2. About Me
• Hometown of Savannah, GA
• UGA Grad – BBA MIS 2010
• Symantec Wonder Workshop Symantec
• Business Intelligence + Marketing + Front-End Dev
• Youngest Finalist for Digital Analytics Rising Star Award
@akhil_anumolu
7. n00b marketing plan
1. Build a product
2. PR the heck out of it
3. Wait on users
4. Start buying users
5. Bang your head on a wall
@akhil_anumolu
8. Pre Game: Where are you going?
1. Who is our market?
– Are you sure?
2. How big is this market?
3. Who are the competitors in the space?
4. Is there a geographic bias?
5. What resources do we have?
– Content
– Budget
– Value Proposition of Minimum Viable Product
@akhil_anumolu
9. Beta It, Bro
• Test and Get Feedback From:
– Family
– Friends
– Online Communities (HackerNews, Product Hunt,
G+ Communities)
– Local Community (FourAthens, Classes, Other
Startups)
– Influencers (bloggers, investors, local celebs)
– Be Daring: Ask a stranger
@akhil_anumolu
10. Beta It, Bro (cont.)
• When doing the beta, capture honest &
precise feedback:
– No rating system
– Precisely what is wrong or good
• Understand if there are any reoccurring or
correlating feedback
• Determine if those changes need to be made
• Beta trials are great for R&D and marketing
@akhil_anumolu
12. Top Gear: The Helpful Tools – Analytics
• Analytics
– Core base of
understanding:
• Customers
• Page Flow
• Conversion Flow
• Demographics
• Usage
• Google Analytics
– Google Tag Manager*
• Mixpanel
• Kissmetrics
• CrazyEgg
• Facebook Insights
• Twitter Analytics
@akhil_anumolu
13. Top Gear: The Helpful Tools - Organic
• Organic
– Easy ability to be found
– Zero-to-low cost
– Can be time draining:
• Setup
• Update
• Optimize
• Multi-Platform
• Google Webmaster Tool
• Bing Webmaster Tool
• Structured HTML
• Schema.org
• Moz.com
• Yslow
• Yoast – Wordpress
• Google Search Trends
• Twitter Cards
• Facebook Open Graph
• Desk.com (feedback)
• MailChimp
@akhil_anumolu
14. Top Gear: The Helpful Tools – Paid Media
• Paid Media
– Most platforms now plug
and play
– Can both market and
gather insights
– Can get pricey fast
– Need to keep an eye for
low ROI spending
• Paid Search
– Google Adwords
– Bing/Yahoo Adcenter
• Social Ads
– FB/Twtr/LI Ads
• Display
– Google
– Luminate
• Remarketing
– Adwords
– FB Exchange (Adroll)
@akhil_anumolu
16. Lights, Camera, Transaction: Organic
• Content is still king
– Blogging
– Social Media
– Getting “featured”
• Content = backlinking
– Still a core function of SEO
– When you backlink, the other site will probably
see
• Hope is to have backlinks to your site
@akhil_anumolu
17. Lights, Camera, Transaction: Organic
(cont.)
• Social is major to organic growth
– Voice of brand
– Visual lifestyle presentation
– Outreach to and from customers
– Social results now indexed
• PR is still a top initial driver
– Reach out for stories
– Give exclusive content
– Can tell stories from a different angle
@akhil_anumolu
18. Lights, Camera, Transaction: Paid
• If Organic is discovery, Paid is AMPLIFIER
– Don’t shotgun approach
• Use your analytics
• Use top engaging content
• Look towards known customer bases
• Search Engine Marketing is for “what?”
– People looking for an answer
– Compelling to click message – original clickbait
– Personalization is key
@akhil_anumolu
19. Lights, Camera, Transaction: Paid
(cont.)
• Social Media Paid Marketing is “who?”
– People not expressly looking, but:
• Ads can be highly targeted
• Ads can be visually compelling
• Direct voice to the customer: how can we help you?
• Remarketing is the “when?”
– Customers have shown interest
• Can convert them
• Bring them back to share/refer
@akhil_anumolu
20. Lights, Camera, Transaction: Paid
(cont.)
