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Here’s how you can use digital marketing to secure investments for your startup

by Loknath Das February 1, 2018

written by Loknath Das

What conveys best to an entrepreneur that the idea s/he has invested in over some is truly worth the effort and resources? Investments.

When you can convince others – experienced others – to believe in your seemingly crazy idea, then you can really sit back for a bit and enjoy the moment when you realise that all of your time and money was not spent for nothing.

Thus, investments are often the lynchpin and measuring stick of any startup’s potential for growth and flourishing.

Subhendu Panigrahi, CEO at Skillenza and Co-founder at Venturesity, says: “We are always asked about how we reach out to customers and what the go-to-market strategy is in our investor pitches. The points that we focus on are channels used to reach out to customers. What is the Customer Acquisition Cost? If the CAC is low, the business is interesting.”

So what about the odds?

As many as 80 percent of all venture-funded startups fail, 45-50 percent simply shut their doors, and the rest fail to bring any significant profit to their investors. According to the Bath University, only 10 percent of startups happen to bring some returns to their investors.

Understandable why investors hesitate when approached by startups and asked for investments.

Your job is to convince them otherwise.

To realise what investors are looking for in your startup, you have to know what concerns they have when looking at a startup they probably never heard of before.

I’ve looked at tons of writings from investors who speak of successful or failed pitches they are subjected to daily. And one thing became very obvious – investors aren’t really looking for the utmost innovative product or service, what investors really need from you is to convince them that you have what it takes to navigate your business through the rough patches, and have a solid enough strategy to aid you in handling the grind. What you should also be able to showcase is that your company is not merely an ephemeral idea bound for success, but has already received some traction – via excellent feedback/reviews from existing customers, social Media buzz, appealing mentions from industry influencers, and so on.

So let’s remind us what should be in your Investor Pitch Deck.

Investor pitch deck

Essentially, an investor pitch deck is a 15-20-slide PowerPoint presentation, which presents your startup in an attractive way to potential investors. Forbes outlines what slides a typical presentation should contain:

Company Overview
Mission/Vision of the Company
The Team
The Product
The Problem
The Solution
The Market Opportunity
The Customers
The Competition
Traction
Business Model
Marketing Plan
Financials
Q&A

The first slides have mostly to do with general intros – about the company, the employees, and eventually, the product itself. The real challenge, though, lies in the other sections.

Slides on HR solutions, financial information, and revenue models are pretty obvious – you state what you already have and plan to do. Every startup has those strategies and information in place. But the rest is a different story. As a startup, you probably cannot afford to conduct a thorough market research that includes focus groups, or pay an agency to analyse your competitive landscape and build up your visibility through publicity, and later send out a comprehensive report on the results.

That is when online marketing and SEO and digital marketing tools enter the stage to resolve some of the challenges you are faced with when creating a perfect Investor Pitch Deck.

Digital marketing/SEO & your investor pitch deck

Archit Gupta, Founder at ClearTax: “Investors look for the proof of sustainable growth in a startup. Understanding your customers and identifying the most cost-effective channels to acquire them become the task of a startup’s growth team. At ClearTax, SEO, inbound marketing, and word-of-mouth advertising have helped us grow to a million-plus users today. We chose a more direct approach to reach our target audience instead of traditional advertising methods, and it has worked wonderfully for us. It’s also a proof of validation and brand presence for potential investors.”

Tools can’t directly give you all you need to get those desired investments; what they can do is make a big part of your pitching efforts easier.

So we will go through areas of your Investor Pitch Deck that can be covered by certain tools that can give you what you need and what investors are looking for – data-driven solutions and strategies.

Market opportunity

You can have the top product characteristics, the best user-friendly features, and the lowest prices, but if you fail to realise that you don’t have the customer base for your product, what’s really the point?

The very first thing you’d want to emphasise in your presentation is that you know for sure and you have the facts to prove that there is actually a market for your product.

