Growing your startup is a skill and not everyone is crafted to do a great job at that. Crazy working hours, disgruntled employees, fluctuating revenue charts, and many more hurdles might make you wonder if you should still continue with your dream of building and nurturing your startup. But hey, failures are indeed stepping stones to success and one needs patience to withstand difficult times. Patience may not necessarily lead you to success. Hence, here are a few tips on what it takes to grow your startup by 500% a month.
Let us try and understand the thought process behind introducing smart bots to Grow Your Startup. Narayan and his partners were finding it really cumbersome to talk to each and every customer and constantly record their queries and qualms. They had to find a better way to stay in touch with their clients while keeping the momentum going steadily. Some of the questions that haunted them were -
- “How do our customers talk to us whenever they need to?’
- “How well are our customers using our services and what are they liking or disliking about each of our offerings?”
- “What better could we do to improve the quality of our service?”
- “How to introduce customisation for a great user experience?”
While these questions were quite daunting, Ryan decided to do something about this rather than simply ponder over this. Chatbots were an interesting option to explore and here’s what Grow Your Startup discovered about employing these bots to meet their expectations.
Have you ever sat in a conference room, filled with top officials of your company and being questioned what’s the ROI of a particular campaign? How often have you been able to provide a satisfactory answer? Have you ever stared blank at them because you do not know what ROI is and how to calculate it? Well, if you have faced any one of these situations, then you are not alone, my friend. Fournaise Marketing Group , found that nine out of ten global marketers lack training in ROI calculation. This is a serious problem for the success of your startup. In this write-up, we understand basics of what ROI is and how to measure it efficiently for your campaigns and venture.
Traditional forms of marketing like TV, print ads etc had their own charm till some years back. But, since the advent of digital marketing, the former media have faded in popularity. One of the main reasons for this is the measurability of what’s being invested in each of the campaigns. How can you accurately measure the worth of your money that’s spent on TV and print ads? However, you can get an exact factor of how your campaign has performed in the digital medium. This factor is what we call as ROI or Return On Investment. Now that we are familiar with this term, let us understand how to measure it.
A lot of marketers claim that half the money that they spent on a marketing campaign was wasted, but sadly, they are unable to track as to which half was it that got wasted. To overcome this challenge, we have certain parameters that help us in calculating the performance of our ads along with numbers that support the argument. Now, to calculate the ROI of a campaign, you need to first define certain goals for the same. These goals are further attributed by KPIs also known as Key Performance Indicators. Your KPIs could be any of the following, depending on what goal you have defined for your desired campaign. Answer these questions to drill down to the right goals.
- What is the overall purpose of your campaign? Based on overall performance, your KPI could be Traffic, Leads or Extent of reach of your campaign.
- Where is your ad appearing? You could further define channels based on whether you want to measure the performance of your ad across website, blog, mobile application, search engines. etc.
- Why are you running the campaign – to generate leads, to drive more traffic to your site, to increase number of views on a video, or to increase conversions? Identify this factor very carefully and you are sure to tread towards success.
- How are your customers landing on a particular page of your website? Is it through organic search, referrals, social media interaction or paid campaigns?
Ensure that you set realistic targets and goals for your business rather than setting super ambitious ones that you know are impossible to achieve. There are various Analytics tools that help in assessing the ROI of your campaigns. They present all the data in one single platform and it is then your job to perfectly extract the information you need from all that data. Google Analytics , Crazy Egg and a few other platforms offer exhaustive data collection and presentation. You may use one of these open tools or design one that’s unique for your business. You may also do wonders with a simple Microsoft Excel sheet as that’s the skeleton of all these sophisticated tools.
Now that you have your KPIs set, we need to keep in mind, certain important factors that may cause obstacles in calculating the correct ROI. So, here are a set of standard rules that you ought to follow to avoid making mistakes while crunching those numbers.
Your website and social media profiles are the most powerful means of communication with your customers. It is therefore imperative to maintain a good behaviour on these platforms to manage your brand image and also to connect with your audience. Frequent checks for malware hits, appropriate comments on blog posts, regular updates on blog, managing your CMS appropriately, maintaining website hygiene for SEO and other online purposes are a few nuances of website management. On the other hand, periodic updates of posts on social profiles, timely response to customer queries and complaints are some of the aspects of social media management. While this may seem overwhelming for you at first, but you can make all this a lot simpler by following certain habits that will help you streamline this process.
Let us first look at website management. You may want to look at some of the below mentioned parameters to effectively handle your website.
