I was just talking to a founder today at Bear Metrics. Bear Metrics is a great company, by the way, if you’re looking for data on how to optimize your plans and pricing strategy.

So anyway, we had a conversation and one thing that I’ve noticed in the SaaS world is that organic traffic seems to be this badge of honor.

Like it’s extra cool to be able to say “I’ve been able to grow my company organically, without spending any money on paid ads!” or “I’ve been able to grow my company on referrals only, and haven’t spent a dime on paid ads. Woo, go me!”

I don’t get it.

What’s interesting is, and you might disagree with this, I don’t think you have a real company if you’re ONLY growing on organic.

 The goal is to have a scalable acquisition strategy to bring in new customers anytime you want, so shouldn’t that be the badge of honor?

Shouldn’t it be more like, “Hey, we can spend $100,000 on ads and make $200,000 in revenue. And we can do that consistently.”

vs.

“We get tons and tons of organic traffic, but we don’t convert a lot of it. A lot of it’s like trash traffic. We can’t figure out where the traffic is coming from. We have no control over how much traffic we’re getting.”

If you’ve been growing organically, that’s awesome. I mean, that’s fun. Fantastic.

BUT you’re going to hit a point where you just can’t scale anymore and your organic growth is going to plateau.

The reality is that you only have so much control over who visits your site if you’re creating content, so that content is going to bring in qualified people…the flip side is it’s also going to bring in people that aren’t qualified.

What you really want to do is be able to bring in qualified traffic whenever you want.

If you have that struggle, here’s what I would suggest. First, look at all of your customers that have been paying you and identify who’s been paying you the most and who has been with you the longest.

Put them on a list and call them up and say, “Hey, we appreciate you as a customer. You’re one of our best customers, and we just want to figure out how you’re using our tool.”

We have a process called the Deep Dive Interview Sheet; it’s the questions that you need to ask someone to figure out why they’re your best customer.

A few of the questions we ask are:

 “What was the problem you came to us to solve?”

“How much was that problem costing you in time, money, and resources?”

“What impact has our tool had on your business?”

“What is the biggest impact that you can see?”

What you’re looking for is customers who say that they cannot survive without your tool. They absolutely need it. Everything else they’ve tried hasn’t worked.

You’re trying to identify who your ideal customers are with these questions, and then your goal is to go find more of those people.

It sounds pretty obvious, right? If you just sit there and wait for a beautiful girl to come talk to you, it’s probably not going to happen. I know this from experience. But if you know who you want and you go looking for her, your chances are a lot higher of finding her.

The same concept applies to finding leads and increasing conversions.

Start a conversation with them and then move them into your funnel, which is your conversion process. You’re going to be able to grow much faster than if you depend completely on organic traffic.

So, let’s go back to the framework.

Identify who your best customers are. Look at why they’ve been around for so long. Then we find congregation points.

Where are they hanging out? What books are they reading? What people do they follow? What were the hot buttons that brought them in? Then we use those hot buttons (which are hooks) as a way to find more of those customers.

My strategy is called the Dream 100 Strategy. We find someone who already has built your audience, and then we put our product in front of them and get them to be advocates and integrate their product into their service.

You can do it one-on-one too. You can do it with ads, and you can do it pretty cheaply, too. Facebook is not the only way to advertise, there are other ways to get your product out there that are less expensive than Facebook.

With the right hook, you can bring the right person in and your goal is to be able to cover your costs quickly.

So anyways- quick recap!

Identify your best customers, find out where they hang out, find out what their hot buttons are, what are the things that attracted them to your product, use those hot buttons to attract more people, more ideal clients, and then bring those people in.

No offense to any of you who are just like gung-ho on organic traffic. But man, if you are only using organic traffic to grow your business, you’re eventually going to hit a point where you are no longer growing, or you’re just struggling.

This is where having a paid strategy or a scalable strategy (doesn’t necessarily need to be paid) needs to be a scalable growth strategy that allows you to bring in new customers- perfect customers- at will without having to depend on organic.

I hope that was helpful for you! We’ll see you later.