#PNMeetup - Zero budget marketing by Ankur from Akosha

1. No Budget, No Problem! Learn
how to get to millions without
a marketing budget.

2. > About me – founder @ Akosha.
> Today’s agenda:
Top level thoughts
What worked for Akosha
Tools and suggested readings
Q&A

3. Top level thoughts on marketing
for internet startups

4. > Reality check - not possible.
> Budget – means founder salary, tech
team, content team etc. salaries in
making the great product and real
marketing cash. Usually to scale to the
“millions” you will need a budget.

5. > Virality – works when the fundamental use
case of your product needs other people for
realization of the full benefit (email, social
networks).
> Growth hacking – definitely helps but you
need the keep testing and getting growth
from other sources as well.
> Indian context – adoption is becoming
faster but nowhere close to the pace in US.

6. > At early stage startups – better to be in a
high intention market and get conversions to
prove product market fit.
> Use Google Keyword Search /Google
Trends tool to look for high intention
> If intention is not there in the form of
Google Searches, this should totally change
your marketing strategy.

7. > High intention market – focus on
Google AdWords, Emails and other high
intention based methods.
> Low intention / impulse based /
luxury goods etc. – Focus on Facebook,
other branding exercises.

8. What worked for Akosha at
different points of time

9. Search Engine Optimization
(SEO)
• On-page and off-page (latter’s efficacy has
really reduced in the last 2 years).
• On-page = content (shitloads of it)
• Competitor Analysis
• Challenge for us - Creating decent SEO
traffic without making the complaints
public
– Created useful pages for customers
(customer care pages, brand pages, got
content written)
– Identified events to push to the page to keep

10. Search Engine Marketing
(SEM)
• Persistence is key. Need to get your hands
dirty.
• Outsourcing it not a great idea.
• For us the challenge was to get the
conversion rate high that we could get
maximum number of leads:
– A/B Testing: Operating a limited budgets, we
created multiple landing pages and tested them.
– Keywords and Ad Copy Testing: Multiple
keywords and ad copies & did custom copy
analysis.

11. Social Media - Facebook
• Creativity is important (esp. if you are not
about
cricket, Bollywood, parochialism, and/or
sex)
• Good for branding, not for conversion.
• Very useful in the initial days: Akosha Tagline
contest worked for us.

13. Social Media - Facebook
• We got some 3.5K fans along with an
audience which had to understand what
Akosha did by virtue of the competition.
• Total spend Rs.2500.

14. Social Media - Twitter
• Has worked out better.
• Finding customers directly on Twitter.
• Scheduling content like tips (200 tips of the
day at one go).
• Good for branding, okay for conversion.
• Growth hacks like auto-tweeting any
resolution, asking the customer to tweet
whenever he is filing a complaint.

16. Youtube channel
• You Tube: We created a video channel
indiaakosha with purpose of educating
people about consumer complaints.
• Created a single branding video for Akosha
which emphasized on the message.
• Works only for long term ROI.

18. Email marketing
• Email newsletters
• Email notifications (easy login, need the
backend to manage notification replies)
• Email remarketing (GetVero, Userfox etc.)

19. PR
• First coverage is the toughest
• Usually inbound works best
• You should start with blogs first (like
Nextbigwhat, yourstory etc.)
• Offer to write guest blogs etc. (everyone is
hungry for free content)
• Make sure you have a good story / angle for
journalists
• One coverage will lead to another. No other
way of scaling this (PR firms have low ROI).

20. Tools and Readings

21. Tools
• Small list of essential tools (after trying out 10s of
products)
– Google Keyword Search (SEO),
– Traffic Travis (SEO),
– Alexa (Competitor Analysis),
– Google Webmaster (Admin),
– Google AdWords (SEM),
– Google Adwords Editor (SEM),
– SendGrid (Email),
– GetVero (Email remarketing),
– Mailchimp (Email),
– VWO (A/B testing),
– Google Website Optimizer (A/B testing)
– Hootsuite (Social)

22. Readings
• Some suggested which helped us think
better about distribution/marketing:
– Andrew Chen blog on growth hacking
– Peter Thiel on Startups CS 183
– Avinash Kaushik on Google Analytics
– Don’t Make Me Think (on design)
– Hubspot blog and older e-books
– Google forums on SEM, SEO etc.
– From Zero to Million Users (by Drew
Houston, Dropbox)
– Mark Suster blogposts on PR

23. Thank you. Q&A.