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Then there have been projects where I did not succeed in marketing/PR – tripnaksha.com and hitchhikingindia.com – I have learned from these too. In each of the successful projects I mentioned, the objectives and target audience was very different and hence the approach we used was different too.

I like to say that when you don’t have money, you are forced to get creative. It is not very hard to hire a PR professional or a marketing agency, but most of the projects I was involved with have been bootstrapped where money was in short supply and there always was a more important purpose for the money we did have. Make no mistake though, free PR/marketing does not mean free of time or effort, or as one of my favourite authors says – TAANSTAFL (there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch). It is always a good idea to evaluate what you have less – time or money, and decide which you can afford to spend.

Online

If you are a company with customers across the world and hardly any local customers, you would be better off concentrating on online activities. Online is generally cheaper too.

1. Own blog and Bloggers

Starting a blog is easy, maintaining it is not. But having an active, meaningful blog can be extremely beneficial. The trick is to not sell your product all the time – people are easily put off by that. Instead talk about the industry you operate in, write case studies of how your customers benefitted by using your product, talk about other products that complement your product and so on. Take the example of wmpu.org – this site is related to wpmudev.com which sells wordpress plugins, themes, etc. The blog frequently talks about plugins other than their own and their posts are often at the top of Google search results when you query for plugins for a particular purpose.

Another way to keep your blog active is to publish interviews with other folks/startups, etc related to your work and vice versa. Not only are you now reaching a new audience, you are also building traffic to your website. You also make good connections in your industry.

2. Twitter

Most people think twitter is good only if you engage with people and talk to them. True. But it also takes a lot of effort and dedicated resources to maintain an active twitter profile. As a scrappy startup, you can partly solve this problem with an automated feed – setting it up will require careful thought though.

Twitter is also a great way to make connections. If you already have an active profile on twitter, use it to talk to people. These days, everyone is on twitter – celebrities, editors, journalists, PR professionals. Talk to the people relevant to your field of interest, this way you don’t force yourself to tweet inanities and not look like a spammer. Also, please don’t stalk, it’s not cool. 

3. Customers and Clients

One of the best kinds of publicity is when your customers talk about you. When I started GoUNESCO, there were less than 10 participants. These folks wrote about the challenge on their blogs and the next few people joined after reading these blogs. Although I would have preferred having all the experiences of the participants on the main website, I did not discourage participants from writing the main article on their blog and then linking to it from the GoUNESCO website. The first newspaper article came through because a friend spoke to the reporter she knew.

This will work great even if you are a B2B player. Ask your happy customers to write you a testimonial and put it up on their website or blog. That speaks many volumes more than a testimonial you put on your website.

4. Linkedin Answers, Quora, Forums

It is surprising how few people use Linkedin to its potential. Linkedin is not just a place to add connections, it can be a very powerful way to build your personal brand. Linkedin Answers especially is an incredibly powerfull way to build reputation in your industry. For a B2B startup, this can be one of the most powerful tools available. Think about it, you have a whole bunch of professionals and decision makers in one place and you get to solve their problems. Also, display the depth of your knowledge and insights. This can be the start point for building new partnerships and even getting customers.

I believe Quora can be used in a similar fashion, but I cannot comment on it as I have never used it much. For folks purely into technology (not just startups but developers too), contributing answers to Github, StackOverflow, Serverfault can be a great way to build reputation. Contributing to open source software also proves your technology prowess. You do not need to look far for an example.

Agiliq, a tech services startup I know in Hyderabad does not even have a sales team, their entire team tech gets them all their sales leads – because of their contribution to free and open source software.

5. Social Sharing

You might have noticed that I have not mentioned Facebook at all till now. While I truly believe that enabling and encouraging social sharing is great, I am not taken by the number of fans a brand’s Facebook page has. Many brands spend time, money and effort building an audience (getting likes) and then end up paying more money trying to reach this audience (noticed the promote your post  link on FB admin pages?). And for what – sending traffic to Facebook? I would rather have customers share links to my website on their walls and get people to come to my website. This word of mouth, in my opinion, is much more valuable than a brand pushing silly updates on their wall and hoping they will be like or shared by people. 

Offline

1. Newspapers

It feels great to see your picture or a mention about your startup in the newspaper, doesn’t it? Newspapers are great if your target audience is local and are regular people. If your audience is more specialized, you would be better off getting written about in industry specific or technical publications. Many publications and newspapers publish email addresses of the authors, you can start by noting down the contacts of the folks whose articles are relevant to you. Trust me, everyone is looking for interesting content – the quality of silly news being covered (especially t.v) should give you a good indication of that.

Write to these folks and see if they would like to mention you or write about you. You cannot control what the reporter writes, it is your responsibility to make sure they understand what exactly you do. Try not pitching your product or trying to hog the limelight, instead talk about the effect your product has had on your customers, give examples, testimonials and share contacts of your customers. Media wants a human angle in everything they publish, and rightly so – give it to them.

Once you have appeared in enough publications, you can hope that you will be asked for opinions, quotes about issues relevant to your industry. This is free publicity too.

2. Endorsements

An endorsement by a stalwart or an established person in your area can go a long way in helping you gain trust of your customers. For GoUNESCO, I was lucky to be endorsed by folks very active in heritage and conservation, even celebrities like Swanand Kirkire. Of course, you have to give them enough reason to and they should really like or be convinced of your idea. Celebrity users works very well too, as you would have seen in the case of twitter.

3. Awards and Recognition

Industry awards and recognition help building your brand and can gain customers’ trust. Keep on the lookout for relevant ones and apply. It does take some effort, but many times is worth it.

Connections

Everything you have read till now can be superceded if you have the right connections. Most of us are not born with the right connections, but we can work towards getting to know the right people. This may mean staying active socially, joining activity groups, and so on. You can use Linkedin too to reach the right person you should pitch an idea to. In my experience, helping someone before asking for a favor works most times. Always be ready to help, and stay good.

What are your tips to get PR and marketing done on the cheap?

About the author:

Ajay Reddy is the founder of the GoUNESCO Travel Challenge. After an Electrical Engineering degree from NIT, Jaipur, he worked at Infosys Technologies for 4 years before starting on his own. He is a long distance runner and loves adventure travel too.

Running a startup is one of the most amazing, exciting, diverse and satisfying experience one could have in a short span of time. It keeps you on your toes and helps you learn something new every day. One of the key challenges with any organization (unless you are some government funded defence project) is limited resources and to decide on a key question : how to best utilize these limited resources?

In case of startups it is certainly much more difficult a challenge to say the least for obvious reasons, more so when decision making is to be done between weather to allocate funds to next big feature you want to release or build your brand in the market.  The investment needed in traditional marketing instruments (TV, radio, newspapers, hoarding etc) can be overwhelming for small companies like ours. Unless funded, normally startup have to shy away from such big investments on marketing. This creates a chicken and egg situation, how to get more customers without branding, and how to get funds for branding unless you have enough customers.

Just like all of you, we have faced this questions many times, and we still face the dilemma every other day. We have applied some strategies (explained below), which has worked quite well for us so far.

• Use the social media. In this age of internet;  Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Linkedin are really superb tools. Almost 70 to 80% of our target audience is connected to one of these mediums and number of likes / followers, subscribers helps you build a lot of credibility, among your targeted community. 

• Start a Blog. And make a point to keep it updating it with happenings in your company, your domain and about your progress. If you are genuine, you will soon find genuine followers. If possible also ensure a periodic update (possibly a newsletter or mailer) about happenings in your eco system goes to all your prospects. 

• There are so many startup circles / facilitator / incubator / weekend events and these are great source of mentorship, ideas and networking. Stay active, participate and you will soon find your network is worth million bucks of marketing spend. 

• One of the traditional (atleast by standard of technology) yet quite affordable medium is Search Engine Marketing. Given almost everybody uses search engines to find what they are looking for, the leads thus generated are generally of good quality. We have found Google ad words very effective for our business. It is affordable, easy to learn and master and you can control it yourself without help of so called “professional experts”. You can also try Linkedin premium, Yahoo! and other such options. 

• No publicity is better than your clients speaking for you. This comes with a rider though; you have to be really delivering on your promise.  If you can make them your referrer, job is 70% done. One little point to remember here, you need to keep hinting/reminding your happy clients to provide you with referrals, quotes and other such helps, they generally don’t remember these on their own. 

• If your business is something like ours where long and deep negotiations are unavoidable. You may want to try and check if your prospects will consider mentioning you in their more expensive media (traditional so to say) campaigns. This will create a win-win for both the parties. 

• Build relationship with media, reporters, bloggers, writers, news website, print media. They need you as much as you need them. So long as your story is not made up and they see a merit in it, they will help you spread a word about you. 

Every business is different and so are the needs and means to build your brand. Try one or more of these to see if it fits your startup, or you can devise your own strategies.

A word of caution –my entire narration is based on experience I had working and owning the marketing strategy for www.homebuy360.com, so you know what I mean !!

P. Krishnakumar, Dell India

YS:  What does Dell classify as SMB?

KK: Our classification is on done the basis of number of employees a business has. So small business would be companies having between 10-99 employees, medium business is 100-999 and then we have SoHos which have between 2-9 employees.

YS: How does Dell market to SMBs? When did you start?

KK: We started focusing on entrepreneurs since 2008, when we realized that as an opportunity. We saw companies in India going outside and acquiring companies. Technology and social media was scaling up. Entrepreneurs wanted to be successful not just in their city or country, but were looking for opportunities across the globe and markets. So we decided to see how technology can solve their business problems.

