‘Test your marketing channels’ says Sean Ellis, startup marketing expert. A good marketing plan is all about choosing channels and putting in a rigorous plan to test these against metrics that matter for your business. Three step approach to executing on a web 2.0 marketing plan

• Discover your users and gather relevant metrics
• Learn from testing and optimize
• Budget and Hire

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Where do you start? Free marketing channels are the best place to start, for e.g. viral apps. Optimize your business economics, by spending time to identify the channels that matter. Doing so, helps improves customer experience, reduces friction in the acquisition process. Paid channels help in demand harvesting for innovators and demand creation for disrupters. PR, for example, is great for innovators, where as SEO works for disrupters. Budget as much as you have the capacity to test. Then find out which tests worked and fund them. Do not set expectations up front in the early stage, rather rely on test results to ramp up. Finally, hire in to fill gaps that are slowing you down. Do not hire to ‘figure things out’.

On the question of tracking of your channels, Sean suggests, using triangulated approach, for e.g. with tracking urls, surveys, instead of a single source.

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