How can a Technology Startup do its Marketing that provides Online Courses
What are the potential channels available to a new startup for marketing the to-be-launched mobile app to the target audience comprising of college students and young working professionals?
Two Modes : Offline and Online
Offline – Interact with students, faculty and inform them about their new venture and give them some demos. Also, inform them about their partners if any that have penetrated the market pretty fast. They can give demos of their videos in Management and Engineering Colleges. They can also conduct surveys in the colleges they visit. a new startup can contact young professionals and reach better through Word of Mouth, talking to professionals from various domains and making out which skills and technology are in demand. a new startup can initially offer their courses at lower prices to students and charge normal prices when they become professionals after their studies by maintaining a good relationship with them.
Online – By creating a dedicated page on Facebook and videos as demos from various kinds of courses that it offers and also putting some of them on YouTube. They should offer any course divided into various levels like for beginners then medium level of difficulty and then to difficult; this will keep the viewers engaged and make them easy to understand If somebody wants they should offer courses against various depending upon the type of difficulty level one chooses; like lower price for the people who want to go only for the beginner level and vice-versa so that if someone likes the video they will go for the next level by paying extra. This will also spread positive word of mouth and give credibility to a new startup. Initially the rates can be kept to penetrate and once it is established prices can be increased.
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Given a Zero budget, what should be the maximum number of downloads that can be achieved for the a new startup App? How to go about doing it?
This can be achieved by following ways : By incentivizing the people by giving them few offers like if someone is attracting more number of people they can be given a calculated amount of discount on the courses they choose. This discount will be proportional to the number of people they attract and can be accounted by the number of downloads people make by using the Referral Code of any particular person so that this person can be awarded accordingly.
They can offer “One App Package” to the customers for accessing a new startup as well as any of their partners. With this people will be able to access to access all of them through a single app as they don’t want to have so many apps on their mobile. And by this people will be able to save memory and space in their mobile.
After sufficient popularity checks, they can also go on iOS and Windows OS if supported only by Android till now to reach even more number of customers and Premium segments as mostly this segment carries Apple Mobile phones with iOS and not Android.
The app should also contain Feedback mechanism and some kind of Referral mechanism to give it more visibility and easy market penetration.
What kind of courses should be included in the future apart from the existing courses and categories to increase the paid Customer base and Why?
A new startup can add many Certification for professionals and students like PMP, PMI acp, ITIL, Six Sigma – High in demand, Cloud Computing, Digital Marketing, Photography, LINUX, Python, PERL, SaS, R. Skills mentioned in Bloomberg’s research that is lacking today for both for Mangers and Technocrats.
The Courses can also be offered in “Packages for family” so that professionals who are undertaking the course can get some benefit of free videos for their children for education purposes, or wives for Cooking & Grooming courses or for parents for some Health related programs. There should also be some educational courses on subjects like History for people who could never history in depth and are greatly interested to learn that. Some courses also be offered based on the region and likings of the people from those particular places. Through unfiltered data gathered from different sources these things can be easily found out and they can be offered courses accordingly. There should also be provision for customization of courses liking mixing of 2 courses according to each customer’s requirement.
What kind of creative PR stunts a new startup can pull off to get free marketing mileage from mass media and new age creative media?
Word of Mouth plays a very important role here and maintaining long term relationship is also very crucial. Having links with new tech-savvy start-ups like OyoRooms will give them a competitive advantage over others. This will give them National level exposure and recognition. “One App Package” can give them additional advantage as it will give the message that it is customer friendly and sensitive towards them. This will help a new startup and its partner a platform to do each others’ Promotion also and hence their visibility will be increased. Feedback mechanism will encourage them to constantly improve and innovate. They can constantly judge their popularity through the number Facebook and youTube likes and work upon that. They can also offer Live Projects at management colleges and giving students the tasks to share a new startup’s blogs to social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Quora etc. They can give extra privilege to customers who refer more and bring potential customers who are ready to pay or actually pay.
This article has been authored by Richa Sinha from NMIMS, Bangalore
