“Go To Market is not just about choosing whether I should do Facebook ads or TV ads or a referral program, expand your horizons and think about how to create a brand for your startup.”

One of the few things most commonly heard amongst entrepreneurs is the want to build and develop an effective GTM strategy. We met with Harish Narayanan, CMO, Myntra. Harish comes with tremendous experience having worked with P&G, Google, and Unilever. 

Right off the bat, Harish spoke about how startups didn’t have a lot of exposure to brand building. Consider this, your startup is a new brand. What you want to do is build a brand that will last for decades to come by “sticking in the minds of the customer.” He also said that there 3 primary roles of marketing:

• Telling the stories of the Brand
• Connecting to the Consumer, at a deep level
• Growing the Business

“Marketing is codified common sense, that is my firm belief.” Harish then spoke about how one could achieve growth through effective marketing:

Growth: It comes from more users and more revenue made per user.

To get more users, you want to:

• Add more users to the top of the funnel through advertising: Through Social Media, TV, Growth Hacking, etc.
• Increase your conversion rates and Reducing Churn: Increasing the number of people who choose to stay on your platform as opposed to shifting to another or quitting it altogether. This is done through CRM, Loyalty Programs, etc. 
• Reactivate your dormant customers: Bringing back from the dead inactive customers. Done through Email, Retargeting, CRM, etc.

When it comes to more revenue made per user, you are usually talking about:

• Optimising pricing
• Increasing Cross selling: If they’re buying from one category, you promote the other ones.
• Increasing Upselling: If they’re buying a base product, make them buy a premium version of the product.
• Increasing frequency: If they’re buying your product once a month make them buy it thrice a month.

 

 

Your Go-To Market strategy will depend on the biggest barrier you’re facing through the channels of communication you choose to operate out of. At all points, you will be talking to your consumer to determine your ‘Why’ and then effectively determine ‘Who’ and ‘What’ category of storytelling you want to fall in. Once you’ve gotten that down, you will need to figure out what approach is for you and the ‘How’ to go to market.

Harish called them Moments of Truth:

• Zero Moment of Truth, ZMOT: The first time someone comes across your product. 
• First Moment of Truth, FMOT: When they physically see your product/app for the first time.
• Second Moment of Truth, SMOT: When they experience your product for the first time.
• Third Moment of Truth, TMOT: When they form an opinion about your product and would like to either advocate for it or against it.

Let’s rewind for a second- again, your Go-To Market strategy will depend on the biggest barrier you’re facing. Do people not know about your product? Then you need to work on your ZMOT, and so on and so forth. Here, getting feedback from your customers is very important to understand in order for you to make necessary tweaks to your approach. 

To spread awareness about what you’re doing- you can have three figures to promote it:

• Friend: Low on reach, high on trust; If you want to build a brand based on trust, you want to get your own consumers talking- referral programs. Ideal for small-scale, early stage, bootstrapped, B2B, finding PMF startups.
• Influencer: Med on reach, med on trust; Influencers have a good amount of credibility because most of their opinions are based on a tried and tested format. 
• Celebrity: High on reach, low on trust; If you need wide reach then you can always pay your celebrities to give you a shout-out. Ideal for startups that are large-scale, B2C, well-funded, blitzscaling, millions of users.

Harish then spent the next hour interacting with the audience and answering their questions. A super interactive session with stellar takeaways, this workshop was a great stepping stone for startups into the world of marketing.

Contributed by:
Sanskriti Bhatnagar
Headstart Network Foundation