There are various approaches to measuring the market opportunity. But what is it all about, anyway?

Establish your market size and roughly estimate what part of that market your company can get. SEO and digital marketing tools can reveal plenty of insights about your target market. As we mentioned before, it is very unlikely that your startup can invest in a thorough market research, with in-depth Nielsen-like reports and focus groups, but looking at digital usage will also uncover what others spend hundred thousands of dollars on.

Leverage keyword analysis to find your potential market size: SEMrush’s Keyword Magic Tool, LongTailPRO, or Wordstream’s Keyword Tool can point out the search volume for any keyword that you are likely in need to target, and, since most people are going to the web to look for companies and their products, search volume is a great indicator of the number of customers you can potentially interest. By estimating how many users are Googling your product type, you can assume with a level of certainty that these people can potentially be interested in what you offer and can be converted into your prime audience.

Furthermore, the cost per click numbers for each keyword you target will give you an opportunity to forecast how much expenditure you should count on to get a designated market share.

According to Neil Patel, competitor analysis will also help you measure your market size and how much market share you can potentially gain.

Competitors

Competitors won’t only show you your own market opportunities. In fact, investors expect you to know your field from inside out. And competition analysis is a huge part of that knowledge.

By showing your knowledge about your competitors and sharing ideas about their ups and downs, you will be able to showcase your own value proposition.

Ideally, create a table and highlight every feature that your competitors have and check where are your wins and losses, and what particular areas require investments, both money and resource-based. Don’t forget to communicate your competitive advantage.

Here is what you should do:

Determine your competitors
Define your competitive advantage
Showcase your wins against your competitors.

Any business model creation should begin with a comprehensive competition research. But for an investor’s pitch, the competitor research should work to your startup’s advantage and eventually build up your credibility. This is the time to “blow your horn”.

A two-time technology entrepreneur Caroline Cummings advises: “Impress the investors with what you and your team have accomplished to date.”

Note that your competitors are always of particular interest to your investors and they can also be the stumbling block for your investments. It’s in your hands to prove that you have your competitors covered and know where you’re going.

The Organic Research Report and SimilarWeb will measure website traffic and organic keywords for each domain of your choice to help you determine your biggest competitors within organic search.

And probably the most important aspect of competitor monitoring – Brand Monitoring – will allow you to learn from your competitors by discovering their performance and spying on their expenditures.

Once you’ve done your homework on your competitors, you can prove that your performance versus expenditures is more efficient than your competitors’, and that is how you showcase your advantages over your competition.

Your job is to impress investors. And by outwitting your competition even in the smallest areas like spending less to rank higher for the same keyword than one or two of your biggest competitors will play in your startup’s favour. But to gain even more credibility for your startup, you have to show your potential investors that you aren’t just another struggling company; on the contrary, you’ve already gained some publicity and traction from the market you know inside out.

Traction

Eighty-two percent of investors take your brand strength into account when making their final investment decision. You have to show that the traction you received resulted in some feasible evidence of success – increased traffic, higher customer acquisition, game-changing deals. Even some social buzz can do the job.

Here is what traction is all about:

Effective PR starts with effective outreach – to the relevant and the most beneficial media/sites. The Link Building Tool, Monitor Backlinks and Open Site Explorer can monitor your competitor’s backlinks to show you what traffic sources bring them the greatest outcomes (traffic, buzz) so that you know which sites you should target and which media/sites you can disregard. Thus, tracking and reverse engineering your competitors’ link-building strategy can potentially help with your own outreach efforts to reach relevant media, connect with the most relevant influencers, and make sure that no opportunity goes missing.

I’d like to find someone who managed to gain an impressive publicity and, thus, visibility without using paid advertising. Hence, a tool like Advertising Research or Moat will uncover your competitors’ advertising strategies and expenditures, show their ad copies, and reveal the particular keywords they target. Use that info to learn their best practices and build your own ad campaigns.
And, of course, what’s good traction without good old social media. No brand can afford to disregard social media. SM entails your visibility, customer service, support, Public Relations, and so on. And Social Media Tracker, Brandwatch, and OCTOBOARD can help you build the ultimate social media strategy by looking at your competitors and which channels return more benefits to their business, what content type engages their audience and, moreover, will also monitor and analyse your own social media activities.

