Challenges of Marketing Your Own Startup
Aug 19th
We’ve got a Social media company operational since Jan 2010…After a good 8 months of business, we now have a cluster of good and exciting brands in our basket…but we feel that things can be even better esp. in terms of our annual projections (which, I would confess are extremely ambitious!). After much deliberation and team meetings amongst ourselves, we’ve realized the basic missing piece of our puzzle – not enough marketing activities for our own company! It is indeed ironical how many advertising and marketing startups forget to market themselves properly, or should I rather say how they ignore the role of marketing for themselves.
We’ve now hopefully cracked the process for ourselves (it is still WIP). Here are some of the learning that we drew from our brainstorming sessions:
1) You are the Client – While creating a marketing PR plan for your startup, consider yourself as yet another client. Take yourself and your planning and strategy as seriously as you would have done for the client who’s paying you for your work
2) Discipline – Create a timeline for meeting your marketing milestones and go about in a disciplined manner
3) Commitment – Dedicate enough of your and yours team time for brainstorming and execution of your plans
A set objective or road map is very essential to achieve one’s own marketing objectives. We drew up a road map for ourselves and a process to follow (hopefully this is the right one! Shall be adding more to it as we go along):
1) Budget your marketing plan – Align your marketing plan with your business goal i.e. if your revenue objectives are $X in the first year, put aside ‘a’ times $X as your marketing budget (the ratio varies but we’ve committed a minimum percentage for it)
2) Be honest about your ambitions – The above ratio also depends on your overall revenue ambitions in context to your industry. If your first year revenue projection translate into more than 15-20% of the market share, then accept the fact that you are not just a ‘small’ startup and need to take ‘Big’ marketing steps to meet those targets
3) Monetize your Man hours – One of the biggest hurdles is actually putting asides finances for your own marketing plan, especially if you are a marketing/advertising startup yourself (Well we get paid for it by clients, why should we spend on it!?). The best way is to break the total budget (calculated in point 1) in a monthly expenditure and convert them into man hour cost vs. payout cost. Calculate your man hours on the market rate
4) Embrace PR – For so many years we all have downplayed PR over marketing for our clients. It is time now to embrace it wholeheartedly. Go out and meet the reporters, connect with the bloggers and if required ‘pay’ a professional PR agency to help you out
5) Social Media – Most important form of marketing if you are in an internet business. Much been written about this so I am not going to go deep into it. But yes, do have a plan in place before you dive headlong into social media i.e. what messaging you want to commnicate, what content you need to develop etc
6) Create a marketing/PR excel Plan – Put all your plans on an excel and stick to it!
shall be putting more as we go along..
India’s First Multiple Platform Synchronized Social Contest!!
Jul 21st
Fan Page Management – Indian Photo League
Jul 1st
This blog posts will be featuring the behind the scene activities to put light on what it all takes to create a highly interactive and involving Fcaebook platform which is driven, not just alone by the campaign management team but by every single individual who is connected to it somehow.
Indian Photo League is a recent entry in the crowd of facebook fan pages, featuring high involvement Photo contest, providing professional, as well as amateur photographers a space to reach out the thousands of the people, with their amazing photographs. This photo contest is supported by Facebook application and a website. Cricket themed photo contest was the initiating activity to give a smooth start to this photo contest platform. Amazing cricket moments captured by great photographers across the country and even over the globe, voted and commented by our highly interactive fans made this first contest theme a success.
“With only 10 days passed after starting the contest, our team got something to be caring for, and that was Three Thousand Fans. Our fans were not just being there in the list of fans but they were actually coming forward with comments and idea, making our page a highly interactive platform for photography lovers and photographers. This all happened because for us our fans were not just a figure to show that we are reaching to the masses very quickly but we were actually building a team to work together to make this photo contest platform a huge success.
What was actually happening on Indian Photo League Fan page was totally different from the ‘Gyaan’ given by the so called social Media Gurus over the internet. Our team was connecting with our fans, replying their comments as soon as we could, answering their questions no matter how many times they were asked. Every “Like” and “comment” by our fans brought happiness to our faces. We were waking up in the middle of nights just to check if any of our fan as awake and is there query by him/her. Every interaction was making the bond between our team and our fans more strong. May be for many people our team was living in a virtual world, but for our team it is all real and full of passion.
We reached 7,000 Fans in three months and what was the most interesting happening there was our fans participation al a large level. As our team was working hard to track the authenticity of the photographs in the contest, so do our fans were working hard. Many times they helped us by giving sources and links for authenticating the photographs. It didn’t took us a long time to learn that actually we were not just a team of few people but actually we were the team of more than 7,000 people, and what in this world can stop us. Indian Photo League has reached to more than 8,000 Fans or we should call it a team of 8,000+ people.
Indian Photo League Management (Webitude) would like to thank the readers of this post and our fans for their great involvement. We will soon launch our Facebook application to support the uploading and voting for the “Nature Photography” theme contest.
Thanks
Team webitue (Bluelemon Technologies Pvt. Ltd.)
Managing “Indian Photo League”
The Facebook Movie – First Teaser
Jun 26th
Well we always said that Facebook is a ‘phenomenon’ worth spending time with. So here’s the first teaser of the movie..http://www.thesocialnetwork-movie.com/
So what next? With 400 Mn active users, Facebook is third largest ‘country’ in the world! So what about governance, political system and representation? Are we looking at an emerging Democracy? Plenty to think and watch out for..
Social Media Marketing – The Webitude Way
Jun 21st













