Marketing Strategy for Startups

You have built a great product / service line, and now you need to work out a marketing strategy to get customers. How do you plan ?

Various sales / marketing / promotional channels are available at your disposal, some of which are more influential than others, namely:

• Walk-in
• Cold calls
• Workshops
• eMails
• Website Contact Forms
• Social Media Promotions
• Print, Electronic and Broadcast Media
• Community / CSR activities
• Promotional / Sponsored Events etc.

An effective marketing strategy combines one or more, preferably all, of the above, and more if any, into an automated centrally manageable process that maximizes the individual yields while minimizing the overall time and resources spent. This requires constant feedback, monitoring and control of the execution, with the underlying plans being agile and responsive to the ever changing needs.

An effective strategy that any startup, or even established organizations for that matter, can employ in this age of online societies and digital communications is:

1. Generate leads based on the Intent analysis (such as queries, mentions, wishlist monitoring ) in (near) real-time. These are your readily-approachable customers, since the interest (in your product/service area) is coming from them, rather than you initiating the prospect, which means you have higher rate of success in conversion.
2. Implement AB testing methods to get the pulse of your audience on which channel they are likely to receive and which methods or promotion (gift coupons, promotional offers ..) are more effective.
3. Monitor the conversion rate across different channels and prioritize presence on the relevant channels, cutting down on the others. This reduces waste and helps in focusing your efforts.
4. Predict the sale-leads, conversion and turn-around time for orders based on historical trends for each dealer and cross-correlate it with the customer-satisfaction (CSAT) ratings to optimize the process cycle times and cut down costs.
5. Keep the customers engaged with your social presence and continuous stream of relevant and useful information about what they can expect from you even beyond post-order completion.
6. Profile the customers to identify the classes (e.g. regular vs luxury vehicle owners) and build recommendation engines that increase personalized value-add to each.
7. In case of Retail or businesses that involve supply-chains, combine your Logistics (GIS) with the sales leads to drive sales to the nearest / best-rated dealer. While having a large distributor network is good, you also need to put your best foot forward, when it comes to reaching out to your prospective customers.
8. Not all dealers are equal. Identify the capability gaps in the coverage for dealers and provide means for new dealers to take part in the business or have the existing dealers extend their services.
9. Rank the dealers based on user feedback analysis, inventory capability, maintenance IRT and tie it with the premium / commission, wherever possible. There should not be any ambiguity when it comes to letting everyone know what you, as a business, value most.

The role of Data Analytics in this cannot be overstated. Starting from AB testing to using the recommendation engines, the data science principles play an important role in offering the insights into the nature of your customers, future of your business and the overall dynamics that is binding and governing all these entities together.

Please feel free to write to me for a free consultation on how your business can benefit from the Data Science, Predictive Analytics, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence and other emerging new technologies.

GK Palem is a CTO for Hire, Consulting CTO for MVP Building, CTO for Startups, offering CTO as a Service, Virtual CTO, CTO Advisory Services, Blockchain Consultant, Artificial Intelligence, IOT, Open Source, CarMusTy, CFugue, C/C++ Music Library, Carnatic Music, Song, Data Science, Notation, MIDI, Typesetting, PDF, Books, Maya, Visual Effects, DirectX, OpenGL, Simulation, Predictive Analytics, Big Data, M2M Telematics, Predictive Maintenance, Condition-based Maintenance, Research, Cryptography, Distributed Ledger, Mentor, Marketing-Strategy.