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How to market my product using Angel funding?

By Rabi Gupta on 27 Comments / 3690 views

Hello everyone,

First of all, my greetings to all of you on this great platform which Mr. Kejriwal has built (Kudos to him!).

I’m founder of a web/mobile based startup iDubba (https://www.idubba.com), which is one of it’s kind TV show/movie recommendation website for Indian users. We recently finalized some Angel funding and are looking forward to market our product.

As a startup, we have crossed our first hurdle of creating a product/technology. But the second hurdle and the big one is to get users on our website. We are working on to get free publicity from blogs etc but the main part is to create a marketing plan which can effectively utilize our seed fund.

I’m basically looking for good online marketing strategies, as offline strategies are well known and the challenge there is in execution. Here are some of my ideas, I would like to see your comments on same-

[Budget of around 2-2.5 lacs]

1. Social media- This has to be de facto first strategy seeing today’s scenario. Facebook is the only place where we can market our stuff (Let me know if there are others), be it the Fanpage or the product itself. Acquisition cost over FB goes from 2-6 Rs per user depending upon multiple factors (I have run 2-3 campaigns on Facebook earlier). If this is combined with an intelligent contest as well, user acquisition can go viral very easily bringing the per user costs down to 50 paisa to 2 Rs. Can you guys give some idea has how best we can combine a contest with a advertising plan so as to get users come over iDubba?

2. Banner ads- Any idea of the costing structure for some of the top sites such as https://www.india-forums.com? How to approach such advertisers and what should be the monthly budget to get around 1 lac hits?

3. Google SEM- I personally don’t think that Google SEM will help me much in a website like ours, which is more about user engagement than information provider. However if you think the same kindly tell me the budget which I should fix for this marketing.

4. Digital marketing- How to create content which can become viral on other social media platforms like twitter/indian social networks?

5. Ideas- Any other ideas coming to your mind? Please have a look at our website and kindly tell me what elements you think can help us better our product and also user engagement.

Looking forward to a great discussion ahead 🙂

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27 Comments

  1. Rabi,

    I will feature this and hopefully will get some folks to reply.. and also get their attention.

  2. I guess your budget is not enough for you to look on paid traffic options. As media buys will exhaust quickly. You must focus on “Social Media” and other viral marketing strategies.

    Can you define :-

    Who exactly will be your target audience whom you want to market.?
    If we get those group of audience to visit your website, what would you expect these people to do on your website ?

  3. Hey Rabi, the product is interesting.

    I think for your banner ads the best person would be Aditya (he is on my friends list) who has a ad network and should be able to give you some sound advice on what to do. Aditya has a CPA option which you may find interesting though cost of acquisition will be higher than FB. The rest of the strategies are more or less spot on.

    You are right about traditional SEM nobody is searching for a recommendation engine for movies so contextual marketing won’t work. The google display network is better but go in there with full brakes on (or it will eat your money overnight!) and be extremely picky of the sites where your ads get placed, you can get pretty good CTR and CPM/CPC if you place your ads in the right communities.

    The important thing is to define your user segments and target each slice of the segment separately. Unfortunately (or fortunately) depending on how you slice the discussion the Indian demographic is highly splintered and you need to factor in regional influences as well. Your ads should connect with audience. Find highly responsive segments and engage with them. That requires a totally different mindset from the mass market advertising approach. Start with the metros and B cities. (okay that’s easy to say but hard to execute. Geographic targeting within India is still in its infancy. Again Google Display Network is somewhat good in this regard) For each geography you need to split the viewership along demographic lines. And engage with them individually. The recommendations the 20yr old wants is not the recommendation that the 40yr old mom wants. When you are constructing your campaign don’t send them to your home page, send them to a specifically designed landing page that outlines the benefits of your service and one that engages directly with your targeted audience.

    One more thing you can do, mine the twitter timeline to find tv show maniacs and reach out to them individually. There is also a marketing tool out there that identifies social media influencers. Sorry I don’t remember it off hand. You know those pockets of rabid users who have a strong following? Find them and engage with them.

