Marketing for IT – Agile Approach

The goal of marketing for IT companies is to prepare your business to scale.

 

Generally, many companies in this industry operate on the basis of manual customer acquisition. Mostly, focused on the very effective work of one person from the company who builds relationships with the right people.

 

However, this approach is very risky in the long run and cannot scale profits. If there is a process that is defined and launched, it allows us to predict: how many new customers will we acquire? How many new inquiries will “pop in”? We can expect that someday manual sales will not be enough and that you will have to incur operating costs without revenues. Companies do not always have enough savings to survive, such as a month or quarter.

 

One way to not rely 100% on manual customer acquisition is to implement an agile approach.

 

[Process] Agile approach to marketing for IT companies

 

Is it very difficult to “survive in the market” by spending money on promotions and not knowing “what works”? What knowledge did we get from the market?

 

The agile approach in marketing can be implemented in three stages:

1. Defining the lean business model canvas
2. Specifying a Product of Minimum Value – MVP
3. Carrying out the experiment

 

Stage 1) Defining the business model canvas

 

So we answer 9 questions here, on one page – canvas.

1. Problem – what client’s problem are we solving?
2. Solution – how?
3. UVP (Unique value proposition) – short information answering the question of why we are unique and worth buying.
4. UA (Unfair advantage) – what prevents our product from being stolen or copied?
5. Segment – who is our product intended for?
6. Key matrix – how will we measure whether our business model is working? It can be profit, but also the number of subscribers on the YouTube channel.
7. Channels – how will we acquire customers?
8. Costs
9. Revenue.

 

Step 2) Determine the minimum viable product – MVP (Minimum Viable Product) – is the cheapest possible version of what we want to sell, representing a unique value proposition.

 

So we are looking for an answer to the question: what can we do to spend as little money as possible and check whether a given functionality / service will be accepted on the market?

 

Depending on what we want to test, the investment will mean different rows of expenses. However, it is worth putting some energy into thinking: what knowledge from the market will we need?

 

Stage 3) Conducting the experiment

 

Any experiment should begin with the formulation of a hypothesis. It is an affirmative sentence that describes the future.

 

It is good if it is strictly timed and quantified.

 

Example: By the end of this quarter, we will acquire a new customer from Google Ads, spending $1,000 per month.

 

[Framework] Marketing for IT – Collection of data about ROAS

 

The key people in the company should receive a monthly statement, where the first column presents the expenditure on a given customer acquisition channel, and the second – the profits.

 

And finally, in the third, specific ROAS – Return on Ads Spends. So the quotient of profit by costs. Where the ratio is the highest, you should increase your advertising investment. Where it is below 1, discontinue investment.

 

Google Data Studio can help a lot in the preparation of such lists.

 

Check also our Framework: Building marketing processes in a medium-sized company