As part of the journey we did a lot of research and came across some common challenges. The main challenge was that entrepreneurs always had the constraint of finances and predictability of cash flow. The second challenge, was in terms of talent, finding the right talent whom they can retain. And the third was, they knew very well about their own business, but were not too sure if they could use technology effectively to leapfrog their business.

We went deeper into this problem to understand how people looked at technology. Some looked at it purely as a cost and therefore not upgrading technology, because they were asking what do I get in return for the investment. They looked at it as a cost centre. Some looked at it as a business enabler. So these business were happy to use technology and wanted to know what are the right kind of investment to be done. Then there were others who were using technology to leap frog their business. Their business had nothing to do with technology space, but they were using technology to improve efficiencies.

Based on these insights we thought how can we engage with them better? Until 2008, Dell always interacted directly with customers. But we changed our method for SMBs. Around the same time, in 2007, we also set up our factory in India. SMBs dont have too much cash, but when they want to make a purchase, we wanted to be sure we could service the demand. Secondly we setup our distribution channel, so that customers could touch and feel the product, see the product and get it at short notice if they want to buy it immediately.

As we went through this over the last couple of years, we realized this was not enough. From IT investment point of view, most entrepreneurs were relying on channel partners for recommendation of IT, on what investments they should make. The challenge was entrepreneurs have money and want to invest in technology, but they are not sure if the investment they are making in IT infrastructure is right or not. They don’t want to invest disproportionately that it becomes more expensive when they scale up.

We started educating the SMBs and telling them about technology, how it can be scaled, how cost of ownership can be kept low. We also brought in Vostro, our range of products that’s been made specially for small business.

We conduct a lot of road shows, about 18-20 every quarter in Tier 2-3 cities.  We participate directly as Dell or with a financial institution to educate SMBs about the various opportunities available from technology and financial point of view. We directly touch about 1,000 customers per quarter.

YS: How has your strategy of engaging channel partners to reach SMBs helped you?

KK: It is very important. Say you are starting a company and have 15 employees, but for 15 – 20 people you will not have an IT person in your office. If something goes down, you want someone who can take care of the problem and fix it. Most SMBs have outsourced their IT maintenance to a third-party, who comes to their office and can fix any problem that may arise. So it could a network printer that needs fixing or a computer issue that has to be resolved.

This third-party service provider is someone the entrepreneur trusts and relies on for most IT advice. We have tied with a large number of such IT providers to help reach these entrepreneurs. We also provide training to these people. So these SMBs can be told about our products and the benefits by their own IT service provider. If an entrepreneur wants to talk to us directly, we have no problem. But we want to give them as many options as possible to reach us.

YS: Did Dell undertake any research before targeting the SMB segment?

KK: Yes, we did that at a global level and also did on-ground research in India, China and US. We also used our online portal Idea Storm, where we encouraged users and small biz to come with ideas and what features they would like to see in the product. That encourages people to come and give us ideas and based on that we come up with products and solutions they want.

YS: How do you market to SMBs?

KK: We do the road shows, that I spoke about earlier. We track all the leads and enquiries we get at these shows for six months and about 20-30% of the leads get converted. We also have a Linkedin platform that we use to engage with small businesses. Its called ‘More Growth’ and currently we have 22,000 members in the group.

YS: How is the SMB business  growing for Dell?

KK: It’s the fastest growing segment for us, not just in India but even from global point of view it’s the fastest. Dell is the only IT company which has stated publicly how we are going to focus on the SMBs and how we are going to help them grow. There is an overlap between small and medium business and that would be about 25-28%. This is roughly about one-third of our business that comes from the space.

YS: In the SMB space, which cities in India are growing fastest for Dell?

KK: I cannot give you city-wise breakup. But from an SMB perspective, the business and opportunity for us is coming from the Tier 1 & Tier 2 cities, where we are seeing the growth and maximum benefit from the adoption of technology. There are specific cities within that, where for example there is a concentration of IT services, like say Bangalore, and these cities are important. But overall if you see, the growth is happening from Tier 2-3 cities.

preethi@yourstory.in

Last week online furniture and home décor store Pepperfry.com raised fresh funds worth US$ 8 million from Norwest Venture Partners (NVP). The funds raised will be used to strengthen Pepperfry’s leadership position in the furniture, home and living segment. Pepperfry.com is looking to widen its merchant reach, expand fulfillment operations and invest in improving its brand presence across media. But this change of strategy comes after a lot of research and behind-the-scene number crunching.

When they started in September 2011 their focus was clearly the lifestyle space. So that presented an opportunity to sell shoes, apparel, furniture, home décor, jewellery, healthcare products and so on. But some purchase behavior analysis of customers buying from the site, made Pepperfry realize that a bulk of the purchase was happening in the furniture and home decor space and only 20% purchases were coming from others. Further deep diving showed them, that customers buying these products were people in the early stages of their household life, who were comfortable buying online, didn’t like what that was available offline and so on. “When we looked at the size of the furniture & home category, it is a $24 billion market. Therefore we decided to sharpen our focus and bring in more variety of items under a category that was anyways working for us,” says Ambareesh Murty, founder and CEO of Pepperfry.com of the change in strategy.

Ambareesh Murty

Pepperfry.com today has over 4000 pieces of furniture they sell through the site in partnership with over 1000 merchants. However the site does not keep any stock, but works with merchants who can even fulfill small orders from their customers. The site also sells office-related items, white goods like toasters and products in laundry and housekeeping. Going forward they have plans to offer services of carpentry, plumbing, electrician, etc – in line with their vision to be the one-stop shop for anything related to a home.

The startup has fulfillment centers across the country they rely to fulfill customer orders. Currently their centers are located in Mumbai, Delhi and Jodhpur and by the end of this year their centers in Bengaluru, Kolkata and Madurai will be functional.

The fresh funds will also be used to improve the marketing and advertising presence of Pepperfry. Ambareesh understands the cut-throat world of eCommerce and wants to ensure they have enough mindshare among customers to stand out in the clutter.

The startup has a team of 150 employees based across different offices in the country. Ambareesh says they have been lucky to get the right kind of people: “we are not the best pay masters and there is a lot of work we do, but all I can say is we’ve been lucky.” Ambareesh thanks his stars and attributes this good luck to some divine intervention from up above. Even the senior management at Pepperfry are a diverse mix. Their CTO has come from Zapak and the product head is an ex-Alibaba employee. Kashyap Vadapalli who recently joined the portal as the chief marketing officer, comes from eBay and had earlier worked with Google and Tata Interactive Systems.

The portal has also redone its logo to make the connect to home and heart more obvious.

preethi@yourstory.in

This article is a part of the series of articles on “Marketing for Startups” from Srihari Palangala who is the Country Marketing Manager at Adobe India. Read the first two posts in the series-

What Startups need to focus on While Marketing

Necessary Elements of Digital Marketing for Startups

Continuing with the series, this post focuses on Positioning – and how B2B startup ventures might consider thinking about it. In the slide deck below, I have shared my thoughts on B2B positioning:

- What your marketing message should convey

- Whom to target with your messaging

- How to effectively reflect your marketing message and positioning

Do drop in your challenges/thoughts around positioning and marketing your product/services in the comments…

This article is a part of The Pune Startup Pulse. Please take the survey to contribute.

Nilesh Bhojani and Unmana Datta are the founders of Markitty, an online marketing company.  Involving himself in the startup events in Pune organized by Pune Open Coffee Club (POCC), Nilesh was That Lonely Man to start off with but slowly he became embroiled in the system and then decided the implement the idea of Marketing Office Hours in late October 2012.

The concept was simple: Bootstrapping start-ups need marketing advice but usually don’t have a budget for this. Markitty took up the initiative via which startups could book a two hour slot and get free consultation. Here, Nilesh shares some thoughts from this 5 month long experiment with 20+ businesses…

1. Don’t use the community as a sales tool

We were not out there to sell. It helped create the much needed trust between a marketing consultant and business owner, and we had healthy and detailed conversations. These conversations had insights that we might not have got if it were a sales meeting.

While end goal of all networking efforts is to make profit of some kind, it’s important to not use a community as a sales channel. This applies to not just start-ups and tech communities but also to social media – your twitter, facebook or linked in communities. If your sole objective is to sell your product or service, you will harm not just your own reputation but also that of the community.

2. Create Value- Contribute in any way you can

Continuing from the first point, contribute to the community you want to be part of. There are many ways of adding value – you don’t have to be in the organizing committee to do that. Reach out to the people who are running things and they would be more than happy to get a helping hand.

Find things you can do well – we knew that we would not be able to help much with organizing community events and we like more focused conversations than open ended gatherings. Office hours gave us that opportunity and filled an important gap.

3.Respect others and their time, and they will reciprocate

We hadn’t worked with Indian clients earlier and had heard not so positive experiences from friends who did. Starting out, we weren’t sure what to expect- even small things like turning up on time for the meeting.

We prepare for each meeting in advance, prepare our notes and set up calender requests for the meeting. And our clients didn’t give us a chance to complaint either. Except in one case where a client cancelled the meeting at the last minute, all our meetings started on time and any one who couldn’t make it informed us in advance.

4. There is nothing wrong in following processes

We had decided in the beginning that we will only offer this to small business and meet the founder/owner, not a marketing/sales person. Anyone interested in booking a session needs to fill up our questionnaire and then only then do we offer them a slot.

This helped us in collecting the required information in advance and made the discussions more productive. There must have been some people who didn’t apply because of this process, but that’s probably good for them as well as for us.

