Traction:
Traction is a sign that your company is taking off. You got the momentum to have a flying start. When traction is lacking, sales dry up and the customer base dwindles. Most of the founder members of start-ups spend a lot of time building products or services but pay little time on marketing and scaling up the business.
I have got the chance to closely work with some of the Start-up companies. Most of the companies cannot get the appropriate traction because they only see one part of the coin. When they build a company, they only see a market gap from the product or service viewpoint and put their 100% to make the product and bring them into reality.
This is one of the major reasons for the higher percentage of start-ups’ failure in the current arena. It is not that they do not know how to do product marketing but the problem is that they do not put sufficient time into marketing to reach the product to the markets.
This is what we may call the artist’s love of the intrinsic beauty of its own creation. Founder members of Start-up like an artist and they put a lot of effort to make it perfect and forget to balance between product building and market creation for its product.
The 50 percent rule:
Always put a balanced approach between operation engagement and marketing activities. Every day needs to work on traction strategy along with the product building. This is the secret of many successful start-ups.
Sea Fish BD (www.seafishbd.com) is one of the start-ups which is in positive earnings from the very first day and the growth rate is remarkable. Especially in the last two quarters, it is growing more than 128%. I have some opportunities to mix with them closely and find some interesting facts. Here I would like to highlight some of the facts for your better understanding.
Interesting facts revealed in a recent interview:
1. Dedicated Time: Founder Member has dedicated her time equally to product development and building traction from the very first day of her journey. Even daily, she puts daytime on operation and evening time on marketing. Always the founder member puts some thoughts and communication to increase her opportunity matrix.
2. Traction Goals: Sea Fish Bd has a clear traction goal. They have a certain amount of customer winning targets on a month-by-month basis. For example, they build their promotional plan based on some explicit goals like 10000 likes, 250 comments, and 100 shares from their social media advertising budget in July. They know if they bring the leads (primary traction goals), they will get the targeted orders (ultimate traction goals) from social media advertisements. Moreover, they have explicit goals on telemarketing and organic growth through blog posts and other activities. Here is an important fact is that one must have a clear traction goal. It may be primary lead generation or maybe ultimate target goals. But one must have on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis traction goals.
3. Need more than one traction strategy: Commonly what we see. To some extent, every start-up has some traction strategy at least. Most commonly we find social media ads and blog posting. In some cases, we see a lot of effort on publicity from the start-up founder. But social media ads, blog posting, and publicity are not enough to get the desire traction. A smart start-up needs to fire from all the cylinders. Because you never know, which media is going to bring the explosive traction. I personally recommend eight tools for getting explosive traction. Along with the social media advertisement, we need to use publicity, content marketing, e-mail marketing, sales promo, affiliate marketing, participate in the trade show, engage in speaking activity, and community building activity. In the case of Sea Fish BD, we observed a higher number of traction strategies in their day-to-day plan of action. Especially I must appreciate the effort on affiliate marketing concept to increase the growth.
Perhaps there is no hard and fast rule to bring the explosive growth through traction strategy. It may differ from company to company and market to market. It is always a balanced approach. But start-ups need to put a higher importance on marketing activity in their daily activities.
This is the secret of success!!!