Start-Up Marketing School: Class 4- Developing a Customer Base
What’s your plan to acquire customers? It’s the difference between a business and a hobby.
Talk 1: Lead Generation and Customer Pipelines in a B2B company.
Elizabeth Golluscio - VP, Marketing at Smartling
Talk 2: Customer Acquisition in a B2C company.
Samir Balwani - Director of Acquisition Marketing, Stylecaster
Talk 1- Elizabeth
Works for Smartling- B2B, translates websites and mobile apps
B2B marketing is a maze; actually very human- its messy, you get your hands dirty
like in a maze, you need to start backwards
- end goal is the customer, so start there
think of marketing scorecard as a funnel
- top part of the funnel: hot leads
- next is opportunities
- next is proposals/ quotes
- bottom, smallest part of the funnel: new customers
items you need to track:
- visits to your website
- registrations
- full service inquiries
- average key words
- PR hits
- assets that you generate
- costs
some good tools to use:
- Trada- crowd source model
- Hubspot
PPC can be a bandaid if you don’t have good SEO
The Marketing Mix
- Advertising, Direct Marketing, PR/AR, Events, Relationship/ Customer, Inbound
If you hire 1 amazing person, make it an in-house designer
Marketing Strategy
Prospect and Problem Analysis -> Product (consumer), Price (cost), Placement (convenience), Promotion (communication) -> Customer Acquisition
placement includes working with your sales team
Geoffrey Moore- Crossing the Chasm
- For (target customer) who (statement of the need or opportunity) the (product name) is a (product category) that (statement of key benefit/ compelling reason to buy) unlike (primary competition) our product (statement of primary differentiation)
know who your market is
whats the alternative to your product?
- sometimes its nothing, sometimes its stagnation
getting close to the beginning of the maze- value and values
messaging your company’s values
the more we can connect with people on an emotional level
the “value” of your product needs to connect to the “values” of your company
first hand experience should not be underestimated
- just need a couple of really quality conversations
and at the top of the maze, is you, the researcher
top industry trends
- marketers: design + tech + communications
- Smartling: globality, SoLoMo (Social Local Mobile)
lost art- great copywriting
School of Applied Sciences to compete with Silicon Valley
- we can all get better together
- marketing should be brought quickly to a start-up
do what you love, love what you do * make good friends * take care of yourself
Talk 2- Samir
Stylecaster- B2C
there is an overfocus on social media
going to present 2 old school, good tactics and 1 brand new tactic
1st tactic- email marketing
nobody focuses on it, but email marketing is huge!
you want someone to do something, email them
use email marketing alongside analytics
- focus on page views
the idea of putting in a password scares people
- email newsletter acts like a stopgap
campaign- send out newsletter and then 5 emails of value and then sell on the 6th email
- first 5 emails are you walking them through the sales process; don’t include an offer in the first 5
- almost like in-depth blog posts
use MailChimp- why?
- have larger list platforms
- integrate well with everything including the free site SocialPro
SocialPro will crossreference email to any public social media
can get specific with people based on their social media preferences
all of our marketing comes from our content
blogs are important to get your content out there
for content consumption- twitter and facebook are great
- but you can “like” something on facebook without ever actually going to the website and reading the page
have to build your influence on your lists
should email everyday- the more you email, the more likely views
your unsubscribe list will go up, but those people weren’t going to buy your product anyway
duplicate content penalty from Google
- need to do all original content
white papers or case studies can be repackaged as a guide
best syndication deals are newsletters
don’t give your content to someone else in the same channel
not about the number of subscribers, it’s about the number of people who click
2nd tactic- targeted landing pages
homepage can be a black hole for leads
try to direct PR to sign up pages
landing pages
- use unbounce.com
- tool to create landing pages on the fly
- also allows you to A/B test
- use landing pages to make partnerships
give-aways
- know that incentives devalue your product
adswaps- work with other brands
test everything!
- optimize.ly
- visual website optimizer
3rd new tactic- remarketing and retargeting
B2C amazing tool
catches people that come to your site and then follows them around the web
- they don’t even have to sign up for your service
- cookie based so will follow you
yet, if you are already a member, it won’t follow you
Lesson- Kiss Metrics developed a cookie you can’t delete
- spotify uses them
- registration based
- now are in a lawsuit for it
Google Ad Words
- have to have display ads
high conversion on landing pages
need brand consistency- don’t play around with that
working at a start-up requires a lot of resource allocation
Marketers should work on what needs to be done Monday through Thursday and then on Friday just learn, try new stuff, take a class, blog, innovate
“Done is better than perfect”
