[Issue 30] The Cold Traffic Conundrum

How to create a sustainable system for filling your top-of-funnel

[Photo by Cris Ovalle on Unsplash]

The Odysseus Files, Issue 30

Playing Your Own Game, Part 7

When You Should Prioritize New Traffic

Should you be focused on increasing your top-of-funnel traffic? 

To most small business owners, the answer is an emphatic yes. Lead gen & new customer acquisition sits at or near the top of biggest needs for most (like the 60% who listed finding new customers as their number one challenge in marketing their business in this survey). 

There are definitely seasons in your business where lead gen will be your top focus:

• When building a new audience (obviously) 

• When you need to get to critical mass to sell your first ads (if this is your predominant monetization strategy)

• When you only have one offer, so need a steady influx of new subscribers/leads to replace both previous customers & unsubscribes 

But, if you’re optimizing for sustainability using the Acropolis model, it’s possible to intentionally design seasons where lead gen takes a back seat. 

How is this possible?

The Myth of “Sustainable” Traffic

There is no sustainable traffic source. 

There. I said it. 

Think about it: Every single “discovery” channel sits outside your control. In today’s world, most of them are controlled by an algorithm. Even the ones that don’t (say, advertising in another creator’s newsletter) are vulnerable to unpredictable factors: 

• Will your message align with this particular audience at this particular moment?

• How many similar ads have they seen in this publication? Or how many other cross-promos or affiliate partnerships has this given creator done in the past? 

• Say you do find a well-performing traffic source: How long can you realistically promote there before saturating the audience and needing to move on? 

There are other sustainability issues as well: 

• Effective lead gen methods at a small level rarely maintain that effectiveness at scale

• Content-based traffic sources will always require a tug-of-war: do you dedicate a significant portion of your own time to content creation? Do you take a hit to your overhead & maybe even brand voice by bringing in help? Do you give AI a role? (If so, to what extent?)

• The popularity of any given traffic source is, ultimately, its downfall. The more competitive a source is, the less effective it becomes as consumers adjust to the increased noise

To take it a step further, say you could wave a magic wand and land on the perfect traffic source for you: one that is reliable, effective, affordable, not super time consuming, etcetera. Sounds like a gold mine, right? 

This will be the death sentence to your brand. 

Why? 

Because as soon as you become over reliant on a single source of anything in your business, you trade resilience for a false sense of security. 

Something will one day change, capsizing your traffic, and wiping out your business that got too comfortable. We’ve seen this happen over and over to online businesses dependent on a given algorithm. 

The struggle of fighting for your traffic and constantly adapting to a shifting environment helps build your resilience. (But too much struggle will sap your financial, time, and energy budgets to the point where you have nothing left to give.)

How do you get around this? 

Solving the Traffic Dilemma (Sustainably) 

Rather than focusing on identifying a mythical “sustainable” traffic source, you’re better off building a sustainable traffic system. 

Here’s what I mean: 

A traffic system is sustainable if it doesn’t require an ongoing (active) effort from you to generate traffic in order to keep your business going. 

In other words, you can have “down seasons,” where you don’t put a lot of effort into getting traffic, and your business will do just fine. You can complement these with “ramping up” seasons, where you lean into filling your top-of-funnel, when you are ready for a season of active growth. 

Example: we all know how hard it is to find a plumber, electrician, mechanic, or general contractor who is reliable and honest. When you DO find one, you know, because demand for their services is through the roof, all their new customers come from referrals, and they likely have to turn down/postpone a lot of new jobs because they’re spending all their time on billable work. 

How can we adapt this to our own businesses? 

Positioning. Positioning is owning an idea in the mind of your audience. Because of the way the mind simplifies the complex world around us, there can only ever be one link between an idea and the person/brand associated with it. 

(Example: “Google” and “search engine” are almost synonymous. This leaves competitor Bing constantly playing catch up. Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo opted to claim “privacy search engine.” This sub-category will never be as large, of course, but it gives them a moat to protect their business, unlike Bing.) 

The contractor example above demonstrates this on a very basic level: once one is associated with being honest and professional, the established trust prevents the customer from considering a competitor.   

What’s an idea you can claim and own? Once you’ve established this, you can retain customers easier and raise prices, both of which will insulate your margins against low-traffic seasons. 

Offers. Of course, retaining customers means providing a reason for them to keep coming back. Which means they need more to buy. But to sell more, you need to become embedded deeply enough in their journey that you can build offers to help them through each stage, naturally progressing them from one level to the next. 

A great example of this is Olly Richards’ StoryLearning brand, a $10 million ARR language learning company. StoryLearning’s offer structure is a progression of courses: a 101 level, then 201, etcetera. Once someone completes the highest level, they can then buy a certification program to teach using the StoryLearning framework. If someone goes all the way through this, their CLV (customer lifetime value) shoots through the roof, to several thousand dollars. 

Another approach to offer structure is selling something that needs to be bought over and over. Subscriptions are starting to run a little low on steam because of how much of our day-to-day lives have been reduced to this payment model. But there are plenty of product ideas for something that is consumable and has to be purchased on an ongoing basis. 

Increasing average CLV has another benefit: it means you can spend more to acquire a customer. 

When you’re ready to top up your top-of-funnel with fresh traffic, you can focus on prioritizing high quality traffic (by paying a premium price). 

Russel Brunson, founder of ClickFunnels, popularized the idea that the key to winning the lead gen game is being able to spend more to acquire a customer than your competitors. 

(Even if your focus is organic, content marketing-driven, this might look like investing in higher quality production across more media, delivering the impression that you’re everywhere.)

More available ad dollars also gives you the flexibility of investing in brand awareness marketing. This can dramatically increase the leverage within the rest of your marketing efforts.  

Customer Experience. Finally, when you’re less focused on front-end customer acquisition, it means you have more time to deliver an amazing customer experience. Whatever the experience you create looks like (refer back to issue 19 for ideas on how to build this out), this is about serving your customers at a higher level. 

The effect? More customer loyalty + more word-of-mouth - the gold standard in marketing. 

You can see how these three categories create a flywheel effect between them: 

• Referrals complement your brand marketing while directly feeding your top-of-funnel. 

• Customer experience reinforces your positioning, which helps drive customer retention and increase average CLV. 

• Better positioning allows you to charge more; combined with a higher CLV, you have more resources to shovel into driving traffic. 

Above all, optimizing for these three things means you can be traffic source-agnostic: you’re adaptable and can jump to whichever traffic source is getting you the best results at any given time. You’re not dependent on a single source, but instead can spread across multiple channels and tactics, increasing your resilience. You can afford to invest in sources that are more expensive/harder to leverage, giving you a competitive edge (because of reduced competition). 

And, when one source changes, becomes saturated, or starts failing in some other way, it doesn’t affect you. Drop it and move on. 

This approach is harder and takes longer than 99% of creators and entrepreneurs are willing to put up with. It’s for the “grownups” in the room, not those chasing the latest tactic, trend, or tech. All of which means the potential payoff is huge. 

Want help implementing any of these in your business? Hit “reply” and let’s talk. 

P.S. - The next few issues will go deeper into how to apply these concepts. Stay tuned….