A swarm of tech start-ups have mushroomed all over India in the last few years – in fact, in 2012 alone we have had close to 400 new tech companies setting up shop. With so many young companies in the market, marketing assumes a lot of importance for them in order to differentiate themselves and be successful. However, marketing is a vast portfolio and young companies can easily chase the wrong goals and spend precious dollars on irrelevant programs. So, what should a young company focus on?

1. Marketing priorities for emerging companies
A swarm of tech start-ups have mushroomed all over India in the last few years – in fact, in 2012
alone we have had close to 400 new tech companies setting up shop. With so many young
companies in the market, marketing assumes a lot of importance for them in order to differentiate
themselves and be successful. However, marketing is a vast portfolio and young companies can
easily chase the wrong goals and spend precious dollars on irrelevant programs. So, what should a
young company focus on?
First, the goal of these companies is to get customers and grow the business. This would involve
extreme focus on selling and activities to support it. Business growth will be the agenda for the
company in the first few years followed by customer engagement and brand building. Obviously,
marketing has to be aligned with this. How should companies go about deciding the marketing goals?
Here is a framework that will help companies with this issue –
On launch of the company
• Website, Sales collateral, Online marketing
• Prospect research
After registering revenues and gaining a few customers (~ 20 contacts)
• Case studies, testimonials, white papers, newsletter
• Client specific strategy
• Prospect research, research to explore new markets, competition intelligence
10+ active clients
• Participation in relevant third party events
• Speaking opportunities
• Review of offerings and align with market demands and experience with customers
• Customer satisfaction study
• Industry analyst programs
• PR
This is a basic framework and each company can build on this based on their context. This framework
indicates the additional programs that a company has to initiate at each stage as well as continue with
what was launched earlier. As the business grows, the scale and complexity of these programs is

2. bound to increase and this implies changes in the structure of the marketing team as well. This calls
for a more mature team to set the direction and get the job done.
While this is a generic framework, companies will have to figure out when to launch each program
and how much to spend based on their individual situations. For example, PR may make sense for a
company once they reach a certain scale and want to attract quality people for hiring purposes.
Analyst programs become important when a company has a unique offering that has been validated
by the market with few customer references and so on – in fact, even a small company can consider
this route.
Overall, the business has to revisit its goals and set its marketing priorities in accordance with that –
companies can use this framework as a guiding principle when doing so. Also see more info @
http://www.prayag.com