It was just a small distance from becoming a unicorn! Ankiti Bose and Dhruv Kapoor’s Zilingo which started way back in the year 2015 came very close to becoming a unicorn just after 4 years of its launch. And a startup can learn numerous lessons from a unicorn.
Thanks to their unique startup marketing plan and their decision to focus on the business-to-business marketing plan for startup.
Among all the strategic steps they have adopted according to the CEO and co-founder Ankiti Bose, “Scaling down our business-to-consumer (B2C) business is definitely one of the toughest decisions we have made recently” and one of the main strategies.
Another startup marketing strategy that they adopted was that they decided to launch a consumer-focused “fashion marketplace”.
Unlike what other business entities follow with regard to their marketing strategies for startups, Zilingo could have competed with the likes of Tokopedia (Softbank backed), Shopee (Sea Group), Lazada (Alibaba backed), and Amazon brands. However, the competition in this case would have been fierce, capital-intensive, and quite tough.
Instead, it has diverse course and focus on “offering holistic” to brands and business entities. It also focuses on financing, logistics, and procurement in bulk.
The marketing plan for startup business proved to be effective.
Another strategy is to offer a platform that includes tools to cater to a host of services for different brands. These tools and the platform offered by Zilingo aim to help with trend prediction, tracking sales, inventory management, and order.
As such, marketing for startups also varies depending on the requirement of the business brand.
7 Strategies of Creating a Startup Marketing Plan and Lesson From a Unicorn-
Lessons from a unicorn
There are a couple of lessons that you can learn from startup unicorns. Aside from the three lessons picked up from Zilingo, you can also follow these strategies when it comes to marketing for startups. These are as follows-
- Set up an objective and vision for the company that is “mission-driven”.
- As per observation, the niche market segments serve as a great point of entry and drives innovation
- Satisfy customers as they prefer a seamless and hassle-free shopping experience
4. Make available to the customers those tools that you would want to make use of
5. If your business is small-scale or medium-scale, then as “forward-thinking organizations” you will receive support from consumers.
6. You must build or develop products or platform as per customers’ preference.
Work out a startup marketing strategy in such a way that even if the government gets disrupted you have a backup plan to fall back upon.
