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Setting up your marketing anatomy by measuring what really matters

Setting up your marketing anatomy by measuring what really matters

What got you till here, might not take you all the way there

As a marketer, tracking startup eco-systems is fun because you can analyse what worked for them and what hasn’t.

You get to know the inside scoop and the latest specific tactics from the Internet marketing universe.

It is a rough estimate that every year, a hundred thousand tech startups reach the basic funding stage. But, only 10 per cent of the companies are able to show enough promise to actually receive their first round of Venture Capitalist funding.

The sole problem for this ratio — creating sustainable revenue streams and selling the product.

In the last five years, I met a number of startups like Capillary Technologies, FarEye and Knowlarity, at various meet-ups and product round-table conferences.

Most of them had already reached milestones like raising Seed-funding and Series-A funding – which every founder targets when they bootstrap.

Not to forget, moving towards next-levels of funding is a major achievement in itself – because it is proof that your technology has progressed from an interesting concept to a promising commercial opportunity that is expected to solve the challenge of a million-dollar industry.

Have you raised your Series-A funding, recently?

By now, you might have demonstrated your product capabilities with a subset of customers and maybe some big brand names and investments in your bank account.

Now that you want to scale up your marketing potential and create a Go-to-Market (GTM) strategy for yourself, here is what you need to do to set your marketing anatomy right!

Most startups that have cracked the early-stage challenges stumble upon scaling up their teams and businesses by creating sustainable revenue streams and having recurring customers.

But unfortunately, many tech startups get stuck at this stage because they can’t figure out a scalable way to implement their go-to-market strategy.

It might be because most startups fail in setting up their marketing anatomy right and measuring what really matters for them. As the growth curve moves upwards, many leadership teams read more and about successful case histories of Silicon-Valley startups that have become Unicorns.

Let me give you an example. Ten years ago, Uber didn’t exist.

Eight years ago, Uber was just based in San Francisco.

Today, it is in more than 85 countries, and worth more than US$90 billion.

There has been a meteoritic rise of such startups in recent times, and Uber is one such example.

The time-to-market cap today is decreasing and today’s start-ups are growing about twice as fast as those founded a decade ago.

In a volatile start-up business environment, where everything is changing, it is important for you to understand every bit of the business and setting up the processes. With everything, changing at such a rapid pace, it is important to understand the behaviour of the target audience.

Understanding the target audience of your product is more crucial than anything else for creating a successful GTM strategy, and let’s talk about the target group of your product.

Millennials — the elusive and mystical creatures that all marketers strive to catch!

The independent and socially-active group, occupy about 80 per cent of the people in the United States alone who spend close to US$600 billion each year.

The uniqueness of a product or service comes with its ability to market to its prospects, listen and adapt to your customers to what the new generation want from you.

Today, most decision-makers and users are millennial.

Most of the CXOs might belong to the non-millennial group, but their decisions are influenced by millennial employees who are striving for new-age digital technologies and this is acting as a game-changer for most companies to adapt to digital transformation.

Now, the ‘swipe-left-right’ generation, as we call them, wants personalised and responsive marketing. Thus, the brand that hits it right will reap the benefits, by acquiring customers quickly.

Also Read: How listening to our 4.1 million users inspired a new product idea

Setting up your marketing anatomy is no trivial exercise – it separates the companies that will be successful and sustainable and tosses those that won’t.

With every conversation with the brand becoming digital, startups must work on setting their digital marketing and inbound marketing strategies in place.

Because, with inbound marketing, you can align your marketing with sales and by going digital you can increase your brand footprints, exponentially.

What got you till here, might not take you there.

While building trust and credibility, creating responsive marketing for sales conversions is crucial in measuring what matters.

Then, what actually matters is scaling-up your marketing efforts, dynamically. After speaking to more than 50 founders and analyzing various startups, these are the following steps that are actually helping today’s startups set their marketing anatomy right and create a flawless GTM strategy.

If you are a CEO or a Marketing Head of a startup and you need to accelerate revenue growth, then you must try the approach below and see how it might apply to you.

Then, create digital workflows that would help you take your customer throughout the product journey and the sales cycle.

  1. Engaging them with the conversational content.

  2. Setting up a quick and responsive marketing process by promising the value.

  3. Aligning your sales and marketing processes to create a stronger inbound strategy.

Building trust and credibility

From a business perspective, it is always important to build trust and credibility with your prospects in the process of scaling up.

Adding successful case histories, product use cases at every stage in a prospect’s journey will help in building trust.

With the right set of content, they can contextually attract, engage and delight your prospects and customers and continue to build trust in your brand.

Responsive marketing for sales conversions

In today’s world, creating a one-to-one approach to marketing that companies use to shorten their sales cycle is through learning about their customers.

Creating conversational marketing uses targeted, real-time messaging and intelligent bots instead of lead-capture forms.

Also Read: Go-jek launches expansive insurance scheme for drivers in Singapore

Combining all together, the key lies in creating a successful inbound marketing strategy, that will help you measure the right metrics and give you a direction about the same.

The success in creating a successful GTM strategy lies in attracting, engaging, and delighting people to grow a business that provides value through digital workflows.

An inbound guides an approach to doing business in a human and a helpful way. This helps in increasing more traffic, connecting with more leads, closing and managing leads.

Once you have taken the above steps, you can continue to improvise based on the insights.

No matter how you implement them, the above lessons will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs. That’s the only way how you can grow and acquire new customers.

Inbound, that’s the key! So, are you ready to set your inbound marketing strategy, right?

Image Credits: ljooc

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