Not just for marketing, now free consultation is available for a number of different areas due to the efforts of POCC organizers and willingness of the community to contribute. While there is probably a long way to go before Pune can compete with Bangalore or other international start-up hubs, this gives me hope that it’s not a matter of if but only when.

Note: This is the third article in the 7 part series on social media contributed by Xerago. First article here

Cynicism is sometimes a good quality, a quality important to a marketer. It makes one question things. Take the entire hoopla over social media marketing, for instance. Instead of getting dizzy over everything that social media can do for businesses, it might be a good idea to start with knowing what the medium cannot do.

Presence doesn’t equal popularity:

Merely creating an account isn’t all that it takes to be popular on social networks. Alternately, effort that is invested in social media almost always doesn’t pay off pronto. It’s the classic case of slow and steady winning the race.

Plan, plan, plan

As fun as getting on social media sounds, be assured that it is all serious business just like any other part of your marketing efforts. It requires focused strategy, consistent effort and careful tracking.

Not a one-stop solution

Social media marketing is great for getting word-of-mouth promotions out but it can’t really perform magic. Expecting the medium to miraculously turn ineffective products or services into fantastic ones is a fairytale possibility that doesn’t translate to real life.

Not a stand-alone process

While social media marketing is likely to make a difference to your overall marketing efforts, it can’t completely replace marketing and PR practices altogether. It works best as an ancillary support medium rather than a comprehensive marketing plan by itself.

Not a recruitment channel

One interesting trend with social media has been the increase in announcements about job opportunities. But hoping that social media will take over the recruitment function entirely is plain silly. At best, social media can help spread the word about the opportunities and establish initial contact with prospective candidates. The conversation then needs to be taken offline to close the deal or reject it.

Not a contest that can be rigged

So someone has told you that it’s not very difficult to garner ‘likes’ and ‘followers’ since they can all be purchased. Well, maybe but what you then need to ask yourself is – if the product/service is not inherently likeable, what is the point in paying money and creating a façade? How exactly do you expect that to help your business?

Not all about customer service

You might have heard horror stories of how companies who ignored complaints on social networks and had their reputation take a big beating. There are also stories and instances of clever and wonderful ways of providing customer service via the social medium. But here’s the catch – merely having proactive customer service online isn’t going to radically change life around for your business.

Not a great booster of sales

The biggest naivety that most people indulge in is the belief that social media marketing can directly and magically boost sales. Case in point being the social sales numbers generated for IBM. The technology giant found out that shoppers who were referred by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube generated only a .34 percent of all online sales on the occasion of Black Friday. This was a decrease of more than 35 percent since 2011.

Wisen up!

• Building your content strategy for digital marketing
• Must have, good to have and nice to have elements of your digital marketing mix
• Challenges you are likely to face as you roll out digital marketing tactics and approaches you could try to address them
• What your digital marketing dashboard should look like
• Balancing digital and offline marketing

Would love to hear from you and what you are seeing on your digital marketing endeavors in your businesses!

From my experience, here are a few do’s and don’ts at these events:

1. Reach on (or before) time

This is simply for the reason that early on in the event is when people are most fresh and open to making connections. By the end, most of them are tired of saying the same thing over and over again to different people and usually not in a very talkative mood. Also, if you happen to be the one who is making a presentation, it is always a good idea to get a feel of the place.

2. Keep your cards handy

Not everyone you meet would remember your name and/or your startup. Carry a business card. It is easy and cheap to get them printed. And instead of shoving it in the hands of everyone you meet, politely ask if they would like your card. A little politeness always goes a long way.

3. Don’t be hesitant

Chances are, that the person across the room is feeling as hesitant to come up and say hello to you as you are. We are not trained to go up and say hello to perfectly random strangers. So, don’t be shy, bring a smile on your face, say hello and extend a hand to the person you want to talk to. If nothing else, you would have eased some poor person’s nerves.

4. Don’t stalk

You want to talk to THAT guy. He is known to make deals on the spot. You think that if only you get a chance to pitch to him, you are set for your life. I am not saying that’s not possible. But, just take it easy. Don’t keep following someone around the room. Give them their space and time. Remember, some of them have to do it day and night. Just wait for them to finish up their conversation before introducing yourselves.

5. Respect other people’s time / listen

We entrepreneurs are passionate people. And it is very easy for us to go on ranting about our startup to someone else. But remember that the purpose of these events is not to convince someone to sign a deal – instead, it is an introduction to what hopefully becomes a long and fruitful relationship. Also, give the other person some time to speak, you never know what they might say that could help you. Be a better listener than the talker.

6. Don’t get drunk (yes!)

Let us be honest here, free alcohol is one of the best things about these events. It’s easy to cross the limit of happy high and insanity. The idea of alcohol is to loosen you up and make it easier for you to talk to strangers. But please don’t overdo it. This sounds too obvious but happens way too often.

7. Follow Up

This is perhaps the most important part of your communication. Don’t miss out on following up with all those you have networked at an event. Be quick and your recall will be higher.

Do share some of the tips that have worked for you…

About the author:

Mayank Jain is the Co-Founder of Musicfellas (www.musicfellas.com) – Discover indie music, Support the artists you love and Buy their music legally. Artists get 70% of what you pay. When not at Musicfellas office, Mayank can be found playing Snooker or hanging out at coffee shops.

1. Positioning:

It is important to clearly establish in the minds of customers/users what your product/service offer is, and how it is different from directly competitive and other related/adjacent products in the space. In order to position, dedicate every effort to establish the sweet spot and differentiators for your product among your core audiences. Clearly articulate where the product/service fits in with user workflows, and communicate the value (more than features, value) it offers to users. Establish and drive home a unique compelling position and differentiation case for your product. Your website, blog, social presence, early customer references/wins and collateral should clearly lead and reinforce this unique positioning.

2. “Quick Spin” Trial Experience:

If you position well, people will want to take a ‘quick spin’ of your service/product. Make it really simple and easy so prospects can take a test drive without much of a hassle and see some quick indicative results. For example, if it is a software product – make it easy to download and install (self-serve if possible), if it is a service, consider offering a basic free service (either time expiry or limited by features). The experience should reinforce your positioning and it offers the opportunity for word of mouth/viral amplification among the community.

3. Establish Partnerships:

As you establish space for your products in the minds of the users, start exploring avenues for partnerships. You should constantly look to build channels to co-market – this will help bundle your product offering with others and establishes your interlock in the ecosystem. Co-marketing is a great vehicle to make your marketing spend and efforts count more – as you in effect make the sum greater than the parts.

4. Market Insight:

As a marketer, you will engage more with the community, so start keeping a keen eye on patterns that you are observing among prospect segments. These patterns (basically repeated requests or buying patterns from segments) will help you make recommendations in terms of pricing, discount offers etc. The aim of making such observations should be to help you build customer acquisition velocity. Finally, as you decipher the patterns, you may be able to make product/service development recommendations to the product development roadmap.

5. Lead Generation

I would venture to say that demand/lead generation is probably lower priority for a start-up (early growth stage venture). Your sales funnel treatment is likely not stable yet, so I see little point in pushing leads in to it. However, once you have developed established customer segments, then you can look at active demand gen programs among those segments. For most part, if you do 1, 2, 3 and 4 above reasonably well, you will get sufficient inbound queries and interest that can be passed on to Sales for follow-up. Obviously, once you reach some degree of steady state (for example you know what your sales cycle is, you know repeat purchase patterns etc.), you can start investing in to lead gen and nurturing in the marketing program mix.

What do you think? Are you spending your marketing efforts on other avenues?

In a future post I will talk about the marketing mix and program tactics related to the above.

V-Day Gala, Load your closet with upto 90% discounts

Enter the amazing world of discounts this Valentine’s Day

Do these lines sound familiar? Many of you must already have deleted a few of these from you inbox in the last few days. Most of us receive loads of such mails around every special day. If we look closer at the phenomena of discounts, these are used as carrots to attract shoppers who would otherwise not open their wallets on the site. This also helps them score over competition who may not be offering any discounts at the same time.

But special occasion discounts is a different game. This time around it is to encourage the customer who is more ready to buy. It is more of a push to buy now instead of later (sometimes also to clear inventories) but the customer in most cases has his wallet open.

Dr. Sai Gaddam, computational neuroscientist, data geek and the author of ‘A Billion Wicked Thoughts’ shared his thoughts on the special discount phenomenon. “Special occasion discounts are equivalent to multiple vendors shouting out discounts to a customer who has already set foot inside the bazaar. The race to the bottom for merchants is only quicker when all the stores are a mere click away,” says Dr. Sai.

A much better strategy, in Dr Sai’s opinion would be to attract shoppers by offering quality advice on choosing the right gifts. This is especially true for an occasion like Valentine’s Day when there are many young and eager-to-please shoppers with only the faintest notion of what their girlfriends (or boyfriends) might appreciate.

Unlike brick and mortar stores, online stores have a great opportunity of enhancing their product offerings with blogs, vlogs or live-chats with experts. It is possible to compete on signals other than price, but unfortunately thinking in the eCommerce space is still anchored around the conventional. Reaffirming this thought, Pravin Jadhav, co-founder of Wishberg and an avid online buyer agrees about the herd mentality. “I browsed through ten-plus of the Valentine day online shops but they all look the same,” he says.

In a space mired by price wars, special occasion discounts (from everyone) isn’t solving any problem. The idea at work seems to be similar to why so many vendors selling the same thing setup shops side-by-side and the hope that customer would give in to the temptation and follow what other customers in the marketplace are doing. So, this Valentine’s day, it would be prudent to break the discount heart because even if you acquire customers, they’re not really yours.