• When doing paid, always note:
– ROI – Return On Investment
– COA – Cost Of Acquisition
– CTR – Click Through Rate
– BR% - Bounce Rate Percent
– TOS - Time On Site
– Drop Off Funnel
• Paid does not equal sales
– Effective paid does
• Optimize and test
@akhil_anumolu
Born and raised (for the most part) in GA
Graduated from UGA in Dec 2010
Started at Symantec, First Employee at Wonder Workshop (formerly Play-i), now back at Symantec
Plethora of roles and experience
Pics of places my jobs have taken me
No definitive where to start. Each company needs to consider where their resources are best spent.
Operation analogy: you can start anywhere to address any problem but every small movement can make a big difference (positive or negative)
No matter where you start, once you start seeing positive movement, it will seem like magic. We need to help you decipher the tricks from the treats
Adora Cheung from Homejoy presented it best about what Homejoy originally thought for user acq/marketing, like most startups, which she presented in Sam Altman’s Stanford Startup class. Sam Altman also runs Y Combinator.
Who and why is your market? What lead you to believe this? Always a good idea to understand whom your are filling a need for although you may learn over time that your best customers are not who you intended to sell to
How big is this market and what is the growth rate? A market we see with potential now may not exist in the future: competitors take the space, market changes, or lack of acq. Lack of acq: lots of great kickstarters that get traffic but don’t get funded. Creators Conundrum: great idea but no uptake… world may not be ready for it. Apple Watch was done before my Steve Jobs but never progressed till now. Tablets started by Microsoft but world wasn’t capable of utilizing it yet.
Understanding your competitors can help you understand your own business’ ability to market. Where are they succeeding and failing? Competition is good, can build off each other. Lyft and Uber teamed up to help pass gov’t regulation for ridesharing.
Goes back to who is your market a bit, but where are they and will there be a geographic bias to your product? Look at home companies expand outside of the Bay Area, usually to NY, Chicago, Austin, Seattle, LA, maybe ATL. Why does this occur in a pattern? Uptake ability aka user acq. Every new market presents unique problems for user acq. Lyft in KC example.
Look at what resources you have to determine how you want to progress. Inbound (content, blog, seo, social media, whitepapers, podcasts) vs Outbound (paid media). Inbound then Outbound to help answer the past 4 questions. Also ensure your MVP has a solid value proposition that provide content by itself: is it solid enough to sell alone?
Before you decide to full fledge and launch, take time to beta test your product with select groups like those listed. Be able to capture feedback: email, onsite, in app, etc. (talk more about it in tools)
Family: will be the nicest to you. “Well done kiddo” won’t be the best feedback but if your family can understand and use the product, there is some level of validation.
Friends: can be similar to family but more blunt with feedback.
Online Communities: So these can be great for quick, targeted feedback but you need to be ready for the influx of traffic and join requests.
Influencers: This will be similar to cold calling but can’t hurt. Most will ignore you or say no, keep trying. Your investors can help with connections as well.
Finally, ask strangers. Go out to a park, a festival, food truck park and just ask random folks. I got a lot of good feedback like this and these are the type of people you will market to later
Feedback needs to be precise as to what is great and what is not. This will also tell you the types of customer demographics that appreciate your product, a la your customer marketing segment.
Beta trials are an honest and simple way to easily find out, before spending, who your demographic is. That type of data is extremely valuable to smartly market the product to that demographic, which should be a cheaper cost of acquisition than other groups.
Analytics are the key foundation to effectively marketing, whether organic or paid. The questions presented earlier about understanding your market can be answered with greater certainty by having a proper analytics implementation.
The best and cheapest start is with Google Analytics. It is worth spending time understand the full features of this tool, as it can provide a plethora of useful data for you. Demographic data, traffic referral, page flow analysis, on-site event analysis, transactional, etc. Recommend deploying Google Tag Manager first, as you will be able to deploy all your tools and tags through it to your site much easier. GTM is a container that sits on the page that will allow you to choose when and where to fire what tags in it. Has pre-built sections for easily deployment of google products and open HTML/JS editor to deploy outside products/tags.
Organic is the cheap but time intensive way to get yourself going. This is the best way to rank well early for easy customer discovery.
It may cost you little to nothing only because your time cannot be quantified yet.
Discuss on each tool
Paid Media is when you are ready to share out and amplify the content you have.