    Last but not least, track and monitor the conversion from each channel (Google Analytics campaign tracking tags on the url [search for Google Analytics url builder] and setting up a conversion goal should do the trick). Concentrate resources on more of what works and taper off what doesn’t work. However that in itself shouldn’t be your benchmark. Dig into identify why specific campaigns didn’t work. That’s important. Some will work some won’t. Knowing the why will enable you to make whatever adjustments are needed to get it to work. With a gazillion TV channels we definitely need some kind of recommendation engine – that’s a no brainer – so you should pour over the clickstream when the campaign doesn’t work and find out why it didnt work, fix it and try again. Some channels maybe seasonal etc.

    At some point you will want to tie the demographic profile to some monetization scheme (targeted ads seems like the only way to go for you) which is why I recommended going for the metro/b city crowd at the beginning as advertisers will pay for your ability to reach a targeted audience.

    Aditya, help! 🙂

  4. Okay Aditya already did. 🙂

  5. Also, have you tried demographic segmentation within FB Ads. Split users by age and this is the kicker – interest. Go after niche interests and connect that to the content on your site.

    Google Display network (GDN) is feasible at even a budget of Rs. 1k a day but like I said you need to watch it with a hawks eye and keep fine tuning it. Another stalwart that kind of slipped under the radar – Orkut! FB is the gorilla no doubt but from what I’ve seen, within India Orkut has deeper traction amongst the kids (sub 25 yr olds) outside the metros. And you can serve ads on orkut using the GDN.

    And please, pretty please, tell me you have a regional content/local language strategy in place. This is one of those golden goose staring in everyone’s face but being ignored because nobody has got into hacking the monetization code on that. One of these days…*pins one more dream on the board and scowls*

  6. Hi Alok,

    Thanks alot for making it a featured one 🙂

    Alok ‘Rodinhood’ Kejriwal said:

    Rabi,

    I will feature this and hopefully will get some folks to reply.. and also get their attention.

  7. @Aditya: thanks for clarifying my doubt on paid traffic options!
    See Sir, “Target audience” is another typical concept every marketer talks about. If you ask me I would say mostly young college students who get some leisure time to watch TV as well as are online, young IT engineers have enough time to watch TV during weekends and are internet savvy, 15-21 year aged girls love both Social media as well as TV. I would also like you to please suggest me a methodology to arrive at “Target Audience” figure!

    Can you give me some Viral campaign case study links if you have something in mind. That would help

    Once again thanks alot 🙂

    Aditya Singh said:

    I guess your budget is not enough for you to look on paid traffic options. As media buys will exhaust quickly. You must focus on “Social Media” and other viral marketing strategies.

    Can you define :-

    Who exactly will be your target audience whom you want to market.?

    If we get those group of audience to visit your website, what would you expect these people to do on your website ?

  8. Hey Abey,

    I’m making a lesson out of your comments! Really appreciate your time and thanks for liking the concept 🙂

    I have read each and everything carefully, Orkut idea was brilliant, didn’t think about it! Local Channel strategy very much in place, have to capitalize on it.

    Will mail you separately after properly digesting your comment 🙂

    and yea looking forward to your support!

    Regards,

    Abey John said:

    Also, have you tried demographic segmentation within FB Ads. Split users by age and this is the kicker – interest. Go after niche interests and connect that to the content on your site.

    Google Display network (GDN) is feasible at even a budget of Rs. 1k a day but like I said you need to watch it with a hawks eye and keep fine tuning it. Another stalwart that kind of slipped under the radar – Orkut! FB is the gorilla no doubt but from what I’ve seen, within India Orkut has deeper traction amongst the kids (sub 25 yr olds) outside the metros. And you can serve ads on orkut using the GDN.

    And please, pretty please, tell me you have a regional content/local language strategy in place. This is one of those golden goose staring in everyone’s face but being ignored because nobody has got into hacking the monetization code on that. One of these days…*pins one more dream on the board and scowls*

  9. Rabi you are already capturing the demographic data that should give you an idea of the different target audiences. See you don’t have one audience. Everyone is your audience, but each one needs a different entry point, at least initially, till the viralizing aspects kicks in and everyone will ‘automatically’ sign up because they can’t navigate their TV remote without idubba.

