Start-up marketing insights form DraugiemGroup. A presentation from Lotus 9 - conference about startups. Website: http://www.aiesec.lv/lotus

1. Start-up Marketing Insights
from DraugiemGroup
Davis Siksnans
Lotus conference
15.12.2012.

2. Background
• 115+ employees (Dec ’12)
• 15m eur revenue in 2011
• 1.2m eur profit
• 15+ active startup projects/companies

3. Background
• Information Systems at University of
Wisconsin-Eau Claire and University of
Latvia
• 3+ years at DraugiemGroup
• Worked with both Draugiem and Idea Bits
projects

5. Insights come from these projects

6. Projects at a glance
• DeskTime - Time-Tracking Productivity
Software (web-app, SaaS)
• Friendly Bracelets - Unique, Hand-made
Bracelets (e-commerce store)
• Behappy.me – Inspirational Quotes on
Products (e-commerce store/community)
• StartupVitamins - Motivating posters for
your startup (e-commerce store)

7. Startup Marketing
1. Conversion rate optimization
2. Online communities – how to use them
for marketing?
3. Traditional paid advertising – what
works and what doesn’t?
4. Social media marketing & PR

8. Conversion rate optimization
• Conversion optimization is the process by
which a Web page is optimized to increase
the rate of conversions.
• Typically you achieve by developing
hypothesis and doing tests (split A/B tests
etc.)

9. What can you measure?
• Conversions can be
– User registration
– Email list subscription
– Product added to cart
– E-commerce conversion (purchase)
– Subscription start etc.
• You can also test time spent on site,
bounce rate (also important in SEO),
pages visited etc.

10. Why do conversion rate
optimization?
• Best way to increase your
marketing ROI

11. How I can do this & examples
• Google Analytics Experiments (free &
our pick), Optimizely and Unbounce and
many others
• Custom Google Analytics reports for CRO
• Heatmaps (CrazyEgg etc.)
• Build, Measure, Learn cycle (Eric Ries,
Lean Startup)

18. What typically works in CRO
• Clear call-to-action, one
user goal per page
• Use of good images (no
stock images, though)
• Testimonials (with people
faces, if you can)
• Ask for less info, even if
your sales people insist

20. What typically works in CRO
• Make specific landing pages for your sales
channels
• Make trust visible
– Trust seals
– Social proof (social buttons, statistical data)
– About us page matters

21. What typically works in CRO
• A 1 second delay in
page response can result
in a 7% reduction in
conversions
• If an e-commerce site is
making $100,000 per
day, a 1 second page
delay could potentially
cost you $2.5 million in
lost sales every year
• Very important on
mobile

22. Post-conversion
• Don’t forget to engage users further – CTA
to follow you on social networks
• Don’t leave user just hanging - direct to
another page or provide some additional
coupon/offer

23. Startup Marketing
1. Conversion rate optimization
2. Online communities – how to use them
for marketing?
3. Traditional paid advertising – what works
and what doesn’t?
4. Social media marketing & PR

24. Online Communities
• CSSMania – online design showcase
gallery ($10)
• Automatic CSS galleries submitters might
work for SEO, but does very little in terms
of traffic

25. Online Communities
• Quora – question and answer website

27. Online communities
• Dribbble, Behance – designer
communities (a more web-design centric
DeviantArt)

28. Online communities
• Reddit, Hacker News (it used to be
Slashdot and Digg)
• Reddit – 2k uniques for Behappy (didn’t
even make it to the front page)
• Hackers News – 34k uniques in 2 days,
great exposure on Twitter

29. App directories
• BestVendor (free), AppStorm (paid),
GetApp (paid), Chrome Web Store,
Google Apps, AppAppeal, ratemystartup,
new-startups.com, betali.st etc.

30. Startup Marketing
1. Conversion rate optimization
2. Online communities – how to use them
for marketing?
3. Traditional paid advertising – what
works and what doesn’t?
4. Social media marketing & PR

31. Traditional paid advertising
• Experiment with images and text for the best
CTR (click-through-rate - clicks divided by
impressions, higher the better)
• Be specific with your audience
• On Facebook you can often bid below asked
rate and still get a lot of clicks

32. Traditional paid advertising
• Custom Audiences – import your mailing list
to Facebook to target your existing users
• Retargeting – recapture your visitors -
Adroll.com
– Site wide or on specific pages (e.g., cart or
registration page)
• Retargeting now available also for social
networks – PerfectAudience.com
• Use Google’s URL builder for better analytics
data (utm parameters)

33. Startup Marketing
1. Conversion rate optimization
2. Online communities – how to use them
for marketing?
3. Traditional paid advertising – what works
and what doesn’t?
4. Social media marketing & PR

34. Social media marketing
• Monitor not only your brand name, but also
competitors (TweetDeck)
• Experiment with post timing
• mention.net – far better alerts for your brand
mentions across the web than Google Alerts
• TweetAdder (paid) – follow accounts by bio
keywords
• Sponsored Tweets don’t work, identifying
and reaching out to influencers does

35. PR
• Online press release distribution PRWeb
helps SEO, but can’t reach real media
• Individual pitches and personal
connections work
• Andris K. Berzins: Insurgency Marketing
for your startup http://bit.ly/T1mOcT

37. Final tips
• E-commerce sites should take full advantage of
CyberMonday (Monday after Thanksgiving)
• Email marketing still one the best ways to keep
users coming back to the site
(MailChimp/Mailigen)
• Don’t underestimate mobile (33% of Behappy
users come from mobile, m.facebook.com a strong
referrer)
• Read blog.kissmetrics.com & quicksprout.com
• Measure, measure, measure…

39. Thanks!
Davis Siksnans
davis@draugiemgroup.com
Follow me on Twitter @imruffian
www.draugiemgroup.com