Key slides: customer acquisition & marketing strategy

What we considered above should help you eventually dive into the key area of your Investor Pitch Deck – your marketing strategy that will ideally result in some impressive customer acquisition outcomes.

According to Entrepreneur, when it comes to investing in a company, most VCs assign a great deal of importance to digital marketing and won’t invest in a startup that fails to show some solid tactical plan for digital marketing. Basically, that plan is the step-by-step description of how you are going to reach those people who will eventually purchase your product.

And all of the areas and tools we mentioned above can help you find answers to these crucial questions that should be addressed in your investors pitch:

What will be your key marketing channels – paid advertising, social media, email marketing, content strategies etc.?
Which channels already work for your startup and which ones brought you some early victories?
Do you have a rough idea of preliminary customer acquisition expenses?
What publicity-provoking tactics will you employ?
Have you already attracted some early buzz?

Being based at Ahmedabad, the capital of Incubations [There are 25+ Incubation centres at Ahmedabad] and also, being a founder of a digital marketing agency, it’s been a great experience to mix both things. These are my inputs for your pitch deck. What tools are you using for the same?

(Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of YourStory.)

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[“Source-yourstory”]

February 1, 2018 0 comment

Online Marketing

How Online Marketers Use Facebook Quizzes To Exploit Your Narcissism For Easy Bucks

by Loknath Das September 12, 2017

written by Loknath Das

I have a tip for you. Those Facebook intelligence quizzes that claim “only 5% of the population will get all these answers right” are not actual intelligence quizzes. I hope you already knew that. If not, you’re welcome.

Those quizzes are either rigged, disingenuous (almost everyone can see the difference between these little colored squares) or are outright scams designed to get your personal information. Even at their best, quizzes shared on Facebook are marketing tools, either used for ad revenue, cookies, or brand engagement. They are, indeed, the ultimate clickbait.

Using Your Narcissism To Make Money

The one secret marketing companies don’t want you to know? They prey on the narcissism inherent in social media use to get clicks. A University of Michigan study shows that social media “reflects and amplifies our culture’s growing levels of narcissism” and attract individuals most in need of an ego boost. (The jury is out on whether social media is more about making a connection versus a venue for preening and self-promotion, but at least there’s a quiz to help you figure it out).

A high score on an intelligence-measuring test, for example, is one way to signal to your friends what you’ve known along: that you are very, very smart. With some tests that truly go viral, it is a way to one-up others. Take, for example, a vocabulary quiz that in June 2016 was shared more than 78,000 times and liked over 51,000 times.

As always, the results of this quiz should be taken with a grain of salt, not in this case because it is rigged but because the questions start off relatively simple then throw in some very obscure words. Thus, almost anyone choosing to take such a test will likely do well enough that he would share his results without embarrassment, but truly linguistically gifted people can have bragging rights by besting their peers.

Personal Brands Versus Joining a Tribe

Sometimes the bragging rights have to do with specialized knowledge. “Only a true Harry Potter fan,” for example, would get all the answers on this quiz. In other cases, they are much easier than promised, and sometimes, like in this quiz for nurses, they are completely rigged to give someone either 100 percent or 0 percent. Regardless, they evoke a positive dopamine rush in test takers. If not a true test of intelligence, they are at least a test of “trueness,” a belonging to a fandom or a specific group, like a reverse of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy.

People want to belong to a tribe. It might be a tribe of Phish Phans or Trekkies, or it could be belonging to a profession or a generation (after all, only a ’90s kid could identify these Backstreet Boys lyrics). Publicly identifying with a tribe is a part of our social media branding. In fact, almost everything we do online is part of our branding and influences how others view us. It is more advertisement than conversation, more media than social.

