Interactive Marketing Startup Challenges

Many digital marketing startups struggle with the concept of "How do we make money?" and "How do we keep from growing too quickly?”. Many times the creative and development areas are sure they can do it better than existing companies, so they start an agency and begin building product.

Then the question becomes “How do we become a full service company and not a website factory?” Unless you've got great connections and access to a network of partnerships (or a trust fund) you will struggle with making the leap from factory to company.

I believe the key to this success is to build a formal plan. Identify the stakeholders, your target customers, influencers, and decision makers. Know the target for your message. Understand your audience and identify the channels that can connect your message to them.

If you are in the online space I think there are a fundamental set of skills required to be successful.

Step 1 – Build a Marketing Plan

Know who you are, who your audience is and how to reach them. Once you know your customer and how to reach them, you can use some of the following ideas in addition to any “traditional” marketing techniques. This plan should define conversion points for a defined sales funnel.

Customer Acquisition

1. SEO - This is the best thing you can do for yourself for free. Create the “theme” or your site and brand, develop your core keywords, and integrate them into every page of your site. Once you are successful at this for your own site, it becomes a core service you can offer your clients.
2. Functional Cross Link Development - Identify sites that are relevant to what you're doing and build inbound links using your targeted keywords. Cross linking in the blog space is particularly easy if you find other agencies, contractors, or bloggers that share in your fundamental vision. Build an optimized company statement that is easily shared among the other sites and can be readily linked using social bookmarking sites like Digg.
3. Social Media – This is the channel to develop if you want to create buzz about your brand. By the nature of sites like Twitter, Myspace, and Facebook, connecting with people who can then champion your cause for you becomes another source of “free” public relations. This is only going to be affective if you take time to truly enage in the conversations.
4. Advertising – Remember the old adage “You have to spend money to make money”. Work towards aggressively bidding on PPC (Paid Search) in your geo-targeted area to begin. Eventually if you SEO efforts are working then this becomes less necessary and more strategic.
5. Blogging – Participate in the “blogosphere”. Write blogs, comment on blogs. Some of the best buzz is developed when the comments on a blog further the thought of the original piece. If you want any traction on your blog, you need to get it exposure and the best way is to get out there and add value to other blogs. Be authentic, have your own voice.

Step 2 – Formalize the Business Process

This is the factory part. A car manufacturer is not making it up as they go along. There is plan and a design and there are roles and responsibilities.

Discovery

1. Research – Do your homework on your customer. Live their brand. Understand the path to market, understand the value they offer.
2. Interview the Stakeholders – Identify the people within the client company that will have an opinion. Too often new companies build what the person that contacted them asks for, not what is really needed.
3. Define Requirements -- Weed out the wants/needs/wishes and formally document the requirements with the customer. This is a big part of managing expectations.
4. Create the Concept -- Like requirements, but less tangible. Manage the expectation of the client by creating a document that captures the “essence” and “feeling” of the project.

Design

1. Formal Concept Documents – Create User Experience Flows to map what you expect to happen on the site.
2. Create Design Comps -- Show the customer a picture of what they are buying. This can also be accomplished with limited functionality prototypes depending on the skills sets of your creative team. Both methods work equally well.
3. Functional Spec -- This is where the rubber meets the road. Even if you are a small shop with many of the same people gathering the requirements and building the site, the spec becomes your reference document for future enhancements. The habit also sets you up for growth and spikes in business. If you write a good spec, it is much easier to be successful with contract programmers.

Build and Deploy

1. Programming standards -- Programming to particular set of standards will alleviate future problems with developer changes etc.
2. Deploy to Test -- Create a method to deploy things to a test environment. The live site URL should be considered sacred. One of the worst things you can do is drive people to your site and then have things break or look bad.
3. Deploy to Live -- Deploy with Fanfare! Engage the marketing areas to help get the word out.
   

Step 3 – Develop a Service Model

If you build it well they will come back again and again. Determine how to foster the long-term relationships with your customer. Manage the expectations on the front-end of the relationship.

Customer Retention

1. Experience – The first thing is the experience people have with you and your product. If it's bad you can guarantee that they're leaving and you'll need to pay double to market to them again and win them back. If it's great, then they'll probably become an evangelist for you.
2. Content - If you're focused on advertising revenue, you better have fresh content going up every day on that website.
3. Email - Cultivate those relationships with customers by connecting with them regularly. Let them know what changes and projects are in the queue for you. Actively send them links to white papers and resources that can help them make better business decisions. Do this with a personal touch. Mass emails from vendors are usually not well received but if a real person is reaching out, it is harder to just throw that email away.
4. Feedback – “Feedback is almost always bad” so make it very easy for people to complain. If your customers feel they are heard and part of the solution, it solidifies the relationship for the long-term. Find a way for your customers to provide you with their ideas. It takes the guesswork out of what people want to see next. They'll just tell you.

Successfully moving from a “Factory” to a “Full Service Business” is tricky but I think it is manageable with proper planning and thought. Engage the thought leaders in your company and take the time upfront to formally put your plan on paper. If you do this, it will be a much more successful and enjoyable experience.

Social Media Value

With all of the buzz about Web 2.0 and Social Networking, one would think that we have found the panacea of a new way to do business online. The concept is one of all about "me" and not of all about the customer. I think that we have to transcend the "social" and better incorporate it into the "business". Why do we think that the .com bubble burst was much different than what we see on Twitter? Many .com companies made nothing, offered little, and therefore failed when people realized. I am a Twitter user and I like what I am able to learn from those I follow, but is it realistic to expect it to be around with no visible income stream? The sale I made through a contact on Twitter this morning cost me nothing and Twitter some processing time. Web 2.5 or 3.0 or 5.0 will have to resolve the swing from the consumer space through the social space to the eventual consumer space again.