5 Startup Marketing Case Studies to learn from

It will take generations if a startup works on the formula of waiting for customers after building a setup. Miracles are an old story now, it’s just the edge of the pyramid, there is a lot of hard work filled inside it. Since, a startup needs much of everything like efforts, talent, time and funds and if it lacks in chasing any of them it needs strategies then.

It is a hard decision to look for an appropriate area of investment when there are extreme options available to offer you plans and channels to market your business. To stay in the reality, traditional marketing isn’t that effective. It takes more energy and money with lesser results. When you have just begun with the startup, make sure you have thought about every single step twice before executing and which channel or medium of marketing suits your business best.

The supreme method to win your expectations is to stay on grounds and do not hype too early, work according to your plan and stick to the strategy rather than going too fast in excitement. It is very common that startups lose their actual direction and motto in the heck of being in the competition or in the market.

There are various startups that have achieved their goals through successive marketing strategies at a very early stage of their startup, hence this article talks about how different startups used some hacks and attained a growth level in their business.

Importance of Marketing

The rate at which your business will grow majorly depends on the marketing factor. Marketing is the only way which introduces the product or service to the targeted audience and leaves its impact on them. You may have the most promising deal or product but it is of no use until it reaches to its potential customers. Marketing comprises of mainly advertising, promotions, sales and public relations. It is very essential to make the community aware about your business and service to attract the attention of the customers and expect growth in the business.

Let us look at how marketing works through the marketing funnel.

Awareness- This is a step to spread as much awareness as possible to ensure the results of the marketing. It can be done through any medium or channel whether on a digital platform or traditional mediums.

Interest- It requires finding the interest of the audience and recognizing the target audience as per your product and gain the attention of the same.

Consideration- This step includes boasting about your product, highlighting the features and characteristics of the deal and convincing the audience.

Intent- It is more of promotional sales to demonstrate your product on public platforms and show your vision and expectations to the potential customers.

Evaluation- Turn the words into actions and prove that your product is different from others and is the best in the market and then evaluate your sales and results of marketing.

Purchase- Track the sales transaction of your business and keep a record of existing customers as well as the aspiring customers and build connection chains through them.

This was a brief about how marketing funnel flows and also the importance and use of marketing in startups. Now we shall have a look at some case studies that depict the successful marketing strategies and have become one of the most rapidly growing startup companies.

1. Airbnb: generated awareness and interest about their product

Being one of the largest well-known startups, they still have a minimal UK team bound to operate out of London. The fact is that it does not matter whether the team is small or large, the plans and purpose works. They restricted their scaling to unpaid acquisition and started to look for the target audience which opts for something other than the usual living in a hotel and look for options to hang out more on the digital platform.

For the same they used Craigslist. The answer to the marketing question was easy, they pushed the visitors of their website to share their listing on craigslist and eventually lot more people got attracted towards Airbnb due to their attention seeking pictures and better listings. It turned into a rapid viral as the strategy fit their business.

Image Source: Growth Hackers

2. PayPal: played the right trick to gain interest of users.

It is very difficult to choose the most appropriate method to market your product. A lot of unsuccessful attempts follow the one success story; the same happened with PayPal. They tried many strategies but only one marketing plan gave them the lead.

PayPal started paying people for every signup. They paid an incentive of $20 for each signup and an extra $20 for the referral and soon the plan worked and people started signing up more and more, also with the increasing customers they gradually decreased the amount to $10 and then $5 and then finally to nothing.

This got them a huge amount of traffic on their site and increasing number of activating users as this method caused them lowest CAC as compared to the other methods.

Image Source: Quora

3. Groove: retained users through email marketing.

It is a software extending help for businesses at the cost of $1 per user. It is more of a subscription based business therefore it suffered high number of churn rates which was indeed making their business unendurable and fleeting at the same time.

Churn rates are basically the percentage of people losing interest and opting out of the subscription. They worked on the problem and figures and facts on how many users continued to stick for more than 30 days and the rest who are leaving before that time.

They were great at their strategy of understanding the struggle or detachment faced by people and resolving the issues by targeted mails referring the same. They got outstanding results through the mails that they sent to people opting out majorly before 30 days of time span. The plan reduced the churn rate up to 71%.

Image Source: Kissmetrics

4. Drop box: Boosted growth using referral marketing.

Dropbox has actually taken the help of referral marketing. The viral growth of dropbox has been incredible. They chose paid marketing and spend almost $250 for each user.

The strategy that took them really high was the earning of 500MB for every friend that you suggest dropbox. This worked really well for them; they gained up to 40 lakh users in 15 months.

Image Source: Referral Candy

They kept the process of inviting friends easy and quick so that people do not think even twice before doing that.

Image Source: Referral Candy

5. Picmonkey: increased revenue through ultimate purchase strategy.

This startup was in the field of photo editing. Notwithstanding the fact that they were ready with an excellent product in the highly competitive market, but the plus point was the freemium model that they incorporated with it. They left some features and filters which could be used for free so that people can get to know about the tools and become a user of it. For more advanced filters they asked for $4.99 on a monthly basis; they gathered millions of users through this strategy.

Image Source: Fortune

Conclusion

It becomes clear from the article that one needs to know in which part of the marketing funnel their business lies and should choose the best marketing plan accordingly. It is the only way which can lead your business on the top-notch.

People might lose chances and fail at some strategies, but if they hack the relevant marketing plan, they are half way through it.

Looking forward to boost your startup's marketing? Here are some of our case studies you can learn from : marketingmasala.com/growth-hacking-examples