I was honking my way through the Bangalore traffic one morning with the radio in my ears when the catchy ‘Sixty Sixty Ten Ten’ jingle caught my attention. It got me thinking and I soon realized the hefty presence startups are having on radio. Having started their campaign back in October 2012, it’s been a good four months for TaxiForSure and the response they’ve seen by conducting random surveys on the streets as been encouraging.

As opposed to high budgets that a TV ad will entail, radio is surely much better suited to the needs of a cash crunched startup. If you’re in Bangalore, you must have heard ads from online businesses like ZopNow, BigBasket, TaxiForSure, Ola Cabs, LoReMo and more. On an average a 10 second radio slot will cost you about INR 350. Talking to a person who has been associated with multiple radio stations, I learned more about how the whole thing works.

Radio stations tend to bunch up ad slots and give it to the customer; one cannot buy just one or two ad slots on radio because it doesn’t serve anyone’s purpose. For some measurable impact, a frequency of atleast five slots a day for about 10 days is recommended. This would cost one around Rs 17,500 (doesn’t include other costs like creatives which varies) with the previous assumption and the ads are played in rotation – it’s not on the same time every day.

Bal Krishna Bal, the founder of ZopNow, an online hypermarket focused on South Bangalore shares some of the secret. ZopNow, an Accel funded company, has been running two week ad campaigns. They go on and off depending on the need for a push. Zopnow budgets Rs 1.5-2 lakhs for a two-week campaign which includes everything. The jingle can be created by an agency like Shouryavani Bangalore in case of TaxiForSure or even some of the radio stations themselves do the creatives (like in case of ZopNow).

Sriram Sullia, a popular RJ with Radio Indigo, confirms the trend of more smaller online businesses advertising on radio. Radio possesses immense power of reaching the local audience and region specific targeting is possible. It is a great way to expand region by region.

Radio is a cost effective method but there’s a caveat. Like everywhere else, there is a lot of clutter on the radio too and one needs to stand out in the crowd. If you’ve got really deep pockets, you can bombard the audience but even that might rub the audience the wrong way. The ideation for an ad is of utmost importance and the key motive is to keep it sticky.

In case of TaxiForSure, founder Aprameya Radhakrishna shares that they had a clear mandate of using just two numbers which can be pronounced. They settled with 60 and 10 looking at the availability and also ensured to include every word that a person would associate with a taxi ride. Their data shows that people usually used the taxi for airports, taxis, shopping and malls which was then weaved into the story with the ‘number’ as the protagonist.

A good mix of art and science, if done right, the radio can be a good way of looking at marketing. We also asked, the 250+ applicants of eSparks 2013 if they’re looking at radio stations for advertising and close to a 65% respondents responded with a yes. This certainly bodes innovation in the space and a medium that can be leveraged by startups. Nail it!

Sooner or later, a startup has to get ready to make several rounds of ‘pitches’ to investors, partners, employees, mentors, advisors and competition jurors. Some of the audiences are local, others international; some will even be online pitches.

Having seen dozens of startup competitions and awards, here are my Top Ten tips for startups to make a successful pitch – especially inspired by the recent World Summit Awards for Mobile, which featured 40 mobile app development teams from around the planet.

A general rule of thumb is not to have more than one slide per minute of pitch. So if you have ten minutes for a pitch (a very common format), allot not more than one slide for each of the following tips. And if you have fewer minutes, use your discretion to shorten or skip some of the slides.

Take extra care with your slides if you and your audience have different linguistic backgrounds; they may not always understand your accent well, so spell out all the key information on your slides and in your visuals.

1. Context

You may know your domain very well, but not everyone in the audience is an expert in this field – so spend some time explaining the context in which you are operating. It could be the size of the e-commerce market for travel, or augmented reality apps for medicine, or a wildlife mapping platform – explain the scope of the activity, target audience, transactional components, and user needs. At the same time, don’t get too carried away with describing the context – you should describe just enough to frame why this is important for your company.

2. Your Vision and Mission

Within the context you have framed, what is the entry point for your company and its offerings? What is your vision in this space – to be the No.1 player, or the most efficient, or the most innovative, or to dominate a niche? What is your mission statement and how will this be communicated to the target users? What brand elements does this translate into? This can even include your Internet domain name (and not just a generic Facebook page).

3. Founders: Personal and Professional Touch

Explain the educational and professional background of the founding team, and work experience. Also play up the personal element – what is it about your domain that turns you on so much, as compared to other domains? What was the ‘aha’ moment that made you devote yourself to this cause? This will help convince the audience about your deeper passions and commitment to the cause.

4. Team

If you are going to scale up, you will need a team. Explain who your new team players are, and how you plan to hire them in future. How will you ensure they have the same passion that you do, or how you will bring them up to steam fast?

5. Timeline

Provide a chronology of the key events in your journey so far. What does your timeline look like, and what are the key developments which helped you prove your point and validate your assumptions? What are some pivots that you made? Show the most recent demo of your product and maybe earlier versions as well, so the audience knows what progress you are making. Nothing is as convincing as a demo of a good product or service.

6. Numbers and Metrics

Go beyond the wishy-washy stuff and provide solid data and numbers on what the status is of your product or service. Don’t just talk about number of downloads or users, talk about the subsequent impacts: what processes get impacted, what new insights does this give, how does it affect the target users, and what is the bottomline in terms of profit, convenience or social impact?

7. Testimonials

Go beyond the numbers also – provide actual testimonials from customers and partners about the impact and value of your offerings. A few quotes on a slide would be terrific (many quotes and videos on your Web site would be even better).

8. Future Plans

Yes, plans can and will change wildly, but at least project some of your future signposts and scenarios – it will give your audience a sense of how you think and plan. And if you include success factors, de-risking techniques and competitive advantages, the audience will know you are prepared to handle uncertainties.

9. Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!

The most common problem with pitches I have seen is that the startups never finish on time! Always rehearse your pitch to finish just within your time limit (one minute pitches are very different from ten minute pitches!). Make sure the demo works, make sure the videos do play on different projectors; have a backup in case the online connection drops.

10. Followup

OK, so your pitch did not win over the audience – but that’s also OK, just make sure you collect the business cards of the key stakeholders so you can stay in touch and inform them of updates. Maybe the investors were interested only in a finished product and not a demo – contact them afterwards once your product is ready, maybe they will be interested then.

[ Follow YourStory.in’s research director Madanmohan Rao]

Issues like common goal, job description and hourly commitment, who gets paid when, what when one wants to sell the company and many more can crop up. Ego can also become a hurdle. One might argue that if the co-founders are really good friends, all these problems don’t arise but you’d only be lying to yourself if you completely believed this. Starting up with a friend is often the best recipe to a cracked relationship and a failed business.

Talking to co-founders and conducting interviews, one thing I observed that can create some turbulence is ‘media attention’. There have been instances where the company has been started by two or three people but one of the founders gives all interviews and a perception is created that the there’s only one founder. Now, this is not a problem in many cases but sometimes leads to friction which can grow into something bigger.

Who’s the public image? Who gives all the speeches? Who makes media appearances? All these questions sound a bit fickle when posed to a team but it always should be a conscious decision.

“I think it would be unfair to ask something like ‘Who takes the spotlight?’” says Avlesh Singh, co-founder of WebEngage. Avlesh and Ankit started up together but you’d usually see Avlesh doing the speaking. “To succeed, founders have to have complementary skills. Both, me and Ankit love and live technology but then, one had to take charge and take responsibility for other functions too. Given that Ankit is a bit of a shy guy, I was the natural choice. Both of us add the equal value to strengthen the company we are building – just that I happen to be the one who tweets a bit more often!” adds Avlesh.

As obvious as it seems, when the startup is young, the focus is just on succeeding, none of the co-founders really care a lot about who’s doing the talking. Reiterating the fact, Pravin Jadhav, co-founder at Wishberg says, “In early days of startups the founders should spend time hustling to get the word out. At this stage the spotlight should only be on product, it does not matter who communicates till the product is getting featured.” But the problem creeps in a little bit later when the company grows and attains a certain stature. People attribute the success to media friendly guy, the one who did all the talking. It’s fine as long as the person who has been working behind the curtain doesn’t care. He wouldn’t say anything but deep down, a little grudge remains. In many cases, he shoves it off and celebrates the success but sometimes, he’ll also try to nudge his way to the spotlight and this is when the talkative one has to be understanding. It’s only an intrinsic human tendency showing up.

If your team foundation is not strong, such seemingly trivial issues can prove to become detrimental to your company. It is best to have a talk before it becomes too late. “As the startup evolves over time, it is the CEO who becomes the face of the company,” suggests Pravin and this seems to be the natural way forward.

In cases where the team is in different places, like for Floost, it is a bit more well-defined. “Our story is pretty simple – Abhinav is a hardcore hacker always tuned in to his headphone and gizmos and likes to stay away from spotlight. Harpreet is in Seattle, it’s her job to take spotlight, make product visible, demo the product mobilise feedback . I do the stopgap thing in India,” informs Siddharth Goyal, the co-founder at Floost, a product from Nogle.

As simple as it may seem, initially it’s just a matter of survival and the focus is not on what we’ll do if issues crop up at a later stage. But to make sure the sailing is smooth throughout, you might want to decide upon a few things:

• Who gives the first media interview
• Who co-ordinates with the media for quotes and bytes
• Who maintains the blog (the founders would be maintaining this in most cases)
• Is information disseminated through the company handles on social media or via founders?

These are some of the questions to be kept in mind regarding media but apart from this there are bigger questions which need to be asked as well for which you should refer to 5 uncomfortable questions to discuss with your co-founder.

