Main Steps to Market a Startup

Hey, Guys! We continue our PR strategy discussion.

Tap2Pay.me has become the winner of the joint project by Dev.by and NY communication agency Storifier among national start-ups focusing to hit the USA market. In this article, you will know about the next first steps to start a PR strategy campaign by the example of Tap2Pay. First 8 steps of your future PR strategy were discussed in the previous post.

Task for this week: analyze your value chain and figure out the competitors 🙂

It is important to identify where are you in the value chain. Why do you think this is the part that needs innovation? Who are the other participants that are aiming at the same room in the market? The answers to these questions will help you find the relevant audience to which you will address the message, and correctly formulate it.

Step 1: Identify your value chain.

Value chain means all the components of your market that are in the order of their interaction with each other.

For example, for Tap2Pay.me the value chain consists of all participants in the payment process, starting from the seller and ending with an emitting bank and the servicing bank. Looking at the map, we need to find a place on it for Tap2Pay.me, and figure out the step of the transaction that the startup simplifies. In addition, there is the answer to the question that arises from those who hear about the company for the first time: is Tap2Pay.me a payment processor or a payment gateway?

Step 2: Which part of the value chain are you interested in?

Why did the founders decide that this part of the chain needs innovation? What relevant events prove that the existence of your company is not just desirable, but urgent?

When you pitch a story to journalists, current events and market trends help to emphasize the circumstances in light of which the existence of your company becomes a solution to an acute problem. The focus is transferred from a description of the characteristics of the product to the benefit that users receive from it.

It is important to keep an eye on the latest trends in the industry and the opinions of its leaders. The following tools will help with this:

Google Trends
Consumer Barometer

For instance, Tap2Pay should take into consideration the following trends and events:

Mobile lifestyle and e-commerce dictate the need to simplify online payment acceptance procedures (in the third quarter of 2016, less than a third of small and medium-sized B2C and only 10% of B2B accepted online payments).
A huge amount of information and technologies around us reduce the time of focusing. It complicates the online sales process (in 2000, the focus time was 12 seconds, in 2013 – only 8).
Unregistered users increase sales by 20% and, according to statistics, about a quarter of buyers cancel the purchase if they are forced to register.
Most of the time on the mobile device is spent in instant messengers and social networks.

The industry trends serve as proof that you aim at the right segment of the value chain. Also, trends will help you create a portrait of the target audience in the messaging document.

In the next post, we will discuss how to identify market competitors and their communication policy. Stay tuned with Tap2Pay!

Want to learn more? Leave us a message or try Tap2Pay out by messaging us here.