In managing a business, both an outward-oriented ‘extrinsic’ competency and an internal-oriented ‘internal’ competency are required.
It can be called “internal” competence to acquire or maintain a core workforce, to plan or develop a product or service, to raise funds, or to decide how to manage internal operations.
Conversely, a set of processes that informs a target customer of their product or service through an optimized channel and creates a “relationship” with the customer is called an “external” competency. External competence means marketing.
Marketing does not simply mean sales. If you do not have a marketing experience, most of you will not see it from the customer’s point of view, and you will make a mistake in approaching it from the point of view of the product.
Internal competence is clear what to do. However, marketing as an external competence does not know how to advertise your products or services or how to position your products or services in your mind. Moreover, if one method fails, I do not know what the best alternative is.
Therefore, in order for a company to be successful, internal competencies must be the basis, but external competencies play an equal and greater role.
Marketing Goals
Everyone knows that it is not a sustainable way to simply attract customers by offering products at a low price and offering them prizes. After all, the goal of marketing is to get a group of customers with high loyalty like Apple. Having a group of customers with high loyalty allows you to get a market without being overwhelmed by your competitors.
Companies must create unique values that only they can provide and reflect them in goods or services. And we must strive for continuous communication with customers.
Through these efforts, companies can ultimately gain high loyalty from their customers.
There are many new products and services available every day. In order to survive and succeed in the flood of such products and services, you must have your own strengths that differentiate you from your competitors. By constantly interacting with customers, companies need to provide an environment in which customers can experience their products and services and convince them to buy their differentiated values.
There are many different types of value. They can also improve the inconvenience of existing products or services, provide new benefits, innovate, or provide new and unique mental values. Or you can communicate with your customers in a completely different way and create differentiated values together.
The core of start-up marketing
In start-ups, it is difficult to spend a lot of money on marketing due to insufficient costs. In fact, it is more accurate to think that marketing costs are scarce.
After all, start-ups that lack the marketing budget are forced to use techniques that can achieve high-quality, low-cost results. Storytelling and growth hacking can be the way to go.
Storytelling
For start-ups that are always lacking in cost, it is best for the customer to sympathize with their “story” and spontaneously spread the story. In other words, storytelling should be a ‘story’ that customers should be able to empathize with their ‘story’ and be able to spread it voluntarily through SNS. Especially when there is a concise story and a compelling image is seen together, it has a big effect.
The human brain more easily empathizes, responds to, and remembers the story combined with the image, rather than eloquently explaining how good a product or service is. In other words, you will feel the high paying value for the image + story that brings out sympathy.
It is easy to see that it would be more effective to communicate a concise story with an image of a young child who is chilling with an old grandmother, rather than a verbose explanation of how difficult our neighbors are.
Start-ups have limitations that require marketing at minimal cost. Therefore, they need to reach out to targeted customer groups that are as narrow and specific as possible in order to maximize marketing effectiveness. To do this, the startup needs to understand their lifestyle and communicate the story in a way they sympathize with.
Growth Hacking
Growth Hacking is a marketing technique and philosophy that has been developed in order to attract and retain customers for a minimal cost by introducing engineering techniques to marketing.
In Silicon Valley, many start-ups that lack the cost make use of Growth Hacking as an essential element to maximize growth in the early days of startup. Through Growth hacking, they are able to improve their products, services and processes based on customer data analytics and user experience, thereby increasing and maintaining new customers.
Facebook analyzed early adopter data and found that customers who had more than seven friends in ten days after signing up had significantly higher service retention rates. Since then, we’ve added the “Introduce friends” feature to new entrants and we’ve been able to boost customer retention.
If it is not possible to hire a professional growth hacker, the founder must perform the growth hacking technique directly. In other words, you should be able to study the AARRR analysis framework yourself or learn how to use the tracking code of Google Analytics.