Marketing Mesclun Salad [4 grams]
Walk through the marketing campaign of your venture?
Do you have a website and other social media channels up and running?
How and how often will you engage your end user base and audience?
Daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually?
How many 'in-the-field' Marketing professionals do you need to realistically scale according to the timeline you presented?
How important is customer retention to your Venture?
What sort of “churn” is common for ventures in your category and how do you plan to minimize it?
Marketing Campaign:
My marketing campaign will initially involve a deep dive into the product, designing an MVP, Prototype and Beta for high ease-of-use. This will be done in partnership with officials in Somerville, particularly the Director of Constituent Services. Somerville's current Mayor, Joe Curtatone, has a history of close collaboration with the Kennedy School, as well as a history of innovative governance techniques in order to improve city management.
The Director of Constituent Services has a similarly forward-looking attitude, and has requested to collaborate on a potential solution with OrangeCone.
Concentration on product development and execution in partnership with Somerville would seek to develop my first customer champion - a customer that would evangelize my product to all other customers. In this kind of partnership role, I may label Somerville a 'Research Partner', or some other appropriate title.
With an evangelist in my primary subscribing customer type, I would like to create marketing materials around our successes with our Research Partners, and by doing so drive adoption among other similar customers.
Social Media:
I have reserved the Twitter handle @OrangeCone1 , but have not begun Tweeting. I have no active blog or Facebook page currently.
End User engagement:
End Users will be engaged constantly via user-generated content to the system, so daily. Popular Issue reports will likely also get pushed out via Social Media as well, which would at minimum be a weekly occurrence. I'd like to also write a weekly blog regarding data in government, or public space issues, or the like.
Marketing Professionals:
Most of this is based upon my marketing strategy. At the moment, I believe my marketing strategy will consist of taking the purchase decision away from those involved with RFP purchases as much as possible. Initially I will do that with my subscription pricing model, which is designed to price below the purchase funding level required for an RFP.
Beyond this, I will simply attempt to sell in a way that will deliver benefits to local governments, yet take the purchase decisions away from them. One way to do this would be to sell this service to an Association of governments, which would purchase a set amount of licenses for distribution to the cities that belong to them.
Selling to Nonprofits and Universities, Property Management companies, and Utilities would require a shorter selling cycle then selling direct to government.
Therefore, my marketing sales force size will be highly dependent on government procurement processes which could vary at a state and local level. I believe ultimately this will combine with a sort of viral product growth, driven simply by my website, and backed by some amount of customer reps.
Last, a basic rule that follows from this is simply that as business grows, this workforce will likely grow as well.
Customer Retention:
This is KEY to my venture! It's key to long-term success of this venture because the tighter the network of subscribing users, the tighter the coverage will be of each public space that may have reported issues. The tighter the network, the shorter the issue response time-tables will likely be, so this is an ultimate goal of my company.
But more basically, customer retention is key because it will allow me to see if my product is still filling the needs of the customer base that we serve.
And most importantly to potential investors: the will be looking to see if my Life-Time Value / Customer Acquisition Cost ratio is at 3 or higher - a general sign that a tech product is ready to scale. If I'm losing too many customers too soon, or it costs too much to acquire these customers, I will not reach a potentially successful LTV / CAC ratio.