Every business will look for ways to take a rapid path to success quickly. Not everyone in the world needs your product, and that’s alright. So trying to run behind everyone to pitch your product is simply a waste of time.

As leaders, we will have to narrow down our key drivers and KPIs for our top of the funnel activities early for success. While we experiment with a lot of activities during our initial days, it is equally important to figure out what will yield your desired results. Over a year of experience of building Truepush, I’ve narrowed four key drivers who have accelerated our growth.

1. Build a solid rich content marketing strategy

Content strategy is building, managing, and curating media that you build (of course own it). These media can be any format, text, audio, video, and image tailored bespoke for your audience.

You can always start with the most basic and easiest form of content, text. Although, it is recommended to go about working on other formats to cover the audience at large. Remember! You don’t know how your audience likes to consume your content.

Be agenda-driven while building or choosing a format. At Truepush, we came to a plan upon a lot of small/big experiments and zeroed around a strategy.

∙ We experiment with 2 or 3 approaches for website content, keeping optimisation in mind.

∙ Our blogs spoke about our product and what problem it could solve. To bring more audience, we smartly worked our titles, infused Truepush, and the offering in between. Ex: Seven Best Practices to send Push Notifications, Increase Your E-commerce Conversion With Push Notifications, etc.

∙ We’ve also optimised our blogs by linking relevant blogs within the content. This helped us improve our average page depth.

∙ FAQ’s, How-to- guides, and integration guides are a must, helps you in tool adoption. These guides help you reduce dependency on Subject matter experts. We have seen close to a drop of demo calls if you have clearly explained the process.

∙Whitepapers are reports to inform the audience on complex problems which can be solved out of our experience of building the product and helping multiple clients of different verticals.

2. A rockstar SEO/Web Analytics team for growth

Good SEO practice will help you drive traffic to your website that otherwise is very difficult to receive. The effectiveness of the traffic can be measured with tools like Google Analytics, SEMrush, Ahrefs and other notable tools like Diib, Webmaster tools, and Moz bar. These tools will measure your success of the activities which you do around SEO activities listed:

Not many know that article submission is one of the most powerful ways to gain traction on your website. Submission is all about finding the right forum and tactfully promoting your website.

You just have to find out websites for your product category (You’ll get tons of them online) and start your submissions. 

Quora is a website which works like a charm for any product, but just make sure that you follow their community guidelines and not get deleted by their moderator team.On-page SEO (also known as “on-site SEO”) is the practice of optimising web page content for search engines and users.

Common on-page SEO practices include optimizing title tags, content, internal links and URLs. A lot of information on SEO is available online, the only tip I can give is do it diligently.Keyword ranking — where your website is ranked in search engines for a keyword-relevant to your business (Push notifications in case of Truepush). If done right, it will have a major impact on your Web traffic, lead generation and conversions.

You should first prepare a list of top 20 keywords and build a content strategy for your website and blogs in a way that these keywords are mentioned often. The only thing you should ensure is not to mention it too many times, as this is practice is against search engine policy.

Also, keyword relevancy is important too, else Google will consider your article misleading, and the chances are high that it will not rank on search engines.

Resolve website discrepancies by disavowing unwanted links, fix coverage issues and ensure that your spam score is always 1% (under 3% is still fine). Optimise your website images and keep it responsive so better results on search ranking.

3. Customer retention & engagement should be priority #1

To stay relevant you’ll have to listen to your customer and make sure they are happy. A great product is just one side of it, but if you don’t involve them during your tool-building then more you more likely will see little success or your product will perish soon enough.

Create a fantastic customer experience from the moment your user sign up to delighting your customer. The process we followed at Truepush to engage & retain customers are below:

Strong Support and Helpdesk team is crucial for a tech product like us. Most of your conversions happen from the chat widget on your website.

If you can build the trust of your user in the first conversation, mostly like the user is here to stay. We made sure the support chat/email line response time always stays under 5 minutes — quick replies wow users, especially for a free platform like Truepush.

People would be comparing you to other platforms which ask them to pay a hefty amount for not so great a support line. This differentiation got us the edge over other players in the market.

Few testimonials of our customers on our product:

Easy onboarding, swift demo and strong training module booking processes ensured product adoption was seamless. We made it easy for customers to book a calendar from through chats and emails. The training modules were properly documented and scripted built for swift process execution. The first communication around the touchpoints to the last email (post demo) was swiftly executed yielded us quick results.