Trend 1: Moving beyond Likes and linking them to asses competitiveness

Most companies on social media platforms restrict their engagements to Likes, Sharing and increasing their Fan base, but companies are maturing in their social media presence. There is an immediate need to translate these engagement tools into tangible and measurable benefits.

What does it mean: 2013 will see marketers and advertisers demand an assessment of how Likes, shares and increase in fan base will affect campaigns, product innovations, pricing and market competitiveness.

Trend 2: Mobile is moving to the centre of social media campaigns

Internet-enabled smartphones in India reached the 24 million mark in 2012, as per Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and KPMG International. The increase in Smartphone usage has spurred online activities on the move. This, coupled with a slew of new Smartphone launches lined up in 2013, will make the Smartphone the epicentre of all social media activities.

What does it mean: In 2013 advertisers and marketers will need to devise a mobile strategy to meet their marketing objectives – be it retention, conversion, or branding. Engagement platforms on the mobile phone that enhance reach, and help to explore new audiences and market will be an essential element of every marketing strategy.

Trend 3: The Rise of Video Content

At a time where there are zillions of mediums which hanker for a customer’s attention words no longer have a lasting impression. 2012 saw the popularity of mediums that use pictures, including Instagram Pinterest, and even Infographic. 2013 will focus on Video content, moving pictures which will speak, express and eventually leave a more lasting impression on consumers.

What does it mean: Innovation, creativity and out of the box thinking to communicate via moving pictures will rise. Marketing decision makers will need to equip themselves with video content management insights and knowledge.

Trend 4:  The magic of analytics

In today’s competitive environment, companies irrespective of their size and industry necessarily need to employ analytics tools to improve efficiencies. 2013 will see more traditional segments employing these tools such as governments and regulatory bodies who are required to cater to a population of over a billion citizens and not just sunrise segments such retail or telecommunications.

What does this mean: Analytics tools will become a standard that marketing decision makers will need understand and implement to understand how their social media campaigns impact strategic goals, be they retention, conversion, or branding. Analytics tools will help companies observe the pattern of online behaviour of customers across search engines and social media platforms. They will aid businesses in customising their marketing strategies in a manner so as to attract as well retain more customers. It will be imperative for companies to gather accurate and relevant data from all these sources and analyse it for customer insight thereby significantly improving their customer acquisition and retention strategies.

Trend 5:  Your Mother is on Facebook

There is a mindset that social media is a tool to reach out to a certain demographic. 2013 is going to bust this myth. Last year has seen a diverse age group join the social media bandwagon from grandmothers to school kids. This audience is well poised to be targeted by marketers.

What does this mean: Marketers will need to reckon with this phenomena and move beyond the traditional mindset that suggests that social platforms reach out to the under 30 years of age population.

Trend 6: A 360 degree integrated approach

Offline and Online marketing cannot work in silos anymore. Marketing strategies need to take a 360 approach where both these facets complement each other.

What does this mean – Brands will have to create campaigns wherein online programs, such as a campaign running on Facebook, will have an offline component to maximize impact.

How can Indian startups leverage the web to pull ahead of the competition? Here’s our five-part plan to get you started.

1. Start With a Killer Web Presence

At the core of your online marketing efforts is a robust website that offers visitors a sleek and professional experience. Your website is what consumers perceive to be your “home,” so the impression that it makes will have a huge impact on what people think of your brand. When designing your site and producing content, put the focus on:

-        Unique, modern, intuitive UI – Visitors interact with your brand primarily through your user interface, so it’s crucial to get it right. It needs to be compatible on all devices, both mobile and stationery. It also needs to be easy to use, regardless of the device. Use modern convention and intuitive mechanism so that nobody needs an explanation on how to use your website. And don’t forget, your site design should be attractive as well.

-        Top notch user experience – Visitors should enjoy interacting with your site and should find the experience pleasant, at the very least. Ideally, the experience should be entertaining, and memorable enough to share with others.

-        Low bounce rate – Pay attention to which pages draw people in, and which cause visitors to leave without exploring the rest of your site. Look for patterns, and focus on emulating the pages with the lowest bounce rate.

-        Decrease load time – Your pages should be designed to load rapidly on any device. It is a good idea to estimate the user’s connection speed and respond with the appropriate level of multimedia (giving users an option to switch, of course).

2. Pull Traffic From the Search Engines

Most users who want to make a purchase turn to the search engines in order to research the topic. That makes visibility in the search engines incredibly lucrative.

-        Take advantage of search engine pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements, such as AdWords. This places your advertisement directly above the search results, or just next to them. Better yet, you get to choose which keywords the advertisement will display for, allowing you to target the most promising buyers. PPC ads are a great way to earn a profit quickly. However, it’s important to recognize that they are not a viable long term marketing channel, since the traffic disappears as soon as you stop paying for the ads.

-        Take advantage of search engine optimization (SEO) services. SEOs who know what they are doing can get your site to appear prominently in the unpaid search results, which most users feel are more trustworthy. It’s important to understand that this can only be accomplished long term if SEO consists of genuine marketing efforts, not cheap tricks. Updates like Google’s Panda and Penguin updates penalized sites that used spam to manipulate search results, so focus on SEO firms that use ethical marketing techniques.

-        There is some debate about whether startups should invest in SEO, but we feel it’s one of the best ways to leverage your resources for long term growth. See this guide about why every startup should take advantage of SEO.

3. Leverage Social Media Appropriately

Social media marketing has become tremendously popular and mainstream businesses are finally jumping on the bandwagon, but it’s important to recognize how it is different from other marketing channels. People use social networks to entertain themselves and communicate, not to buy products, so it is not the best place to drive direct conversions. Instead, use social media to:

-        Build relationships with influential people online who can help improve your brand’s exposure on social networks, their own sites, and in the search engines.

-        Retain existing customers by entertaining them with a steady stream of content that keeps your brand on their mind.

-        Expand your reach through the use of viral content, the kind of content that people love to share with their friends.

-        Eventually transition your social followers over to your own properties like your website and email newsletters, where conversion rates are typically much higher.

-        Don’t focus too much on the number of followers, since it is already possible to buy followers (although they are fake profiles). Instead, focus on how frequently your followers are sharing your material, responding to it, and transitioning to your other properties.

-        To reach a large enough audience to get viral activity started, it can be helpful to use Facebook ads. You shouldn’t, however, focus exclusively on this as a strategy for building an audience.

4. Capitalize on Content Marketing

This is closely related to both SEO and social media marketing, but has its own intrinsic benefits. All of this makes content marketing an incredibly powerful part of your marketing strategy.

-        Focus on producing content with a “unique selling proposition,” so to speak. Each piece of content should solve a set of problems that aren’t already solved by other content providers.

-        Produce content with the aim to attract influencers who will share it on social networks and link to it from their websites, activities that will send referral traffic as well as boost visibility in the search engines.

-        Use your content as a reason to get people to subscribe to your newsletter and subsequent blog posts. This keeps you on their mind and is great for customer retention.

5. Get Involved In Offline Events

Offline events, seminars, and meetups are an incredibly powerful resource, especially if you can use them to build relationships with people who have an online presence. Events can be especially helpful if you get the opportunity to speak on stage. Another way to take advantage of these kinds of events is to sponsor them.

In addition to the exposure, events are a great way to get involved in startup culture. It’s not a good idea to try to tackle all problems on your own. Meetups can help you build your network, learn from the mistakes of others, and develop the contacts you need in order to hire new talent when you need it.

Online relationships that started offline are also extremely powerful, since they can be leveraged again and again for exposure and resources.

Conclusion

According to ComScore, the number of Indians who were online grew 41 percent between July 2011 and July 2012, reaching almost 63 million people. These early adopters are also the trendsetters who decide what’s going to be hot next year. By tacking global reach and narrowing your efforts on the most promising prospects, online marketing is the most promising way for Indian startups to grow while using their resources efficiently.

By developing a strong presence online, you will position yourself to attract and retain customers where your competitors are unable to reach effectively. Handle it properly, and you can effectively launch your brand on the road to success.

About The Author:

Pratik Dholakiya is lead SEO and VP of Marketing at E2M Solutions, a full service internet marketing company. He’s also a serial guest blogger and has contributed to SearchEngineJournal, FamousBloggers, ProBlogger, SocialMediaToday, SearchEnginePeople, among other online platforms. You can stay in touch with him through Twitter @DholakiyaPratik

Recent policy updates by two large brands surprised me. I began to wonder if they were sacrificing consumer proposition for money or efficiency.

You know about the first one. It’s the small ‘promote’ link below a status update or a post that you put up when talking about a page. Pay to make yourself heard better, seems to be the play here.

Facebook provides multiple options to pay for a promotion, and has customized pricing for countries. I noticed that the price I would need to pay is listed as 0.30 USD, with one of the payment options being the use of my mobile subscription. When I chose that, the price was listed as Rs. 99/- and it used 3 Facebook credits.

Let’s leave aside the obvious conversion flaw here. Hey Facebook/Airtel – can one of you explain this to me? USD 0.30 should be about Rs. 15/-, taking 1 USD = Rs. 50/-. Your conversion makes this closer to 2 USD.

What surprises me is that I could pay for people to read my updates.

I understand brands being able to promote their posts. There has been angst about the amount charged, but the logic is clear. Facebook posts are marketing and brand building. Ergo, pay from your marketing budgets.

But charging individuals – that feels weird, doesn’t it?

Now, I know Facebook has been making several attempts to build its moneymaking credentials. Investors are relentless in their cawing for profits and monetization strategies.