We brand ourselves offline as well, but many of those things subsequently get shared online to a wider audience. Christmas cards look more like slick family brochures rather than well wishes. Birthdays have to have themes and the decorations shouldn’t be from Party City. Weddings now have hashtags. We Pinterest our lives then replay every aspect online. In fact, a 2013 “Today” show survey of 7,000 U.S. mothers revealed that 42 percent have “Pinterest stress” about being insufficiently crafty.

Humans Search for Meaning

Part of personal branding is, quite simply, telling people who we are. Social media has enabled us to do so on an ever-increasing scale. A major appeal of early sites such as Friendster, Myspace, and the original Facebook was the ability to proclaim to the world your favorite bands, books, and quotes. Even without a quiz to fuel it, think about how many people shared a viral article about “Xennials,” a term referring to a possible “microgeneration” of individuals born between 1979 and 1983. (There also is a quiz to see if you’re a Xennial.)

Part of the reason the term caught fire was that Xennials like myself are in their mid to late ’30s and therefore in the perfect position to bring their ideas and humor into the mainstream (think the jokes and terminology in “Frozen,” which are perfectly geared to appeal to a mid-30s parent). A discussion of a Baby Boomer/Generation X microgeneration likely would not have the same breadth of discussion in mainstream media.

But a slightly more pejorative reason for the “Xennial” obsession is that it panders to the navel-gazing to which millennials (and Xennials) are prone. Hence the abundance of articles (and quizzes of course) shared on social media about introversion, starting with a veritable classic, The Atlantic’s 2003 “Caring for your Introvert,” or the recent trend du jour of identifying yourself as a particular Myers-Briggs type. When Heidi Preibe’s “The Definition of Hell for each Myers-Briggs Personality Type” went viral in May 2015, Google searches for the term skyrocketed, presumably also with an influx of individuals taking and retaking Myers-Briggs quizzes.

As for the Xennials, Sarah Stankorb made up the term in 2014 for GOOD Magazine. This microgeneration had previously been termed Generation Catalano (in 2011 by Doree Shafir) and later in 2015 by Anna Garvey as the Oregon Trail Generation.

So why did the popularity of the term explode in 2017—three years later? One reason seems to be that the term has been newly misattributed to an Australian professornamed Dan Woodman and recent articles therefore incorrectly make it seem as if this is an official microgeneration blessed by experts. Millennials are obsessed with identifying themselves, but they also want the weight of science behind it, just as they do when they read about the intricacies of Myers-Briggs and Jungian typologies or delve into the neurological patterns of introverts.

This obsession lends itself to personality quizzes, but not just weighty scientific ones. After all, the most popular quizzes shared in Facebook are lighthearted inconsequential fare, such as BuzzFeed’s “What City Should You Actually Live In?” (20 million contemporary views) and “Which State Do You Actually Belong In?” (41.4 million contemporary views).

BuzzFeed quizzes are written so the results feel personal and you can relate to them. “The answers genuinely correspond to the results.” Like Cosmo magazine quizzes of old, BuzzFeed writes the results first, putting people into buckets, then writes corresponding questions and answers.

Don’t Just Blame the Millennials

The example of old Cosmo quizzes demonstrates that this, of course, isn’t just a millennial thing. Personality tests, including Rorscharch’s inkblots and Woodworth’s Personal Data Sheet, came to the fore in the early twentieth century and show we want to quantify the human condition. Nowadays when we take personality tests, we get feedback that confirms our views of ourselves and help justify our behavior. What’s new, however, is that now part of the point is to share the results. By doing so, we not only tell people who we are but confirm it to ourselves.

Our society is self-absorbed, but social media isn’t the cause, and instead a symptom of something that arose in the 1980s.