Uplift your customer engagement & retention game by reaching out to the customer by offering help at different stages, by a powerful call to action prompting them next steps. Ex: If they aren’t sending notifications for a while, remind them to engage their users.

Encourage your customers to be part of your product roadmap by giving them hacks on push notifications. Be open for feedback as most of your customers are power users, and have used similar tools built by competitors. Implement their suggestion if it is helping customers at large.

We’ve created Whatsapp groups for top customers who are sharing inputs for your products to grow. Conduct webinars with them to capture their thought leadership over a video.

In a nutshell, delight your customers by being available for them and your willingness to listen.

4. Have a partnership, demand generation and PR plan in place

We have an ever-changing business development strategy formulated for Truepush. Ever-changing because we change it quite often until it gives us desired results. Our idea of meaningful partnership is to propel the growth of Truepush, focused mostly on improving growth metrics like Domain Authority, Page Authority and website traffic. How?

You backlink me, I backlink your strategy helped us in getting good quality backlinks without any sweat. When we write a blog, we look out an opportunity to backlink relevant blog links. In return, we go ahead and request their website owner to backlink our blog. This win-win strategy helps you to improve domain authority, hence your website’s ability to rank better.

Partnership and collaborations strategy allowed us to partner with various accelerators, media partners, infrastructure companies to fuel growth. These partnerships helped to take Truepush out to the community at large. The programs or campaigns are planned and executed in a way that gives up sign-ups in number.

EX: We organized a webinar inviting industry leaders from various domains to discuss the emerging opportunities and challenges that startups and corporates face during extraordinary times of the pandemic. We have partnered with media houses, startups (StartupHyderabad), Meetup Groups (StartupTalks), Telangana’s Incubator centre- T-hub and Amazon Web Services for the webinar which helped us in getting more sign-ups for the event from across the categories. The event had received huge applause from the attendees and hence turned out to be a big success.

This wider reach has helped us in taking our brand closer to the communities and forgot not to mention we have even yielded sign-ups for the tool though the event was about addressing a cause and business opportunities during the pandemic.

Our Demand generation and pipeline strategy started recently and has already garnered 30 + leads in a short time. We created two streams- Product pitching & Podcast pitching, both targeted towards generating good quality leads for Truepush.

Always remember, no matter how big an organization is or how small a startup is- every brand looks for various options so save their marketing budgets!

We reached out to several prospects over Linkedin pitching about our product, making them aware about Truepush and how it can help their business to save $, and simultaneously we invited a few prospects on our flagship podcast platform Game of Growth.

Game of growth focused on two objectives,

1. Building stronger allegiance with them,

2. Garner attention of Marketers/Digital marketers and developers.

This initiative got us a lot of momentum and qualified leads which helped us shape our product road map.

Our Media and PR strategy was simple; we emailed media houses and requested them to publish coverage on us. Our numbers told a great story, and hence media houses preferred to talk about us. We pushed ourselves to get one publication a month, hence taking the brand name out to more people.

Audio and Video content helped us enhance our presence on video platforms like Youtube, Soundcloud, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcast and many more. Our content assets on multiple platforms helped us ranking more on search engines and helped us reach more people who prefer audio/video content over text. To simply put, we are enhancing our area of influence by catering to a large audience.

To conclude, here's a list of our top achievements over the last year (July 2019- July 2020):

• Signup- 20,000 + and Growing.
• Over 400 signups (Best day)
• Top 10 Notifications company in the worth by G2 and Saasworthy.
• 35 Billion Notifications sent till date.
• Best figures/Per day
• 370 Notifications/Day
• DA- 36, PA- 39
• Alexa Ranking- 1019 (India), 10,293 (Global)
• Rated 4.7/5 on G2 and Capterra
• Top Media Company covered us: Yourstory, Business Standard, Yahoo Australia, SEMRUSH France, Blog Dumoderateur, Huffington Post and many more.
• Top Clients: NASDAQ listed company- RCI Hospitality Holdings Inc., Aglasem and GetMyUni, which are leading ed-tech portals, Grabon, India’s leading coupon website, Portugal’s leading internet broadband service- Vivo Fibra, Eenadu, AndhraJyothy, HMTVlive and The Hans India, which are the top regional news platforms, football.fr, France’s leading sports website, Vietnamese e-commerce giant- Chanhtuoi, Wall Street Italia Inc., Italy’s top news website and OImparcial, Portugal’s media platform.