But the ‘promote’ strategy seems strange precisely because it goes against the core proposition for Facebook.

The core consumer proposition of Facebook is similar to that of a college canteen. You visit a canteen to relax and have fun. You sit with a friend at the canteen, and a friend of his walks over. He gets invited to the table and soon he’s your friend. You have a group of buddies, some close, some not very, but you regularly hang out at the canteen with them.

You discuss anything that you think of – what’s happening in class, who’s going around with whom, an article from a newspaper, a hot celeb’s new photo, pictures from a college event or places you visited over summer or gather to fight an injustice – the exam paper had three questions ‘out of syllabus’. Let’s get together and complain to the dean!

For some intimate topics, you keep it to a small group of friends. For others, you don’t mind who’s listening in, whether they are friends or not.

Occasionally, there are companies that want to run marketing campaigns around your canteen. They send someone to distribute pamphlets outside the canteen, stick posters, arrange test drives of their new products, or occasionally send someone who tries interrupting your gang’s conversation asking someone to fill a survey form.

But the proposition of the canteen visit is always about friends. You may be an introvert, but you know that if you feel strongly about something, you can talk about it.

Facebook adapted this social context wonderfully in the digital space. Almost all the buzz is around what your friends (strong or weak ties) are doing, what they think, photos they put up or activities they plan. Brands get involved in your conversation, hoping that you mention your preference for them to friends. Websites post articles that get shared and discussed. There is marketing, but it seems part of the flow. It’s a transfer of a social context that all of us are comfortable with.

Which is why the promoted posts for individuals feels so strange.

Earlier, I could put up any post or update, and depending on how interesting (or salacious!) it was, it would get shared across a chain of friends. You could control the chatter you saw by telling Facebook not to show you content from guys who were extremely noisy (no more baby pics please!), by mentioning who your close friends were or by specifying what sort of posts you wanted to tune out of.

The personal ‘promote’ option changes the dynamic.

It suddenly brings vanity, biased opinion and (pocket) money into the conversation.

Say you had a classmate who thinks too much of himself. He’s difficult to tolerate in class, but due to social norms, you had to add him as a friend on Facebook. You choose to ignore most of his posts, and there’s never any chatter about them.

Now, he thinks highly of himself and has created a page about his ‘Photographs and Thoughts’ that you had to like. He has more pocket money and hence starts promoting posts he puts there. Suddenly, you start seeing a lot more of his posts as promoted. You can choose to a) block him as a friend b) hide stories from your timeline or c) limit the number of posts from him

If you choose any of these, the core reason for him paying for the post goes away – people aren’t interacting with what he writes.

If you don’t, you end up with a feed that seems compromised.

Say he puts up a post with a caustic viewpoint – girls shouldn’t wear jeans to college, maybe? You don’t like it, and want to write a full rebuttal post. To reach as many people as the original post, do you need to pay and promote? You wonder what happened to free opinion.

The third reason to dislike this is purely sociological.

I love traveling to new places and putting up photo essays on places I’ve visited using Facebook albums. The narcissist in me tries getting them noticed in subtle ways – sharing links to albums on my news feed, plugging them in posts I write or even posting photos to albums incrementally so that I spread the surface area for interaction.

But paying to have them show up as a sponsored story? That’s like coming in with a mike to try out-shout a regular college canteen conversation. People look at you and think, “You’re pathetic. Stop fishing for compliments.”

Promoting posts goes against the core proposition – the digital equivalent of a college canteen conversation.

I know that Facebook tries multiple options, and my guess is that this mutation will be short lived.

They have throttled back when they introduced features against the core proposition. The so-called ‘frictionless sharing’ introduced sometime ago didn’t live long.

Frictionless sharing meant that any page I click on would automatically show up on my newsfeed. It went against the behavior that people like to discuss articles after they’ve read them, not before. It just led to a ton of pointless posts with fancy headlines, till Facebook severely restricted the feature. Some apps still do this, but its far more controlled now.

The second brand I saw compromising its core proposition was Cafe Coffee Day.

Cafe Coffee Day grew rapidly over the last decade by the virtue of being an informal place to hang out, like an extension of a college canteen. In a place like India, where there were (and still are) severe restrictions to opposite sexes interacting, Cafe Coffee Day became an acceptable place to socialize. It had wide reach (almost every area in large cities has one), the tone and decor are pleasant and informal, and in most cases, the coffee was incidental. People flocked for a variety of reasons – young couples having their first ‘arranged marriage’ meetings, college groups hanging out and even business guys with laptops having client meetings or just answering emails over their Wi-Fi. (Incidentally, the business crowd was what Barista tried to target in their chain, but the idea never took off. Young India business guys are from the same crowd that frequents Cafe Coffee Day. Why pay more for coffee just for formal interiors?)

You could walk in with your friends, see what’s the offer through the danglers, and the Cafe guy would hand over a menu card for you to order from. You and your friends chose something, had it delivered and would while away time. You would get into a mock fight over who would pay the bill, and often say ‘But I’ll pay next time, okay?’

In effect, the core proposition is about renting conversation space. The cost of the coffee was the ‘rent’ you paid for the time you spent there. You were sure you would be left alone for as long as you wanted.

A few weeks ago, when I went down to Cafe Coffee Day, I was surprised to see that they had inverted the sequence. You could sit at the table, but had to pay for what you wanted upfront, by walking up to the counter instead of at your seat.

I know most of you would point out that this is what every other chain does – Costa Coffee, Lavazza and others. But Cafe Coffee Day had set my expectation otherwise. It was like dining at a hotel. You get taken care of, and you pay at the end. Even the decor was designed accordingly – the payment counters are usually by the corner instead of at the center like other shops.

The new setup introduced moments of awkwardness in the flow. If I met someone for a business meeting, we squabbled over who would pay the bill before we got talking, subtly introducing dominance into play. If I was out with friends, and took their request and walked up to the payment counter, I had to get back and ask for other choices if their first choice was not available. If any of the folks meeting up reached late, s/he would have to go to the counter and order, rather than just ask for something to be served at the table.

And, I had a sense of what I paid before I enjoyed the privilege of my time and space there.

Cafe Coffee Day has a huge footprint across India, and probably has enough walk-ins for this not to make a difference to their turnover. But it’s sad seeing how brands misunderstand the core proposition they offer. Rather than change the flow, they could have capitalized on the unique differentiator of experience they had.

In cases like Facebook, public pressure often changes their offerings. For brands like Cafe Coffee Day, they cultivate a client behavior for years, and rather than try and be different from everyone due to this, fall back into being yet another place.

What do you think about brands playing to their core proposition? Let me know in the comments section or at @shrinathv. [Note: All views are personal]

Marketing is frustrating

For many technologists and entrepreneurs, marketing is a frustrating mix of off-the-wall creativity and strange faith in something that’s hard to believe in. Won’t people buy once they understand the logic of how your service or product helps? We know enough from behavioral economics (the science of why people buy) that information and logic are not enough to drive sales. But if you love data and statistics, there is good news.

Marketing based on data

The great news about modern marketing is that it can now be data-driven. When John Wanamaker uttered his infamous phrase “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” he was not living in a digital age. Because you are, marketing is now a new science with six critical steps.

Big data is big business ($100 billion and counting). It is growing at 10% per annum, which is twice as fast as the software business in general.

Get your business found online

If you want to sell beyond your local area then you need your business to get found online. To do this:

1. Create a website that is attractive for humans to read and friendly for search engines like Google and Bing to index. You don’t need the world’s most amazing webdesign, you just need a functional website that you can control and update regularly. If you can’t get your website updated within say 24 hours of having a new idea, the process is too slow and you need to think again.

2. Publish regular remarkable content that entices humans and search engines to come back often. Monthly updates to a blog won’t attract enough new followers for anything other than a hobby site. If you are running a serious business you need to update web pages and provide new remarkable content multiple times per month as a minimum.

In June 2012, 1.47 billion searchers conducted 173 billion searches making for 117 searches for every searcher on the planet.

3. Add in social media

Now you need to add as a minimum two social media tools. If your audience is consumers then Facebook should be your starting point. If you are selling to other businesses then LinkedIn would be an ideal place to start. In either case adding Twitter to the mix should get you going, but there are hundreds of social media outlets and over time you should indeed add others that fit with your market. You want to be seen where your target audience ‘hangs out.’
Prepare for Data-Driven Marketing

4. Track your performance

Now you have the foundations for data-driven marketing, but one vital aspect is missing: measurement. While John Wanamaker didn’t have the tools to measure his spend on marketing, you do, and some are even free. Install tracking software on your website like Google Analytics (free), or for more advanced metrics take a look at KissMetrics, Marketo, or Hubspot (all paid) to get really comprehensive metrics and analysis of your users’ behaviour.

Google Analytics
KissMetrics
Marketo
Hubspot

The average cost of acquiring a lead using data-driven marketing is 61% lower than from outdated marketing methods Hubspot

4. Now you need to give away much of your product or service information for free!

Moneyis usually the toughest problem for start-ups and new entrepreneurs so when I tell people they need to give away content for free, there are often a lot of anxious individuals in the room. You don’t have to give away your core business but you do have to give away information and guidance that does two things.

• It demonstrates to your audience that you are an authority in your field
• It educates, informs and entertains your audience meaning they will come back to hear more.

Why should I give away free information?

You are reading this article for free right? And if you find it helpful you’d be willing to come back and read anotherto find out more about how to use data-driven marketing to promote your business? You give of your expertise and in return, you get interested potential customers who have put their handup and said “I am interested in your company, and what you do,” making it easier for you to retain customers and make sales.

