How I'm thinking of acquisition projects at Buffer

Having recently started working on user acquisition at Buffer, I came up with a matrix to help me understand the different areas of acquisition and help me categorize project ideas.

Once I knew that I would be working on user acquisition at Buffer, I started thinking of the possible projects we could do. Landing pages, ads, lead nurturing, and more. While it was great to come up with the ideas, I became overwhelmed quickly. Which ideas are in line with the way we do marketing? Which ideas should we prioritize? How do we make sense of all these ideas?

While cycling around a reservoir one morning, I thought of a framework that might just help me answer those questions.

The acquisition matrix

Inspired by the numerous matrices I've seen, I came up with this matrix to help me understand the different areas of acquisition and help me categorize project ideas.

This matrix as a whole represents our target audience — social media marketers and social media teams.

Quadrant 1 is the people who don't know about Buffer, don't know they need a social media management tool, and aren't actively searching for a tool. I believe our brand squad will do amazing things to reach this group of people. A referral or ambassador program could also help to reach people in this quadrant. I'm imagining social media managers sharing with other social media managers the benefits of using a social media management tool and recommending Buffer.

Quadrant 2 is the people who know about Buffer (through our branding projects - yay!) but don't know they need a social media management tool and aren't actively searching for one. This group of people might check out our Buffer landing pages to find out more so I see the opportunity here to be teaching them the benefits of using a social media management tool or Buffer (if using a tool is right for them). I believe there's a lot we could try with product positioning, copywriting, illustrating before and after using a social media management tool, here.

Quadrant 3 is the people who don't know about Buffer but know they need a social media management tool and are actively searching for one. I see the opportunity here to be helping them decide if Buffer is right for them. This could be through being present in relevant keyword search results (SEO), having accurate information on review sites, detailed explanation of our features, clear pricing chart, demo video, etc.

Quadrant 4 is the people who know about Buffer, know they need a social media management tool, and are actively searching for one. I believe what we do for people in Quadrant 2 and 3 will help people in this quadrant, too. :)

So here's the matrix with the details:

(You might have noticed that we're missing a few typical acquisition tactics such as retargeting ads or lead nurturing in the matrix. That is intentional as we have not really tried those tactics before and aren't sure what's the best way to execute them while being in line with our brand, yet.)

Customer journey map

To take this one step further, we created a customer journey map. Here's how Adam Richardson, a Group Product Manager at Financial Engines, describes a customer journey map in his Harvard Business Review article:

A customer journey map is a very simple idea: a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company, whether it be a product, an online experience, retail experience, or a service, or any combination

A customer in Quadrant 2 will have a different journey with Buffer compared with a customer in Quadrant 3. For example, here's a potential customer journey that someone in Quadrant 3 might take:

👉 Experience a pain point with managing her social media profiles 👉 Research about social media management tools 👉 Check out reviews of social media management tools 👉 Visit Buffer's homepage and pricing page 👉 Sign up for a free account or start a free trial to try Buffer

The actual customer journey is much longer and includes stages such as evaluating options, making a purchase, and re-evaluating. For my purpose (user acquisition), I focus on the part of the journey up till her signing up for Buffer. And this is just one of the countless possible customer journeys with Buffer. Our aim is to improve the experience throughout the customer journey so that a prospect is more likely going to sign up for Buffer.

Looking at this customer journey, we were able to come up with a few ideas. Here are some examples: We could create landing pages about our core features and try to rank them well for relevant keywords on Google so that prospects can find them while researching. We could improve our product listings on review sites to give prospects a better impression of our products. We could include more details on our pricing page to help prospects make a decision.

Each idea requires further research for us to determine if it's a validated idea and how we should prioritize it. (This is an area I'm still learning so I'll be grateful for your advice!)

Prioritization of ideas

Here's one way I'm thinking of prioritizing our ideas (which is quite similar to the ICE Score framework by GrowthHackers):

First, I look at the potential impact of an idea. The impact on the signups number is influenced by 1) the number of impressions of our marketing efforts, 2) the clickthrough rate to our landing pages, and 3) the conversion rate on those pages. If we have the baseline numbers for each marketing channel, we could better understand the potential impact of each acquisition ideas.

Then, the next step might be to consider the ease of executing the ideas. For example, creating a landing page is likely easier than starting a referral program. While an idea might have a greater impact on signups than another idea, the former might be much harder to execute than the latter. In this case, it might be better to experiment with the latter first.

The tricky thing for us at the moment is that we do not have the baseline numbers yet. So we do not have a good understanding of the potential impact of our ideas. Hence, for now, our main aim is to find some of those numbers.

Maximizing learning

We hope to learn as much as we can through lean experiments. For example, before diving into a full landing page creation strategy, can we test the strategy with one landing page? If we were to create a landing page about one of our core features, what would the organic traffic and signup rate be like?

Another example would be: can we experiment with a few ads before investing all our budget into a paid strategy? What would the ad clickthrough rate and cost of signup be like?

As we do not have a good sense of those numbers yet, I'm not sure how to prioritize those acquisition ideas right now. Thus, the strategy we're taking at the moment is to test a bunch of things and learn more about those ideas before investing further or pivoting to another idea.

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As you might be able to tell by now, I'm very new to user acquisition. If you have any advice on coming up with ideas, prioritizing projects, and executing experiments, I would love to hear them. Thank you!