Our society is self-absorbed, but social media isn’t the cause, and instead a symptom of something that arose in the 1980s. Narcissistic Facebook users are more likely to be middle-aged adults who use social media to gain approval from people in their existing social circles (whereas narcissistic young adults take to the more public arena of Twitter and broadcast their views opinions on an attempt to become thought leaders).

But it’s “the declaration of self, rather than just being” that theorists say represent a societal evolution. Words are not the only declaration; so are the choices we make public, such as our Amazon wishes or our streaming music playlists

Marketers know this. There are articles on “leveraging the social media ego” to get data on customer targets. Individuals want to project a self-image, and by doing so online they basically hand companies valuable information. We do so through our acquisition of things and our loyalty to brands, both which signify “who we are.”

All of this leads to interactive content marketing strategy. Brands know they need to make users feel as if they are gaining some insight into themselves and their lives, and that people want a personal and engaging conversation with their interactive content. Hence the proliferation of quizzes, almost all of which are some sort of marketing tool.

In the end, that’s all just good business and salesmanship. Knowing the psychology of quizzes and how that benefits marketers won’t stop us from taking them. The one thing for us quiz-happy folk to be aware of, though, are quizzes that try to take your personal information and sell it to others. Experts recommend staying away from any quiz that requires access to your Facebook profile to generate a word cloud, or your most popular statuses, or your “soulmate” from your friends list. When we let our ego lead the way, it is best to protect ourselves from being scammed.

[“Source-thefederalist”]

September 12, 2017 0 comment

Blogging

Blogging taken up more than just hobby, professionals use Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest to push content

by Loknath Das August 21, 2017

written by Loknath Das

Blogs, Blogging, Blogging as hobby, blogging a hobby, Social Media, blog posts on social media, blog posts on twitter, blog posts on facebook, blog posts on instagram

In the pursuit to stand out, many bloggers have begun to publish their content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. It’s very crucial to drive traffic from these channels
to the core site, they say.

Ananaya Banerjee

“Naked Cricket’s timing just happened, almost like a streaker on a cricket field… there’s no explaining it really,” says Gaurav Sethi about his first blog. New Delhi-based Sethi, who shut his advertising agency in the capital in 2005, started Naked Cricket (a blog on cricket, with articles, songs, cartoons, etc, on the game) the same year. At that time, blogging was a relatively new phenomenon in India, but that didn’t deter him. Three years later, after warming up to the online space, 50-something Sethi, with some friends, started his second blog, Bored Cricket Crazy Indians (BCC!), which features other bloggers apart from Sethi and their commentaries on cricket. As early as a decade ago, the idea of blogging was very simple: most people considered it just a hobby and got around to it only on weekends. It was bloggers like Sethi who gave it a twist by pursuing it professionally. The appeal, of course, is manifold. As a profession, blogging offers a mix of subjects—fashion, food, travel, tech and much more—to write on, the opportunity to work on one’s own terms, as well as make a living out of it. For some like 30-year-old Harsh Agarwal, it was a ticket to live a “boss-free” life. New Delhi-based Agarwal, a professional blogger and entrepreneur, quit his job at Accenture in the national capital within the first five months of launching his blog ShoutMeLoud, which offers solutions to aspiring bloggers and enables them to build their own blogs, in 2008 and has never looked back since.

“I never thought blogging could be pursued professionally until I discovered Google AdSense,” he says. Google AdSense, like other ad programmes, is designed to display targeted advertisements on website pages through which website publishers generate revenue, depending on the number of visitors or clicks on the site. “I was amazed to discover that all I needed to do was write what I liked, get traffic and the money would just come in,” Agarwal says. Today, Agarwal has eight blogs—ShoutMeLoud is the most popular, he says, followed by ShoutMeTech, which offers tech solutions, and Wpfreesetup, which helps users navigate WordPress. Ads, undoubtedly, play a very important role in the life of a blogger.