5. Gather permissions

If you are giving away free information, people will be willing to provide you with two vital responses. First their email address (to receive whatever resource you are giving them) and most importantly their permission to contact them in the future with relevant offers. This is a fantastic way for you to build your contact base.

6. Look after your leads

Once a website visitor has downloaded some of your content they then become a lead. A lead has already shown some interest in your product or service so now you need to help them make the buying decision. You do this by sending regular information and education resources to show how your product helps them do something they see as important, and why your business is best placed to help them do this.

If you are developing your own data-driven marketing plan, or bringing in an agency to help follow these six steps to data-driven marketing for entrepreneurs and start-ups, remember that website visitors are a good and important indicator of your growing success, but the only measure that really matters is sales. Keep focussed on sales and profits and don’t be fooled by just getting more website visitors.

About the author:

Chris Markham is owner and founder at Bizfix Data-Driven Marketing Agency. With a background in communications for some of the world’s biggest companies including Vodafone, BT and British Airways, he’s using new data-analytics technology and findings from behavioral economics (the science of why people buy) to help clients get found online and to convert leads into customers. He would love to connect with you on LinkedIn

Here, we walk through some of the major stages that makes The Dark Knight Rises, the final instalment of the Batman Trilogy such a big hit. Post the grand success of The Dark Knight in 2008, the bar was set very high. Fans got the first hint about the third part on 19th May 2011 when an announcement about the launch (yes, 14 months before the release) was made. Following the rather drab press release, the official website was launched.

The website got fans to work on a Friday morning as originally, the TDKR website was completely black with a weird chanting in the background.  One could look at the visual spectrum of the audio file which was a twitter hashtag #thefirerises. The hastag, when tweeted, revealed an image pixel by pixel.

The Image of Tom Bane That Was Revealed

Thus began the viral campaign for The Dark Knight Rises. Such campaigns which involve fans intricately have become a sure shot way to success. The previous Batman movie, The Dark Knight, also ran a Why So Serious campaign which had spread like wild fire. Following the website launch, trailers were released which were more often than not, leaked. One comes to an important case in point here that does a leaked release do more good than harm?

Another strategy was to attach trailers to popular movies. The first theatrical teaser (which was again leaked) was appended to Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows. This teaser got 12.5 million views in the first 24 hours after its official release, the record which was broken by The Avengers with 13.7 million views. A 6 minute prologue of The Dark Knight Rises was attached to 70mm IMAX prints of Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol. The second teaser trailer was added on the theatrical prints of The Avengers and this was released online 4 days after the appearance in halls. All these led to a huge buzz and set the tone for TDKR.

Amidst the activity offline, the real action was taking place in the virtual world where fans turned into detectives themselves to disclose the identity or Dr.Leonid Pavel. Magazine companies received CIA documents containing mugshots connected to actor Alon Abutbul. These documents gave out hints which were later shown to be plot elements of the six-minute prologue.

The “Operation Early Bird” which might look as too straight forward, unveiled early prologue screenings. In April 2012, the official TDKR website was updated with a dossier of an on a suspect named “John Doe” also known as “The Batman” for an arrest, with a list of accusations. Also, a campaign was run wherein tickets were sold out 6 months in advance! Tickets for midnight showings of the film on the night of July 19^th in New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles sold out immediately once word got out that they were on sale, with a ticket price of $17.50. These were later sold on secondary sites including ebay for over $100.

Other popular offline engagements like the one in which TDKR logos appeared on Lotus Cars during the 2012 British Grand Prix and unveiling batman figures at a Toy Fair went a long way in creating the buzz. This 14 month long saga finally ended with the release slated on 20th July but as fate would have it, there are forces even Cristopher Nolan can’t control. The Aurora Shooting dampened spirits in the US but the movie has been a humongous hit the world over.

These kind of liberties in terms of marketing might only be available to Nolan but some of the campaigns are ingenious. Born with The Dark Knight, twitter campaigns and intense on the ground engagements have made the movie as big as it is.  A true case study in marketing, there’s a lesson about ‘Presentation’ that everyone can learn. No matter how good your product is, presentation counts.

These are some myths and misconceptions that are plaguing the mindset of many startups and SMEs. Here is a brief attempt to break these myths and help you do social media(SM) the right way.

1. How to start – First question you need to ask yourself is ‘What is the objective of your social media campaign?’ Do you want to sell your products? Do you want to spread word about yourself? Do you want to hire people? Or do you just want to be on social media because everybody else is?
2. Choosing your platforms – Once you are done with answering the above, you need to decide the platforms which you will use for your campaign. If your target is working professionals, make more use of LinkedIn. If you want to reach out to a global audience and want to focus on the internet savvy in India, use twitter. Facebook can answer most of your questions, so it is in any case a good idea to be there. Even though Google + may not have taken off, having a Google + profile that you update regularly will help you come up in search results.
3. What to post – Before you even start to post, you must first check if you have a website. If not, can you make one? If you don’t want a website right now, can you at least set up a free blog on WordPress or Blogspot? Without a central source of information on you, having social media profiles is not really going to solve much of a purpose. You need to drive people from social media to someplace else, and this someplace needs to be your website or blog.
4. When to post – Most people who create social media profiles have the habit of starting off with a lot of energy and vigour but then the enthusiasm seems to cool off with the passage of time. Till you don’t learn to stay patient with your online campaigns, you will never be able to receive any results from them. Social media is no magic wand which will drive results for you overnight, but it needs constant care and nurturing to bear fruit over a period.
5. Got nothing to post – Profiles are created, few posts have been published and now what? Social media is a tool to broadcast what you do to the world. Whether you are engaging in some offline marketing activity or hiring people for your company, or got yourself a new office space, or signed a new partnership, you need to tell the world about it through social media. For social media to work for you, first you need to work for social media. Offline activities translate into online content which end up spreading the word and good will about you which eventually helps you get endorsers and thus partners and clients. In case, you are not doing much on the company front, you can share articles from your industry, or write some yourself, put them up on the blog and share them on the pages.
6. Nothing’s happening – Few days or weeks into the campaign, you may realize how nothing’s actually happening. Your cash registers haven’t started ringing and your brand awareness is also low. But if you continue your regular efforts for some more time then you will automatically see tangible results. This may begin with your Facebook friends knowing about your company and a one-off friend even passing on a lead to you. You need to carry on your all round efforts on all platforms and as a result you will start seeing more people visiting your Linkedin profile and more people checking your Facebook page. Good way to analyse all this is to see how many more people are visiting your website. You can make use of Google analytics for the same.
7. Nobody likes me – Likes are the biggest myth of the modern day world. Increasing your likes by forcing your friends and relatives to like your page will not help you, but getting relevant people to check out your profile will. Don’t worry about number of likes on your page, they don’t really matter. In a population of billions, even if a few thousand like you, it’s not a big deal. What you should be bothered about is that when a prospective client comes to your page, he/she should see enough happening there to be able to get impressed by you and eventually associate with you.
8. Advertising is expensive – No it’s not. Facebook ads are affordable, and you must use them to reach out to your relevant audience online. Yes, professionals don’t use Facebook as much as college goers, but that doesn’t mean they don’t use it at all. People from all age groups can be targeted on this platform even with a limited budget.
9. So it’s all about Facebook? – NO! Facebook is important, but it’s LinkedIn where the main potential lies. Network more, interact in groups, send people messages, probably buy a premium account and see how you will benefit from the potential of LinkedIn
10. Will this work? – If you give it time, energy and patience, it will work for sure and end up reducing your overall cost that you have been investing in sales, marketing, hiring and other functions previously. But if you can’t commit to social media then you might as well let go of social media for without commitment, social media will never work for you.

About the author – Prateek is a social media consultant and trainer who is also the founder of Green Smyles, a branding outfit that enables holistic growth of organizations and individuals. In addition to advising brands and organizations from across the country, he also conducts social media training workshops and boot camps to empower people. You can connect with him at www.prateekshah.com .

The only reason I ever made money [got leads and sales] is because of the networking that I have done. One such example is: My meeting one of Superchooha’s [My ex startup] first corporate client at a twestival, moving forward, he become our biggest retainer.

So let me take you through a few networking formulas I have applied in my life.

1. Help others:

One way to increase your network is to help others increase theirs. Confused? Apart from the good karma that you will collect through helping others, you will also essentially get access to the persons’ network. A kind gesture now can allow you to reach out to that person for a ‘connect to someone in his network.’

2. Use Rapportive:

Rapportive is a chrome/firefox mail app that allows you to see the social profiles of the person whom you are exchanging mails with. The idea is to not only know more about that person’s background but also start following/adding him on social networks.  The reason being, your email interactions might stop after the specific work activity ends. But the person and you, both will login to your social profiles. The objective is to stay in touch with them there. Also many a times the person you are interacting with changes jobs and with that their email id or number.  But they most certainly don’t change their social profiles.

3. Attend offline events:

It is one of the best ways to expand your network. In the first year of my [ex] startup Superchooha, all I did was attend events. The second year we just kept getting inbound leads all because of the networking I did in the first one year. Don’t restrict yourself to attending only your industry or start up events. Even look at attending casual events like tweet ups , coffee club or book club events.  Feel free to exchange cards in all these events.

4. Follow up:

In the following week of attending an event, drop an email to all the visiting cards you collected. Something on the lines of: “It was great connecting to you at the event, we didn’t get a chance to speak in detail. What exactly is your company into?” This continues the conversation. They share about their work and you get a chance to talk about yours. At the same time, using rapportive, add them to your social networks, especially Linkedin.

