For many startups, marketing is an important, but often daunting aspect, of growing your business.
There’s an inordinate number of partners that will happily help you for a fee, but navigating your way through and deciding what a necessary and worthwhile investment is can be difficult.
By allowing data and analytics to inform decisions, startups will limit the risk involved and ensure the chosen strategy will support impactful results that small businesses need to succeed.
At Mailjet, we’ve been working with MassChallenge to mentor some of the startups taking part in the UK programme on how to develop and implement a marketing strategy that makes smart business sense and will support rapid growth.
Through the programme, we’ve been able to identify four key focus areas described here through the experiences of a two of the 2015 MassChallenge finalists; clothing manufacturing platform Moteefe and transaction service Paybox.
Olivier Stapylton-Smith, co-founder of Moteefe
1. Scale businesses not walls
“Rather than look at simply overcoming any hurdles that come our way we focus on how we can use existing insights to scale our offering and strengthen our messaging organically.
“Through the MassChallenge mentor scheme, we’ve developed a twofold strategy:
“Converting buyers into sellers – we currently have a strong community of clothing buyers, but many of these aren’t aware that they can create their own clothing
“Maximising our database – make sure that all opportunities for data collection are exploited, for example; including opt-in boxes on all relevant pages to grow our marketing list.
“These two strategies have so far worked really well in helping to position ourselves as a social commerce business and we’re really excited to develop this further into 2016.”
2. Target customers with precision
“At Moteefe, we help people sell custom-made clothing through social networks, therefore social media marketing is a big focus for us, as our target sellers are already on these social networks and open to the idea of selling / buying online.
“Precise targeting is key to our marketing strategy. We design Facebook ads to target specific audience groups as we know that it’s people with a niche interest who are most passionate about our offering.
“By targeting niche audiences and producing ads with virality at the heart of the design, we can keep cost very low, making the conversion rate really high.
“Building on this, we’ve also developed a list of the up and coming big names in the design and creative industry in the UK and then target ads to their followers on social networks.
“The thinking behind this is that, their followers should understand digital marketing and the idea of making money through social networks, so our ideal target audience. This has proved very successful for us, our cost per click for this is 20p – very low compared to the industry average.”
Continue reading on the next page to hear from Paybox’s co-founder, who believes in local knowledge and data-driven decisions – techniques that have supported the firm’s customer base growing by 300 per cent daily.
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