But more than being just a source of income, ad contributions help bloggers deliver better content on time by providing an incentive, offers 30-year-old Srinivas Tamada, the brain behind the blog, 9lessons. US-based Tamada started his blog in 2009 as a way to offer unique solutions to complicated Web programming problems. Later, Tamada transformed his blog into a money-spinning venture when he built a commercial social network software, Wall Script 8, which aims to enable people to understand and build their own social networks. The software is currently available in two versions for purchase on the Wall Script 8 website priced at $89 and $109, respectively, and has been downloaded over 5,000 times till date, with several ad-on upgrades on sale with it. Clearly, bloggers like Tamada didn’t take long to catch up to speed with the lucrative side of the profession that opened up because of the Internet boom.

A recent inductee into the club is 33-year-old Charu Tripathi, who, after spending four years in the e-commerce industry, quit her job as a brand and marketing consultant in Mumbai in 2015 and started Le Hedonist, a luxury-fashion blog, the same year. “Seeing the whole magic of building brands from the ground up had me itching to create something of my own,” says Mumbai-based Tripathi. It was her friend Neha Dwivedi, a graduate in luxury brand management from ESSEC Business School in Paris, who pitched the idea to collaborate for a blog to Tripathi. “I believed this was a truer application of all that I had learned,” says 33-year-old Dwivedi. The two girls started Le Hedonist with the aim to educate Indian consumers about fashion and luxury, they say.

Then there is 43-year-old Kalyan Karmakar. The food columnist and author relocated to Mumbai around 15 years ago after spending his early life in Iran and the UK, where he worked as a market research consultant. Interestingly, it was his wife Kainaz, who works with an advertising agency, who nudged him in the direction of blogging, observing his passion for food over the years. Karmakar’s blog, Finely Chopped, started eight years back and has been instrumental in fulfilling his “life’s mission to give men the confidence to cook, so that they don’t have to depend on anyone else to eat well.” Karmakar’s blog has him trying out recipes he saw his mother whip up or those that catch his fancy every now and then. He posts videos of himself cooking, along with pictures of places he has travelled to just to eat something famous, tasty or special.

Finely Chopped has not only won awards from the Food Bloggers Association, India, every year since its inception in 2013, it has also spread to other social media platforms such as YouTube, where Karmakar conducts personalised food walks in Mumbai to introduce viewers to his favourite food haunts throughout the city. Interestingly, Karmakar isn’t the only one branching out to alternative media. In the pursuit to stand out, many other bloggers, too, have begun to publish their content on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest. “It’s very crucial to drive traffic from these channels to the core site,” say Tripathi and Dwivedi.

Sethi of BCC! agrees. Bloggers need to use social media to reach out to the right people, he says. His advice to nascent bloggers? “(There is) no use writing in isolation. So be prepared to use social media tricks if you are starting a blog,” he offers. But in spite of its mass reach, social media has a flip side as well: the problem of plenty. With so many self-made experts in all fields, blogging is getting a tad bit saturated, admits Tripathi. The challenge that, hence, presents itself to bloggers, old and new, is how to be heard or seen over the clamour? Tripathi says it helps to give a thought to who one serves instead of just replicating the same content everywhere. “Bring a spin to your original idea,” the co-founder of Le Hedonist advises.

The other challenge is that of credibility. Agarwal of ShoutMeLoud ensures that the content published on his website goes through a basic checklist, verifying if it’s going to help someone programme their blog better. “I only publish it if the answer is yes,” he says. Similarly, cricket blogs like BCC! came up at a time when fearless comments in cricket journalism in the country were not aplenty, says Sethi. When he started BCC! in 2008 with a few blogger friends, they constituted pretty much all the Indian cricket bloggers back then. Soon, they added a Pakistani, a Bangladeshi and a Sri Lankan as guest bloggers. BCC! struck a chord with enthusiasts of the sport and even went on to win the BlogAdda Cricket Blogger Award three years back. “It has been one helluva ride,” says Sethi.

[“Source-financialexpress”]

August 21, 2017 0 comment