, “Nobody cares about your product, except for you.” Take the content that people are more likely to be searching for, and put that in a search optimized, frequently updating, publicly accessible blog.

The definition of “Frequent Updates” to the blog is always murky – especially for a startup where time is the scarcest resource. There are a lot of great ideas on how to train yourself to regularly update your blog with an editorial calendar, or get others to blog for you by asking for guest authors, and more. Start by agreeing on to an editorial calendar that has the whole team committing to 4 total posts per month. If there’s at least four people in your startup, that’s 1 post per person, per month. Have each person write about the “problem” from their unique prospective of their functional role.

Should we experiment with PPC?

Grabbing lots of users by investing in a daily PPC budget that you can “set and forget” is a trap that many startups flirt with, at some point. From my experience, the steps that are required to setup a Google Adwords campaign and get it running require all of 5 minutes. Don’t let that fool you, the steps required to correctly setup a PPC campaign that results in something other than just handing over your money to Google, are a lot more involved. Tread lightly. Poorly configured PPC campaigns can waste the two most scarce startup resources – time and money. Properly tuned PPC campaigns require banners and ad messaging that truly stand-out from the pack, stellar landing pages designs, crisp value propositions specific to the Ad content, and accurate data that demonstrates your campaigns’ effectiveness through a series of A/B tests, and dedicated time out of your schedule to monitor your campaigns every day.

All it takes is time . . . and money

After talking for an hour or so, the meeting ended with lots of notes on the page. I felt that I was able to help outline a decent user acquisition strategy in broad brush strokes, but felt at times I was overwhelming Jackie with just a bunch of to-do’s that might have gotten lost without overall context. How about you? What other advice would you give to the team at Ubiqi Health to get started on a robust user acquisition campaign? Leave them in the comments below.