Strategies for Digital Scaling-up of Businesses in a Cost-Effective Manner

One of the biggest challenges faced by businesses in growing industries such as e-commerce, mobile applications or online products and services is that of digital scaling-up. It has been seen that companies with a small initial focussed target audience tend to find ways to optimise the cost of customer acquisition along with that of their operational capabilities. It is, however, much easier to scale-up optimal operations through good internal processes and putting in place checks and balances than it is to scale-up customers, increase online growth and multiply transactions and revenue.

Growing businesses; especially those involved in e-commerce, mobile applications, and online services and products; will often find that whenever there are opportunities in the market, competition tends to blossom. This means that the pace at which competitors increase grows faster than the demand for their services or consumer needs. Thus for any digital scale-up, mobile applications and businesses have to be able to grab market share from others. For this new and ever more innovative online growth hacking strategies need to be employed.

In the traditional way of doing things, in order to substantially increase online business growth, a lot of money ends up being spent. It has been shown that in many cases when businesses digitally scale-up their operations; to increase customer acquisition revenue by 100%, the money spent in marketing for every $1.00 of revenue increases by 80% to 150%. This is because businesses tend to bid high and compete with existing large players who already have deep pockets and attempt to hunt customers just like anybody else. This kind of mobile application and online growth strategy only works to the advantage of advertisers and their network such as Google, Facebook, display ad networks, and affiliate networks because this kind of competition increases the average value realized from every visitor or consumer for them.

However, we at ObliquePyramid believe that it is a myth that a business or a mobile application needs to spend a lot of money for customer acquisition, online growth, and digital scaling-up. This only happens because most businesses tend to tread the beaten path and follow the herd; instead of thinking out of the box. We believe that every product and service has its own unique attributes,customer connects, positives and negatives. This unique combination of every service or product is attractive to a very specific set of consumers, and not to everybody.

It is our intention to find that niche and target that specific segment, thereby saving on a lot of costs and expenditure on digital scaling-up. But the key question here is how a mobile application or business can identify this set to streamline online growth and customer acquisition. To achieve this, we use a systematic method; and through an integrated analysis of multiple parameters and multiple cohorts, we attempt to figure out the primary, secondary and tertiary behaviour of all these people around all available digital mediums (including spending and non-spending digital networks) in order to digitally scale-up. We analyse their activities, their timings, and a lot of other behavioural data. This way one can reach them with the right communication for the right offering at the right time.

This will reduce the end customer acquisition cost for businesses and mobile applications, saving on the number of dollars spent in earning every dollar. Thus, even if the volume of visitors may be low; the cost per click and the lead cost (people showing interest) could be high. Because what matters in the end for the business is the revenue realized per transaction and the total revenue generated from the marketing spend, while keeping the growth and digital scaling-up as desired. To this end, it is important to be able to convert the visitor into a customer who takes the money out of her wallet. How many people merely show an interest then becomes inconsequential.

It is a back-to-basics approach to customer acquisition and digital scaling-up; following the lead of a shopkeeper who doesn’t care about the number of people who visit his shop. The valuable number for her is the people who actually buy stuff instead of the window shoppers. To this shopkeeper, it makes sense to expend less money and effort on those who only come to see and not to buy.

We at ObliquePyramid do exactly that and always focus on how to digitally scale-up the business or mobile application, while keeping the customer acquisition cost low. It takes a lot of analysis, and a method of execution that is linked to a loop of optimization of performance. By fine-tuning the behavioural cohorts and thinking out of the box, we ensure the online growth of the business is successful and cost-effective.

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