5. Use Linkedin:

It is one of the leading social network sites that’s allows you to create your online resume and also build a professional network. Its potential is yet to be tapped by a bunch of entrepreneurs. Using your email id database, add your initial set of connections. Participate in discussions in groups and answers and not only increase your visibility but also flaunt your expertise. Go and meet these connections offline, whether they are going to give you business immediately or not, if the profile looks interesting, go ahead meet.

6. Request for connects:

In the book, “The One Minute Networker” Bryan Thayer talks about a human network. Through 6 people that I know, I will end up knowing the whole world.  We just have to tap into that human network.  Don’t shy away from asking your network to connect you to relevant people who will offer you business.  If they do, please be kind enough to thank them and return the favour sometime in the future.

7. Give free advice:

On twitter, almost once a week, I get people asking me queries on and aboutsome social media tool or platform. I make all efforts to answer most of them. I’d also advise you to be proactive and create good content for free that can be shareable.  The more the people read it and like it, the more they want to get in touch with you.

8. Be genuine and humble:

No one likes to stay in touch with someone who is arrogant, nor would they want to introduce you to someone from their network.  I have had instances where even my competitors have helped me only because we share a healthy competitive spirit.

9. Take breaks:

The reason why Path , the iPhone social network has a limit of 150 friends is because they were “Inspired by Oxford University Professor Robin Dunbar, whose research delves deeply into the number of trusted relationships humans can maintain throughout life. We tend to have 5 best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends.”
But we live in an age where ‘I follow 400 people on just twitter’ and I am not even beginning to count Facebook, Linkedin, my work contacts, my area contacts, my relatives, my friends’ boyfriends’ pets’ vet. You get the gist. So the networking can get overwhelming every now and then. Taking breaks in between, going underground and then resurfacing, helps a lot.

10. Remember names and professions

It is impossible to remember all names and profession. I use small tricks like saving the name along with their company name in my mobile memory. For e.g. Ankita Social Samosa. That way, when they are calling me, I am saved from the embarrassment of not knowing which Ankita is calling. Rapportive also allows you to write notes attached to the persons email id. So I write notes like, “Met at social media panel discussion”, “Yoga contact” etc.  I also quickly revisit old email exchanges before initiating another discussion with that person.

11. Ask influencers for help:

More often than not, they will have a huge network. Oh well, that is why they are called influencers, though this one is a little tricky. Not all of them will be willing to help. But you really have nothing to lose. At the most they will ignore your mail/tweet/message. But if they do get on to introducing you to their network, then my dear friend, you have hit a jackpot!

12. Send gifts:

It acts as a way for people to continue remembering you.  It can be very cost effective too, you don’t have to go for expensive gifts. The only thing that you will have to do is give time to selecting the gift, ordering and delivering.

13. Listen:

The most important, yet the least acted upon. If you don’t listen to people when they talk, you won’t register a single thing about them. You won’t be able to create a profile of theirs in your mind and your mind won’t be able to reproduce the name when we need it the most.

These have been extremely handy to me. My networking skills are what have got me where I am today. I truly believe every entrepreneur should sharpen his or her networking skills. As a dear friend is always found quoting, “Network is networth”

About the Author:

A Social Media strategist and consultant, Ankita Gaba has co-founded her second start up, Socialsamosa.com, an Indian Social Media Knowledge Portal. She loves networking and is a shoeoholic. You can tweet to her at @ankitagaba

The ability to track the user behavior from start to finish is the both the advantage and bane of advertising online or for online businesses. Agencies and marketers are always playing on the back-foot as the business demands to know how much sales was generated by each rupee spent. I, equally, agree and disagree with marketers lament that there is more to advertising than customer/sales acquisition!

Online advertising is fairly straightforward (or so it seems) you buy inventory, track the click-thru rates, the analytics tool will indicate transactions acquired, cost per acquisition (CPA), revenue, product etc thus allowing you to distill the information in many different ways. Simplistically put with the advertisement and the sales channel both online it is possible to track end-to-end.

Clearly, the above is not the case when advertisements go up on air. Offline media presents only one way communication channel; the consumer doesn’t interact with the media s/he only consumes it. There is no way to establish the direct link (there are exceptions, discussed below) between what the consumer sees and when s/he interacts with the brand. And this is the crux of the problem that we will attempt to solve for here.

We have heard this over and over again – “The results of a campaign are as good as the planning and execution of the campaign.” – and yes that is the supreme truth of marketing.

This conveniently leads us to the next point that is before you start calculating the ROI you need to set campaign expectations. List down the events you anticipate, guesstimates on numbers and time to impact for each event. For ex: Impact on newsletter subscription, 20% growth, m-o-m growth for next three months or % increase in the number of users entering the shopping funnel. Pick key metrics that will clearly be impacted by the advertisements and are critical to success of the business and consequently the campaign.

Assessing the duration of impact of a campaign is most critical part of the ROI calculation. This is especially true for offline advertising because the impact lasts beyond the time when the ads are actually on air. (For ease of discussion I will use the word TV-ads to represent all offline advertising.)   So while the ads are on air for 45 days, the impact could last well beyond 90 days with long-term residual effects.

If you are wondering what key metrics to evaluate here’s a tentative list – increase in direct traffic, share of direct traffic, increase in SEO traffic especially through the brand keywords, email subscriptions, lowered bounce rates, increased responses from Facebook page, increased product searches, increased CTR’s of online ads, increased conversions from online advertising etc.

The biggest and most obvious impact of TV-ads is number of people visiting the web site typing in the URL and that is the single most important metric to track. If your direct traffic is not going up by over 80% and the share of direct traffic not jumping to a high 40’s you will have a lot to answer for!

The acquisition cost during the advertising period should not include the offline spends, because the true impact of offline advertising is long-term. This in-flow of direct traffic, as a rule of thumb, stabilizes at a high point and remains there until the next burst of advertising activity. So while at first the acquisition cost sky rockets it plummets levels lower than online acquisition costs.

The other side-effect of increase of share of direct traffic is that by pure arithmetic the share of higher converting traffic goes up (direct traffic always has the highest conversation rate among all traffic sources) and thus the overall cost per acquisition (CPA) goes down.  This creates a virtuous dominoes effect; conversion from all traffic sources goes up. The caveat being this occurs only and if only when advertising generates direct traffic.

A tactical but useful way of measuring responses is to use deal codes or tracking codes. However, this should be done only if it ties in with the overall campaign. To put a deal code in the 30 sec only for the sake of tracking would be pointless. The consumer will not notice and you will construe it as a failed campaign.

Then again the ROI is always measured from point of view of CPA. Most often, marketers forget to use their media campaigns to leverage better deals with the suppliers. Marketing teams should work closely to push certain products if it allows for higher margins. The fallacy is that the product has to be put on the advertisement. The web site will be the hub of all traffic and there is valuable real estate available on the web site for pushing these high margin products.

In fact a good marketing plan does backward integration. Work with suppliers for high margin products, ensure availability of high margin products and then push sales for high margin products. The bottom-line that’s your best ROI!

About the author:

Mostly the blog is relegated to being a press release source, with announcements about funding, new features and the occasional culture and values post. There are exceptions though (Hubspot and Kissmetrics) who use the blog as a customer awareness and lead generation tool.

In this post we examine the ROI from a blog that uses it as a customer awareness, prospect education and lead generation tool. Let’s assume that you write 3 posts per week on topics that are of immense interest to your prospective customers. For a month, that’s approximately 12 blog posts and about 150 blog posts in a year.

Each of these blog posts is a little less than 500 words and has 1 image (dont forget the Alt img tag to ensure SEO juice) that’s relevant to the audience.

Having personally written and also outsourced copywriting of blog posts, we can confidently say that each outsourced blog post costs about $10 for 500 words. These posts are of high quality, well researched and organized posts which customers benefit from reading. If you write these blog posts yourself the “cost” may be higher since your time as a founder is possibly worth more than $10 / hour (Assuming it takes 1 hour to write a 500 word post).

The cost of blog posts, annually, hence is about $1500 (150 * $10) or about INR 82,5000. Lets assume cost of hosting the blog is included in other costs so we will not add that to this mix. This is your investment.

Now to understand the return, we have to do 3 tasks:

1. Understand the cost of acquiring visitors from other (paid) sources. You will have to do a quick Google adwords experiment to check the cost per click for each of these keywords.

For GitGrow, that ranges from $1 / visitor to $5 / visitor. So to do better on paid Google Adwords campaigns, we have to spend $1500 and get more than 1500 visitors OR 300 visitors (for more expensive $5 keywords).

2. Detail the conversion rate of registered users to visitors from both the blog other sources. We will assume that the conversion rate for both paid campaigns and blog writing is the same.

3. Outline the comparable cost of getting customers via the blog versus paid sources to understand the ROI.

Lets assume that potential customers are searching on 10 top keywords to learn about your offering (for the sake of simplicity).

The ROI from blog posts for a SaaS company comes from more than 1500 visitors (or 5000 visitors if you have less expensive keywords) who come to your website in a year because of reading your blog posts.

To put it in a generic sense, take the cost of your blog post writing and divide it by cost per click for your keywords. The resulting number is the number of visitors you need to get to your website (assuming same conversion) to “break even on your investment.

Visitor break even = Cost of blog post / Cost per click of keyword cost using Google AdWords

Your “Visitor break even” should be less than the number of visitors you got from the blog post for you to be ahead. In your Google analytics you can track that by looking at the number of visitors for each blog post.

About the Author:

Vinita Ananth, Founder, GitGrow

[Gitgrow is free and can help you optimize your website]