    There is an inertia in recommending friends that all social services face. The usual method that they try to overcome that inertia is with bribery (add more friends win an ipad!). That’s okay in limited quantities. ibibo went overboard with that and started spaming everyone, even using sms. it is slowly fading out. of course thats just a symptom, the center of the social web has shifted to fb which is another reaso,

    The organic method is need. My personal FB network suddenly exploded when I found an old school mate from 20 yrs past. It led me to 20-30 others I’d sort of forgotten or didnt even imagine I’d ever be able to contact again. Getting in touch with my nostalgia became my need which made me reach out. You have to figure out a “natural” way for users (friends) to cluster around something, that cluster will intersect with another cluster and so on.

    Which is why segmenting will help. You start peering into the need of the user within the larger social context and figure out how to satisfy that need. If you are doing any sort of social app you need to become a cultural scientist, a sociologist, and what not. Dig deep into the mind of the user.

    Read up on how FB did it (watch Social Network!) identify the similarities and differences. FB was born in a college dorm in a hyper connected user segment and initially was restricted to just schools n univs. This created the envy effect. Everyone wanted to get in to find out whats so great about it. I remember wracking my brains on how to get a US school/univ email id! 😉

    Keep us posted on how it goes. BTW when I meant channels I meant it not from the traditional distribution channel concept. I meant it as marketing campaign channels. Typically campaigns are big budget affairs. Online you can track both paid and non paid traffic generation strategies and you can measure the conversion of each, which I call a “channel” in my hacked up terminology.

    Admen will roll in their graves! 🙂

  10. a lot of gyaan has been given on the STP and 4Ps… am sure everything has a bit to learn from the comments…

    but there are a lot of mediums that you can explore… even to get people to the website, it is not necessary that you only have an “online marketing campaign”…

    Yahoo, for one, is a company that is completely into Offline Marketing.

    About the budget and all, I would say, you should rather target a particular city/state/region for a start. Use 2-3 vehicles, location-based, and see the response. Try to replicate them if successful. Dont invest all money into a campaign and then realize its not working. Sometimes getting 5% of 1Cr is easier and better than 0.01% of 100Cr.

    Think over it. No one can give you a definition/method to find your “target audience”. You need to find it on your own.

    Do contact me if you wanna discuss more. I will try and share some ideas if i can remember them.

    Remember, Keep It Simple Strategy (KISS) 🙂

    Neel Shah
    https://spoxchange.net
    info@spoxchange.net

  11. Hi,

    You again made some great points there :)! So much to learn for me and I’m excited, to switch my roles! Will keep you posted for sure 🙂

    Abey John said:

    Rabi you are already capturing the demographic data that should give you an idea of the different target audiences. See you don’t have one audience. Everyone is your audience, but each one needs a different entry point, at least initially, till the viralizing aspects kicks in and everyone will ‘automatically’ sign up because they can’t navigate their TV remote without idubba.

    There is an inertia in recommending friends that all social services face. The usual method that they try to overcome that inertia is with bribery (add more friends win an ipad!). That’s okay in limited quantities. ibibo went overboard with that and started spaming everyone, even using sms. it is slowly fading out. of course thats just a symptom, the center of the social web has shifted to fb which is another reaso,

    The organic method is need. My personal FB network suddenly exploded when I found an old school mate from 20 yrs past. It led me to 20-30 others I’d sort of forgotten or didnt even imagine I’d ever be able to contact again. Getting in touch with my nostalgia became my need which made me reach out. You have to figure out a “natural” way for users (friends) to cluster around something, that cluster will intersect with another cluster and so on.

    Which is why segmenting will help. You start peering into the need of the user within the larger social context and figure out how to satisfy that need. If you are doing any sort of social app you need to become a cultural scientist, a sociologist, and what not. Dig deep into the mind of the user.

    Read up on how FB did it (watch Social Network!) identify the similarities and differences. FB was born in a college dorm in a hyper connected user segment and initially was restricted to just schools n univs. This created the envy effect. Everyone wanted to get in to find out whats so great about it. I remember wracking my brains on how to get a US school/univ email id! 😉

    Keep us posted on how it goes. BTW when I meant channels I meant it not from the traditional distribution channel concept. I meant it as marketing campaign channels. Typically campaigns are big budget affairs. Online you can track both paid and non paid traffic generation strategies and you can measure the conversion of each, which I call a “channel” in my hacked up terminology.

