Without customers, there can be no business. So how can you drive new customers to your startup or keep existing ones engaged? The answer is simple: Growth marketing.

As a growth marketer who has honed this craft for the past decade, I’ve been exposed to countless courses, and I can confidently attest that working is the best way to learn.

I am not saying you need to immediately join a Series A startup or land a growth marketing role at a large corporation. Instead, I have broken down how you can teach yourself growth marketing in five easy steps:

1. Setting up a landing page.
2. Launching a paid acquisition channel.
3. Booting up an email marketing campaign.
4. A/B test growth experimentation.
5. Deciding which metrics matter most for your startup.

In this second part of my five-part series, I will teach you how to set up a paid acquisition channel to drive online traffic and, ultimately, conversions (purchases) to a landing page. For the entirety of this series, we will assume we are working on a direct-to-consumer (DTC) athletic supplement brand.

Picking a paid acquisition channel

Even with the most premium product on the market, most consumers aren’t going to magically discover its existence on your website. This is where paid acquisition is most effective — educating and driving consumer interest in your products.

When deciding which paid acquisition channel to launch, there is one key aspect you must consider: your target demographic. Where are your target consumers spending their time online? Are they scrolling through TikTok or reading an article on LinkedIn? Once you can answer this question, it will make selecting the first channel to launch quite easy.

In the event that your target demographic is already on numerous acquisition channels, you can choose Facebook or Google as your first channel. These two platforms are considered the duopoly in paid acquisition and will be the best primer for learning how to manage paid social media and paid search channels.