girish

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..