    Admen will roll in their graves! 🙂

  12. Hi Neel,

    Nice to see you here as well, and yea congrats for pitching at Bloomberg’s contest 🙂

    I would love to discuss the plans with you, will connect you with details.

    thanks,

    Neel Shah said:

    a lot of gyaan has been given on the STP and 4Ps… am sure everything has a bit to learn from the comments…

    but there are a lot of mediums that you can explore… even to get people to the website, it is not necessary that you only have an “online marketing campaign”…

    Yahoo, for one, is a company that is completely into Offline Marketing.

    About the budget and all, I would say, you should rather target a particular city/state/region for a start. Use 2-3 vehicles, location-based, and see the response. Try to replicate them if successful. Dont invest all money into a campaign and then realize its not working. Sometimes getting 5% of 1Cr is easier and better than 0.01% of 100Cr.

    Think over it. No one can give you a definition/method to find your “target audience”. You need to find it on your own.

    Do contact me if you wanna discuss more. I will try and share some ideas if i can remember them.

    Remember, Keep It Simple Strategy (KISS) 🙂

    Neel Shah

    https://spoxchange.net

    info@spoxchange.net

  13. I’ll second what Neel said. Go narrow and focused before going wide. Also another great bit of internet marketing advice “Failure is just a test result“, so fail fast, fail often, but more importantly, fail cheap.

  14. Read the article. Inspiring!

    Abey John said:

    I’ll second what Neel said. Go narrow and focused before going wide. Also another great bit of internet marketing advice “Failure is just a test result“, so fail fast, fail often, but more importantly, fail cheap.

  15. Hi Tejaswi,

    That sounds interesting! Will give it a thought for sure and will ask for more details :), thanks!

    Tejaswi Naidu said:

    Considering majority of your target audience are in the demography of age group i.e mid age level and a large chunk of them are online savvy why not try innovative means of ads wherein you are able to reach the target audience in an efficient and cost effective manner?

    The answer is Interactive Online Gaming Solutions.

    Let me brief you in simpler and effective terms-

    What happens in this scenario is, people with internet are connected on an online platform and play realistic games and the competitive nature that every man/woman has in them is brought out and are engaged in an interactive gaming environment, while along we have iDubba being published at all points of time. Thereby potential customers are given an opportunity to engage and appreciate the new mode of advertising and run potentially high subscription in iDubba.

    Its a simple effective straight forward advertising approach.

    a)Adapt

    b)Engage

    c)Survive. 🙂

    I will be more than happy to brief you more and give iDubba a great online platform!

    Cheers!

    Thanks to Rodinhood for this wonderful online platform! 🙂

  16. I checked out your site, and saw how it pulled up my favourite shows from Facebook and the recommendation engine.

    Before spending money on promoting the product, why don’t you leverage the “recommendation engine” to make some sort of viral quiz that spreads on Facebook. “Your friend Ranbir thinks you are a Bigg Boss fan.”

    The idea is to see if you can have a viral hook to the product. It would also recommend me to other people with similar preferences, even encouraging meet-ups?

  17. Brilliant thinking Mahesh, a Facebook app that gets virally pushed out to existing friends, who in turn push it out to other friends. Invite existing users to invite their FB friends with a viral hook. Another idea: Pull the latest episode of whatever is in a user’s recommendation stream and ask them to ask their friends about some event in the episode (do you think the fight between saas and bahu will split the Chopra kandhan?) and have the discussion in some way that it appears in their individual timelines too. Not exactly sure if that’s possible. But get them talking.

  18. Invest in product, make it remarkable …. once you see that product is cool enough, invest in people targetted ads like FB, content network (cheap ones) … build the community, empower them …

  20. @Mahesh: Brilliant one! Will mash up all the ideas and will try to come up with something cool :), thanks.

    @Abey: very cool idea, it is very much possible and we have slated the feature to be launched soon! Will hook this with social network and it will look like a killer idea. Cheers!

    @Aji well said.

    Also during my last week’s homework I came up with some ideas, penning down here:
    1. Building a video introduction which is not just informational but funny and has viral nature.
    2. Tweeting to people whose tweets suggest that they are either “bored” or “watching TV”!
    3. Targeting people during events like IPL/Cricket World cup etc.

