Accelerate This Marketing: Startups identify target demographics

Michael Onaolapo knows his technology is only useful if it’s in the right hands.

To discover the target demographic of a personal shopping app, the ShopZeely CEO said he and co-founders had to rethink their perfect customer. ShopZeely connects consumers with a personal shopper via real-time video feed, who makes purchases and follows up with same-day delivery. The team previously thought such a service had a universal audience, but the metric’s been refined to families and working professionals with household incomes above $75,000.

“We’ve honed down the customer persona,” Onaolapo said, adding the app still has use for homebound seniors and the disabled. “We’re looking at those who can spend $75 to $100 per ticket to ensure we have proper supply and demand per shopper.”

To find its ideal customers, accelerator colleague Mofin Labs followed the money. As a developer of software for financial institutions, the resulting product trickles down to end users. So the company uses a two-stage approach for customer engagement.

Co-founder Josh Willis said Mofin Labs is creating different sets of public relations messages and product update announcements: those of a technical nature for banks and credit unions implementing the software, and those more basic in details, such as downtimes for maintenance. It doubles the work, but the goal is to build a clear communication chain between parties and provide the company with a sounding board for improvements. “We get real-time feedback from the customers’ customers on the product we’re creating, and that way it doesn’t go through a middleman,” said Willis, the chief technology officer. “The idea is to mitigate end-user expectations so they’re satisfied with the experience.”

KPIs
Outside of presentations and meetings with guest speakers, the accelerator companies recently developed key performance indicators, or KPIs, to measure progress toward viability.

The Daily Scholar co-founder Andrew Goodall is tracking user engagement and site navigation for the educational engagement software targeted at classrooms and campus newspapers. He hopes to test the software with the technology strand of the Greater Ozarks Center for Advanced Professional Studies, or GO CAPS, program at The eFactory by the end of the month, and said New Covenant Academy and Springfield Public Schools representatives have expressed some interest.

The company is targeting posts of three publications per week and seven types of engagement – such as comments, likes, debates or poll responses – per 10 students and each teacher administrator.

“We chose some numbers we thought would be indicative of a midsize classroom using the software on a daily basis,” Goodall said. “We’ll be able to say the KPIs were less than realistic or were way too lofty based on a shot-in-the-dark estimate.”

ShopZeely drilled down on fees to cover expenses and create revenue. During the company’s Aug. 10 open house presentation, Marketing Director Bernitha Medford described the breakdown of costs for a $25 delivery fee on every $50 order. Of that amount, $18 would pay the shopper, $5 would go to ShopZeely and $2 would cover processing. Onaolapo said changes to target demographics and minimum orders added a few bucks for delivery, but it’s still in the $25-$30 range.

As ShopZeely sifts through data from a Dallas-Fort Worth area beta test, Onaolapo and the team can be seen surveying customers of areas stores to gauge expected turnaround times for deliveries and price points for professional shoppers, such as interior decorators or technology specialists building computers. As of Aug. 16, the company had surveyed 136 people outside of area O’Reilly Auto Parts, Wal-Mart and Price Cutter stores as well as Macy’s at Battlefield Mall. In addition to gathering demographics, Onaolapo said the surveys’ purposes are to test consumer interest.

“Typically, the response has been ‘yes’,” Onaolapo said. “When we get to the fee section, they are still interested if (products are) delivered in real-time.”

Customer communication
The Daily Scholar is addressing a different form of initial contact between the company and its potential users: its logo. Goodall said feedback from teachers indicates it’s time for a fresh first impression.

“They want something they can relate to and that communicates less of a formal academic feel to something that is more innovative,” Goodall said, adding the current logo is from 2014, when The Daily Scholar was a website instead of software.

With a degree of separation between Mofin Labs and product end users, founders said a significant challenge is building brand loyalty among its potential customer base.

“It’s easier to establish an emotional connection with customers when it’s a lifestyle product or good, something that is so integral to their life that they don’t want to give it up,” Willis said, referencing companies Apple Inc. and Nike Inc. “In (business-to-business) sales, especially the financial industry, the decision-making process isn’t based on emotion, it’s based on fact and the bottom line.”

CEO Eric Ham said Mofin Labs plans to tailor its first marketing messages to financial institutions, the initial revenue source in its business plan. There are several pieces that make our solutions work, from the idea generators to the financial institutions moving the projects forward, so we’re creating something that tells our story and how they fit into it,” Ham said.

Eagle Speak CEO and co-founder Jason Arend said his company has long considered marketing agencies and design and development firms its target market for the desktop communication platform’s next beta test. However, since Eagle Speak is designed to improve productivity for employees who spend most of their time at a computer, the developers are crossing over into other industries – finance and government – for spending less time reading email and sending texts and more time working. The marketing strategy is simple: word of mouth.

“That’s where we can show that the product transforms and adds value to an organization,” Arend said. “Customer experience is king.”