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How I Increased My User-Registration Rate 2,800% in 4 Days With customers being the life blood of startups, getting people to know that your company exists is extremely challenging. Here is how I quickly overcame that hurdle.

By will binns Edited by Dan Bova

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It's really hard to get people that have no knowledge about your product or service to come to your website. Really hard. You're building something, you need it to get out there and gain traction in the market fast, and you can't wait months for your content-marketing campaign to start delivering returns. In fact, there's probably people in a garage somewhere building the same thing as you right now, and you can't let them beat you to the punch. You need something fast, and now. Hello, Facebook ads.
While Facebook ads can be expensive and some people may disagree with the "pay to play" strategy the social network pushes, in our situation, they were the quickest way to get traction early on for Shoplinkz -- a company I co-founded that gives people an easy way to keep all of the products they see online that they might potentially want to buy in one place. When we initially launched we were only receiving a handful of registrations per day, but after we implemented the following strategy our user-registration rate grew by over 2,800 percent in just four days.

1. Make sure your product is ready. Do you know what your minimum viable product is? Have you talked extensively with the people you want it to connect with in order to validate this? If not, consider taking a couple of steps back and making this a top priority. You only get one chance to make a first impression and Facebook ads can be very expensive if you don't already know this information.

2. Align with your business model. It's super important you know exactly what you want to achieve with your Facebook ads. How many signups or purchases? What's your breakeven point with "X" number? Does your cost of customer acquisition include a budget for what you want to spend on these Facebook ads? Any marketing dollars you spend have great potential to be a net loss and costly mistake for you if you don't know these answers.

3. Setup your landing page. This is the first thing a visitor is going to see, and it needs to be awesome. Fortunately, you don't need to reinvent the wheel putting this together. Unbounce and LeadPages are two excellent options with distilled solutions for exactly what you need to be doing. And make sure you have a very specific call to action included on this page, like signing up for an email newsletter.

Related: Business Still Not on Facebook? Get Up to Speed With These 4 Steps.

4. Call Facebook. This is perhaps one of the most overlooked steps that people take when running Facebook ads. Facebook has tiers of versatile experts that are there for one reason - make your campaign a success so that you return as a customer to spend more money. When you speak with a Facebook employee, be completely honest and detailed about what you want to achieve. Be blunt about your bottom line and what needs to happen to make this campaign work to deliver a return on your investment. Facebook will help you put together the right plays on their platform.

5. Test, measure and optimize. This is paramount to your campaign's success. Your goal here is to get click-throughs and conversions. For click-throughs, you need to put several different types of ads out there to determine what is going to drive the most traffic to your site. Click-throughs are achieved by efficiently targeting the demographic your ads will be shown to with the most optimal copy that will incentivize them to click. Conversions are achieved by expanding on this copy through the use of your landing page in order to ensure the site visitor takes the desired action you want to see. Facebook's Power Editor is an excellent tool for testing, measuring and optimizing your click-throughs, and Optimizely is great when it comes to testing, measuring and optimizing your conversions.

Increasing our site's user registration rate over 2,800 percent in just four days helped us secure traction early on, both externally with our customers and internally with our investors. When utilized correctly, Facebook ads can be a great tool to catalyze growth within your organization, too.
will binns

Bitcoin, Non-Profits and Startups.

Garland William Binns III is a former product manager at Cisco with other past experience working in and around globally distributed teams at Accenture and other technology firms. He has founded and exited multiple startups and is currently working with high technology surrounding the use of Bitcoin and other digital currencies.

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