B2C Marketing Tier List.

I write this blog post every day. Like a journal entry — stream of consciousness style. Usually ends up being about how I slept or my feelings or productivity or whatever.

But not today.

Today is about VALUE. Straight-up unadulterated utility. Answering the most important question: How do I do marketing and lead-gen for my B2C startup, Uptrends.ai

What tools, channels, and resources can you leverage to CULTIVATE ATTENTION, and how can you do it without spending money?

That’s the Golden Goose.

Creating a successful, sustainable startup is really three things: part idea, part development, and part part distribution (ie. getting it in front of people).

And these days — especially when it comes to B2C businesses — distribution is 90% of the battle. Especially as AI tools make it easier to build and ideate without technical skills. In the future the ONLY hard part of building a startup will likely be the distribution piece.

So here’s how I am doing it. I may not be the ultimate authority, but I spend most of my time working on this, and I’ve built an app to 25,000 users within the past few months. I’ve learned how it works, and importantly, what doesn’t work.

Beginner’s Guide to B2C Marketing in 2024

The first thing you must understand the channels: ie. the different mediums and vehicles by which people find you. These are how they break down

• Short-Form Video: vertical videos on TikTok, IG, YT, and now even X, LinkedIn

• Influencers/Creators: paying other people to post about your product

• Social Media Content: posting text/memes/engaging on X,IG,LinkedIn, Reddit

• SEO: structuring your website and content so that it shows up on Google

• Newsletters: opt-in email list you send content to on a recurring basis (like this)

• Paid Ads: running paid advertising (PPC, etc.) on Google, FB, X, etc.

• Partnerships: profit-sharing with another website/startup to cross promote

• Affiliates: paying users a commission for sharing your product with their friends

• Cold Email: emailing people who have not heard of you about your product

• Podcasts: going on podcasts or starting your own podcast.

The first important thing to understand is that these channels are not all created equal.

Sure, they all matter to some degree, but there is a power law at play here. A few of these will matter A LOT, others you could do without for now. It also depends a bit on your skill set and budget.

I would group these channels into the following priority buckets in 2024:

1. Cheat Codes: Short-Form Video, Influencers/Creators

2. Essentials: Social Media Content, SEO, Newsletter

3. Nice-To-Have: Paid Ads, Partnerships

4. Meh: Affiliates, Cold Email, Podcasts

Now again, this is based on my personal experience. I’ve spent some time ALL of these channels. There’s two factors when it comes to weighing the importance of any marketing channel: 1) Cost, and 2) Impact

Cost is how much time, effort, and or money it takes to do any given channel.

Impact is of course the return on investment, how many people you can reach with any given channel. Here’s why I’ve given each of them their ratings, and the tools I use to do them.

B2C Marketing Channels Cheat Sheet

Here’s what I think about each of these:

Short-Form Video: this is the greatest, most cracked cheat code in the history of mankind. Call it social media v3.0 — every single social media platform (including LinkedIn) is optimizing to shill one thing right now: short, vertical videos. Society is addicted to them. And they are relatively easy to make, the toughest part is figuring out the hook. All it takes is one viral one to change your life forever. F500 companies used to spend millions on Super Bowl commercials, now they pay Gen-Z interns to make TikToks for them (and the ROI is better!)

Influencers: this is essentially just short-form video but other people do it for you. It’s an amazing hack if you have the budget (or a product that influencers will shill for free access) — essentially convincing someone who already has a following and/or experience making videos to do the work for you. Can be costly, but we’ve seen some of our biggest growth days from influencer campaigns; biggest viral potential by far, but it’s not OWNED media.

Social Media Content: this is like using social v2.0 features — text, image, reposting, memes, and DM-ing people. Basically all the tools that social media had before short-form video became popularized. In many ways its still a great way to grow a following — it’s free, its viral. But it’s not as great as short-form; most platforms will prioritize short-form every day of the week over text. The platforms that do still weight text heavily (X, LinkedIn, Reddit) are simply harder to go viral on. It can be done, but harder

SEO: this is a long game, but in many ways can be the biggest MOAT. Some of the most successful websites have built their empires by dominating the SEO game. The problem is that it can take a loooooonnnggg time to see results (months, years), and it can be incredibly difficult to figure out some of the technical pieces of SEO. It’s something every website needs to be thinking about, but I wouldn’t put it on the top priority list right away.

Newsletter: controversial? maybe, but I’d argue essential. Email remains one of the last common-ground channels — not everyone is on Google, or X, or LinkedIn, or TikTok… but EVERYONE is in their email. And (almost) everyone has email notifications on their phone. Meaning that figuring out how to build a newsletter following can get you to the front of the line. It’s an owned audience, and it’s opt-in, both are great things. The down side compared to others above on this list is that there is limited viral potentail (it’s linear), and that inboxes can admittedy get crowded. Send spammy emails and your deliverability / reputation will forever be affected.

Let’s stop there for today… if you want to grow and scale a B2C app from scratch on a limited budget, you can pretty much do it all by simply focusing on those 6 items.

Tomorrow, I’ll share why the other 5 aren’t worth your time early on…

Peace,

Ramsey