Scaling Badi through digital channels: the user acquisition challenge.
Working in a startup is one of the most exciting and rewarding experiences that could allure someone looking for a disrupting professional challenge — it’s indeed a bit of rally racing, rough and daredevil but breath-taking and extremely enjoyable at the same time.
Leaving your comfort zone to uplift your professional skills to the next level, treating the company you work for as your own and taking on a role of an equal powerful pawn of a flat-hierarchy chessboard, is something that I take pride saying sounds household to me and all of my peers at Badi. After almost two years since on-boarding indeed, getting ease at doing things I have never done and taking on the concept of if I already know it’s gonna work, it’s too late, are surely the lines that best sum up what is like working here.
Embracing this change rests assure to be something you can never grow tired of. From my perspective, the excitement is doubled. Both a start-up entrepreneurship model and online marketing have been recent game-changers that marked a turning point in today’s global business and being at the forefront of this revolution makes you never look behind to way-back-when. Build things that must work, market the product from zero to hero against tight deadlines or constrained budgets and constantly reshape your work asset to relentless growth can be though as exciting as daunting.
The Demand-Supply Balance
When you are called to market any product, you realise it’s you (your brand, values, and solutions) and them (the users, their needs and expectations to be fulfilled) — at Badi, we are on a mission to make them meet in the most successful, smooth and resolutive way. While, to the most, digital marketing only aims to satisfy the latter segment, it really equally clings to both. In the digital era indeed, with so many fierce competitors, innovative solutions and a limited supply of valuable users, if you can’t sex up your product to the hilt around captivating USPs and build strong emotional connections with your audience you are immediately out of the game.
As our platform also serves as a connective vehicle between external agents with a specific need, marketing Badi is even more challenging for at least two reasons.
1. The marketplace has a lower retention compared to other demand-supply players (Amazon; Uber; Deliveroo). Room Seekers and non-professional listers need to be paired up in the quickest time possible and when this happens they are out of the play for at least 6 months, meaning that the users turnover needs to be as consistent as replaceable.
2. The user acquisition must be pivoted through a holistic approach. By serving each other’s purpose, supply and demand are intrinsically connected. It takes a linear growth on both sides to maintain a healthy balance in the marketplace because whenever this may fall short on either side, the problem will manifest on both of them.
Millions of different people with the same specific need
That being said, putting a groundbreaking and digital native product such as Badi on the business table implies that you need to grow it at double speed than any other if you want to rub elbows with your consolidated competitors, meaning you are on the hunt for impactful volumes from day one.
At this point there aren’t many options other than being where the highest volume of potential and qualified customers are. Acquiring users and becoming viral (not to hinge your dependancy on paid acquisition forever) are the pillars of your success.
Unless you have a niche customer base, Paid Search, Social and SEO embrace pretty much all your needs at an early stage. For their sophisticated targeting capabilities, affordable costs and powerful resonance, Google and Facebook easily stand out in the competition of users growth providers.
The upside of Badi is moving in an ecosystem that is anything but a niche. With a valuation of $217 trillions, the real estate market is said to represent the largest commodity in the world. We live in an era where the demand for urban housing is overwhelming supply, globalization has put millions of people on the move to chase better social conditions and adapt to a more liquid lifestyle whether we like it or not, a belief in a shared economy may not be what started it but living the shared economy may be its solution.
Given this background, offering a trustworthy, digital, and fast responsive product that demands to re-shape the room rental market, gives us the opportunity to cluster millions of different people under one specific need.
Data-driven Marketing as the way to go
However, one of the biggest limitations is that digital user acquisition platforms such as Google and Facebook are strongly dependant on high levels of user reach — data and advanced signals are more accurate proportionally to the volumes they can gather.
Driving online acquisition by targeting limited geo-locations (the proper cities of Barcelona, Madrid, London, Berlin and New York in our case) makes it hard to generate the right volumes of delivery to seamlessly scale up and move fast.
When those channels experience an inflection point by biting off more than they can chew, then it’s time to acquire more visibility, and new opportunities are to be sought by amplifying the marketing reach. Before you can shift your focus to retention, you probably still need to broaden your scope and weigh up the pros and cons of all the possibilities at your disposal. While this represents a big opportunity it’s also a hard challenge.
The marketing mix indeed offers a range of solutions that can be as resolutive as crafty. While digital attribution is still a bit of a grey area, some smaller channels can provide an incremental exposure that doesn’t necessarily convert into business outcomes. Affiliate marketing is a great option as there’s nothing to lose, still anything but transparent. Other more traditional channels such as OOH and TV are really top of mind and can come in handy in terms of leveraging brand awareness, but can’t be transformed into proper DR vehicles just yet.
Data analytics at this point is the strategic addition that will help you maximize your performance impact and process a broad range of different touchpoints into a proper a user persona to help you ramp up.
If the secret of an ever-growing product is to be as flexible as possible in order to constantly reinvent itself to keep fulfilling its purpose, the key of online acquisition is to catch and transform users’ behaviours and needs into marketing outcomes and adapt its strategy accordingly in order to gain incremental value.
