Build viral presence to accelerate revenue generation
Sales and Marketing Strategy
Viral presence to accelerate revenue growth
You developed viable products from scratch and you attracted a reasonable number of paying clients already. This itself is an achievement for Startup companies. So what’s next? For young companies, promoting their products to a wider market is really a huge challenge. This is because your brand recognition is still not optimal.
What I normally recommend Startup and young FinTech companies is to build “viral presence” to create buzz and raise profile in the relevant industry.
What is viral presence?
Developing viral presence requires a mixture of digital marketing, traditional marketing and contents optimisation including your website. The purpose of building viral presence is to accelerate “word of mouth” and to spread the name of your products to like-minded people effectively. How do you do it? Here is the tip:
Website optimisation - make your shop window attractive
Your website is the face of your company, so it needs to reflect the value proposition of your company and your products. Imagine it as your shop window on the high street. What will make people to stop by and peek through the window? Firstly it should be attractive and nice to look at. When people step into the shop, your products and core values should be neatly presented so that they want to touch and feel the products. Make sure that the site navigation is easy with clear product description to attract people’s attention. This will also make a significant difference for SEO (search engine optimisation) purposes.
Contents development - regularly release new contents and engage target client actively
In order to drive traffic to your website you need to publish new contents on a regular basis. The easiest way to do this is to create a blog page to showcase your insights. Write about your product, your company and your team to appeal to your target audience. It is also important to consider “thought leadership” to educate the industry so that you will be recognised as a domain expert. Write about your technology, methodology, also why you developed your products in the first place. And remember, each content needs to have its own landing page on your website. This will re-direct the traffic from the content landing page to your website, therefore, encourage them to explore other parts of your website.
Social media engagement - encourage word of mouth via preferred social media channels
Each content you created needs to be posted to social media with a link to the landing page of the content. If you are FinTech companies, LinkedIn is the best way to engage with your target audience, while Instagram can be a great channel for B2C startups. Post your insights regularly, ideally every week. Since your post has a link to the landing page on your website, more social media postings mean more traffic to your website.
Event and conference - increase visibility and appeal to target audience directly
In order to build your viral presence quickly, attending events and conferences for relevant industry is valuable. There are several ways to engage with attendees - you can simply attend the event and socialise with other attendees (initial introduction), or if your company is more mature and have sufficient budget, take a sponsorship package to attract as many attendees as possible to your exhibition stand. Speaking at a panel with other industry leaders is always a good idea to raise your profile in the industry.
Sales approach - tackling both tails
Now you built a good foundation of “viral presence” using the tools described above. The next step is for your sales team to actively pursue the leads generated via each channel. Also, remember your target audience needs to see your name and your product at least 5 times in different channels before they decide to talk to you. So it is critical to be visible all the time. Also important is to understand how the industry’s ecosystem works. Who will benefit from your service, product and solution? How are these market participants interact with each other? For example, if you are promoting a new payment solution, specific B2B merchant group(s) might be the first target, but then their B2C clients can also be targeted to address the entire workflow from both ends. This will in turn accelerate viral presence as these two target groups within the same workflow talk about your products to multiply the effect.
Industry partnership development - collaborate wisely to position your company effectively
Direct sales are very important to grow your revenue. However, developing industry partnership and collaboration is also vital to raise your profile. Ultimately these partnerships should be aimed at creating an opportunity for you to build a new revenue stream. There are various ways to achieve this. For example, if your product is addressing a gap in the industry, but you don’t have a good distribution network, you can seek a partner who already has a good presence in your target client base. You can also think about jointly creating a new product and leverage your partner’s established client base for distribution.
This all seems a lot of work and you might feel overwhelmed. But I have seen many startup companies grow successfully when they master the art of the viral presence. So it’s not too late for you to do the same.