    Will also share more details as I solidify my plan. Once again thanks to all of you for contributing 🙂

  21. Pretty much spot on. Post your videos to youtube. Other than the *free* thing the more important aspect is its ability to go viral. Comment on other videos and link back to your video using the ‘in answer to this video’ thing. I think youtube videos now support some annotation thing or in video links. Embed a link inside there that will link back to your signup page. or keep it simple idubba.com/signup

    Rabi Gupta said:

    @Mahesh: Brilliant one! Will mash up all the ideas and will try to come up with something cool :), thanks.

    @Abey: very cool idea, it is very much possible and we have slated the feature to be launched soon! Will hook this with social network and it will look like a killer idea. Cheers!

    @Aji well said.

    Also during my last week’s homework I came up with some ideas, penning down here:

    1. Building a video introduction which is not just informational but funny and has viral nature.

    2. Tweeting to people whose tweets suggest that they are either “bored” or “watching TV”!

    3. Targeting people during events like IPL/Cricket World cup etc.

    Will also share more details as I solidify my plan. Once again thanks to all of you for contributing 🙂

  22. Hey guys we are featured in pluggdin (startup blog) 🙂 https://www.pluggd.in/indian-tv-program-schedules-on-idubba-297/

  23. Brilliant.

  24. Hi Jyoti,

    Thanks for the feedback!

    Please tell me about the page, is it general homepage or user homepage?

    Regards,

    Jyoti Shukla said:

    Hi Rabi, This is my feedback as a user. You have brilliant idea and a great site; but you are hiding your best content below the first scroll. When I went to your site I was sort of disappointed and didn’t find anything interesting. It was only when I scrolled down that I was pleasantly surprised with the good work you have done on the site! I think you should really showcase the main part of the site in first scroll and keep the “how to” part in the second scroll. Best wishes.

  25. Hi Rabi , I am a no one to comment on the question you have asked . Neither do I understand the web so well, but have worked with TV for a bit . For me your product is innovative , but , I would rather have this on my TV instead of my computer.

    Please understand TV is changing rapidly with DTH coming in TV , in a few more months TV will get really interactive. I try to give you some insight into the latest of DTH , with something like red button interactivity … you will be able to do these things on tv… e.g. While watching a car commercial, you will be asked to press a red button for a car demo, the interactivity will direct the feed to the advertisers , you will watch a pizza commercial and press red button for a call back , you will see a nice show of singapore on some infotainment channel and can press the red button to see the best offers from thomas cook for example ..

    Here is something you can take a shot on :

    1. Pitch to DTH operators ( tata sky, Big tv, airtel, etc) to add a feature to their interactivity of recommending the program
    2. Why will they buy into this ? – currently there is only TAM which feeds data of the 8k households pan india and extrapolates it over to 60 crores of HUTs.(households using television)
    3. Your solution would be a boon to TV broadcasters , where they can claim xyz no of people recommended my show over
    4. You will be second to TAM ( the god of television ratings and the maker of a 10K , cr TV advertising industry )

    Think over it !

    Cheers,
    Swarup

  26. Hey Swarup,

    Thanks for the take :). You are bang on!!

    Swarup Nanda said:

    Hi Rabi , I am a no one to comment on the question you have asked . Neither do I understand the web so well, but have worked with TV for a bit . For me your product is innovative , but , I would rather have this on my TV instead of my computer.

    Please understand TV is changing rapidly with DTH coming in TV , in a few more months TV will get really interactive. I try to give you some insight into the latest of DTH , with something like red button interactivity … you will be able to do these things on tv… e.g. While watching a car commercial, you will be asked to press a red button for a car demo, the interactivity will direct the feed to the advertisers , you will watch a pizza commercial and press red button for a call back , you will see a nice show of singapore on some infotainment channel and can press the red button to see the best offers from thomas cook for example ..

    Here is something you can take a shot on :

    1. Pitch to DTH operators ( tata sky, Big tv, airtel, etc) to add a feature to their interactivity of recommending the program

    2. Why will they buy into this ? – currently there is only TAM which feeds data of the 8k households pan india and extrapolates it over to 60 crores of HUTs.(households using television)

    3. Your solution would be a boon to TV broadcasters , where they can claim xyz no of people recommended my show over

    4. You will be second to TAM ( the god of television ratings and the maker of a 10K , cr TV advertising industry )

    Think over it !

    Cheers,

    Swarup

  27. Nice input Swarup. It makes you wonder about statistical significance. 8k HUTs representing 60 crore. I wish web site optimization software was as easy!

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