Turn on paid, with a payback rule
Paid works here and not earlier, because you finally know your real LTV and conversion rate.
Target: CAC payback < 12 months
Inside this
- Compute CAC payback and write the rule2h
One sentence that decides every future spend, before you spend anything.
- Defend your branded search8h
Cheap, high-converting, and it stops competitors buying the traffic you earned.
- Bid on competitor and alternative keywords10h
Point them at the alternative pages you built in Phase 2, not at the homepage.
- Retarget readers of your best pages10h
Warm, self-selected, and vastly cheaper than cold prospecting.
- Sponsor niche newsletters16h
Small lists with real trust beat large lists with none. Start with three.
- Boost the organic posts that already worked4h
The cheapest paid social there is, because the creative is pre-validated — as evidence, not as a guarantee. A post the feed carried to the right people can still fail cold against an audience the platform picks for you. On TikTok the mechanism is a Spark Ad: the creator generates a code on their own post and it runs as it is, under their name.
- Kill anything breaching the payback rule, monthly1h
Enforced without exceptions. This is the whole reason you wrote the rule down first.
- Run nine cold creatives built from the complaints you counted4h
Three angles from the top-counted complaints in Phase 1, three hooks each in their exact words, one ad set per angle. Enough to learn from, too few to split the budget into nothing.
- Raise the budget in steps and re-read the payback at each one1h
A profitable campaign at £100 a day is not the same campaign at £1,000. Watch the cost of the LAST pound you spent, not the average — the average stays healthy long after the margin has gone. On Meta a big enough budget change restarts the learning phase, so read each level only from that edit, once it has about 50 conversions behind it.
- Put an attribution partner in before the first paid install4h
Each ad network counts its own installs, and on iOS they arrive late and coarse. A mobile measurement partner is the one ledger that de-duplicates them across networks — without it the payback rule is reading the vendors’ own scorecards. Free plans exclude paid campaigns, so budget it with the ads.
- Send every ad to a page whose first screen repeats its promise2h
The click came for one sentence. If the hero says something else, the ad has paid for a visitor the page then loses. Where several angles share one page, its first screen carries the promise they all make — and Google rates the same fit as landing page experience.