In today's digital landscape, businesses often focus on scaling acquisition and investing in paid advertising to drive growth. However, the success of these efforts largely depends on the foundation of your product mechanics. Neglecting to thoroughly analyse and fix every step in the user journey can lead to a leaky system that hampers scalability. In this blog post, we'll explore why it's crucial to prioritize product mechanics before diving into aggressive acquisition strategies and investing in paid ads.
Validate with Free Traffic Methods:
Investing in paid advertising without first validating your product mechanics using free traffic methods like outbound prospecting can be a costly mistake. By leveraging free channels, you can gather valuable insights, understand user behaviour, and fine-tune your product based on real-world feedback. This validation process helps you establish a solid foundation before scaling with paid ads.
Nail Down Conversion Mechanism:
Hiring a salesperson before nailing down the conversion mechanism can lead to frustration and inefficiency. It's important to thoroughly understand the conversion process and ensure it's optimised to deliver the desired results. This involves analysing user behaviour, identifying bottlenecks, and implementing improvements to enhance the user journey. Only once your conversion mechanism is well-established should you consider scaling your sales team.
Build a Solid Conversion Funnel:
Running paid ads without a proper conversion page, retargeting campaigns, and email marketing automation will result in wasted resources. A well-designed conversion funnel ensures that your paid traffic is effectively converted into valuable actions, such as sign-ups, purchases, or subscriptions. By optimising each step of the funnel, you increase the chances of converting paid traffic into loyal customers, maximising the return on your advertising investment.
Ad Conversion Impact on the Funnel:
If your ads are not converting properly, it can disrupt the entire funnel when scaled. Low conversion rates or ineffective targeting can lead to poor performance, wasted ad spend, and diminished ROI. By continuously monitoring and optimising your ad campaigns, you can maintain a healthy funnel that consistently delivers results.
Leveraging Product Analytics Tools:
To analyse and optimise your product mechanics effectively, you can use product analytics tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Heap, Pendo, and others. These tools offer a wide range of features that allow you to track and analyse user behavior, identify user paths, analyse conversion funnels, segment users, record sessions, and implement feature flags. Additionally, A/B testing capabilities enable you to experiment and make data-driven decisions to improve your product.
