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Marketing for Indian web2.0 startups

March 1, 2007 · Posted in Entrepreneurship, Misc

Marketing is a crucial aspect of any entrepreneurial venture. It is one of the key ingredients needed for a successful execution of your startup efforts. For a tech startup which relies on user community, marketing is a stepping stone to customer acquisition. After all, web 2.0 is all about user communities.

So the question boils down to -

How do market your site to the intended audience ? How do you attract the users and build a community ? How do you generate the buzz amongst the target audience ?

For a startup, marketing can be daunting for a couple of reasons:

1) Several of the startups are bootstrapped and consequently, they cant afford the huge marketing budgets or offer incentives like some of the big players.

2) Most often, tech entrepreneurs hail from a technical background. And so, they have a learning curve when it comes to marketing their startup.

So, what options does a small startup have when it comes to marketing ?

1) Make your product viral.

For the uninitiated, here’s an explanation on what viral marketing means. Recent tech success - YouTube, Flickr, MyBlogLog all fit this bill. YouTube was initially a dud. Once they introduced the viral features, their pageviews went off the roof. MyBlogLog was initially a site analytics company. Once they introduced their widget, they became overnight superstars.

Try to incorporate viral features into your product. Word of mouth and virility will complete the job for you. Also, the marketing costs and efforts involved in this approach are almost negligible

2) Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM).

Lets face it. As pervasiveness of Google increases, it becomes a key traffic driver for your site. Identify some of the keywords that relate to your product / service. Optimize your site in such as way that your organic ranking improves across the search engines. Leverage Google Sitemaps.

Apply for an Adwords account and start bidding for applicable keywords. The beauty of Adwords is that you are in control of how much to bid and what to bid for. That helps you to buy advertising as per your budget constraints.

3) Issue a press release.

For a reasonable amount, you can issue a press release about your product and your startup. A lot of prominent news media use these press releases for their stories. You can hope that you get lucky and your press release gets picked up and written by a journalist.
4) Buzz the blogosphere.

Identify some of the prominent bloggers who like to write about startups and pitch your startup to them. This will not only help you generate the buzz, but all the linking from the blogs will also help increase your PageRank. Although, point to note - with this approach, you’re basically reaching out to a small group of people, who may not represent the actual demographics of your intended audience.
Along the same lines, try to attend and present your startup in BarCamps, Proto (by selection only) etc.

5) Guerilla marketing.

Try out innovative guerilla marketing technics. At the same time, be careful about not spamming / inconveniencing the user. That would have a detrimental effect. What can be some guerilla marketing technics - hire some people to hand out flyers outside the mall in your city, distribute custom t-shirts etc.

6) Think outside the box.

You have to think out of the box. Here’re a couple of approaches I found very interesting.

Preeti Shah of CopperPages documents her life as an entrepreneur and uploads the videos to YouTube.She’s had 5000 viewers and 160 subscribers to her channel. Notice how ‘CopperPages.com’ is always adorning the background. Although she may be reaching a small audience, its a brilliant move

Guruji decided to do movie-advertising in a multiplex in Bangalore. Not cheap, but definitely not as expensive as advertising in other media. Check out their post about this marketing effort here.

Note: I do not have a marketing background and by no means I claim that the above approaches are the holy grail. If you can think of other interesting means of marketing, please let me know. I’ll add them to the list above.

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2 Responses to “Marketing for Indian web2.0 startups”

manish on March 24th, 2007 2:04 pm

i was wondering if it would effective to market a social networking website for Indian community, by publicizing it in blogs of Indian author. Like asking Indian authors to review the website or write an article about the website. Would this give a very good publicity to the website in Indian market.
pranav on March 25th, 2007 1:41 am

why not ? Definitely…

Pranav.