SPARK stands for Streamlining Processes And Realigning Knowledge. It is an initiative by Somish to provide a full-service product lifecycle experience to our premium customers, which goes beyond software development.

As a product venture studio, we realize the importance of product lifecycle management and the go-to-market strategy comprising digital marketing, content management, advertisements, video marketing, social media management, email marketing, setting up of CRM & Support desk for sales & technical support of products.

Technology does not determine the success of a product or service. Especially for the decentralized world, there is a dire need for products to step up their community-building & marketing efforts to build out a cult that rallies around one’s product or service.

Areas of business that are often overlooked on the drawing board include the marketing strategy and budgeting that will eventually help in scale. If thought of carefully, marketing is the only division in a business that brings in customers and eventually helps in generating revenue for businesses.

With 5 years of experience in building crypto businesses, Somish enjoys unmatched expertise in full circle product lifecycle management for crypto businesses. While for most of the 5 years, these services were restricted for our internal use, we have now started providing access to the expertise for our premium customers.

Content Generation

1.  Content Generation is the first step towards marketing of any kind. It is also the most crucial step as the sentiment and impact of the entire marketing pipeline depends on the quality of the content being generated by a product team
2. Crypto content generally includes whitepapers, technical articles, how-to guides, blogs for products like cryptocurrency exchanges, decentralized exchanges, token sales, DeFi Protocols of lending, stablecoins, asset-backed tokens for gold, fiat and crypto.

Content Distribution Engine

1. A good piece of content is only as good as it’s distribution. If you host a piece of content on a blog that has negligible traffic, does it help? It rarely does. It is critical to distribute the same piece of content across multiple distribution channels to attract eyeballs.
2. Targeted Content distribution for crypto works in telegram groups, discord channels, reddit, bitcointalk, social media platforms, steemit and various other forums.

Advertisements

1. Advertisements are one of the most effective marketing weapons. Specifically in crypto, with the increasing noise amongst centralized exchanges, derivatives, leveraged trading solutions, DeFi protocols, it becomes important to jump the organic traffic line by advertising and staying on top of the competition.
2. For crypto, advertising has become targeted. With platforms like CoinMarketCap launching their ad networks, it becomes easy to target ads to the relevant audience. Ads on Google Adwords & Facebook are also relevant, but function for a limited type of products.

Video Marketing

1. A picture substitutes a thousand words, but a video substitutes a million. The most powerful marketing technique in 2020 is that of video. Self shot videos, explainer videos, product demo videos are the thing of today, and combined with conversion of the video audio into a podcast opens up the voice search capabilities of search engines.
2. Video Marketing involves the following steps:
   • Storyboarding – writing a high level story of how the video is going to be shot
   • Script writing – writing a short script for the video, or else extempore works well
   • Video Recording – recording the video if in person, else using motion graphics 
   • Video Editing –  editing the video before hosting 
   • Video distribution – similar to content distribution and follows the same strategy

Social Media Posts

1. Social Media Marketing with posts across various platforms is still a relevant technique. More than anything else, it helps a brand in pushing out a message to its subscribers and announcing latest updates. Most users expect to see an active social media account of the products that they use.
2. Platforms that are relevant for crypto include Twitter, Facebook, Steemit, Reddit, Bitcointalk and a few others.

Email Marketing

1. Email marketing is super helpful for lead nurturing especially from a marketing qualified lead perspective. Imagine a user who is interested in using your product and signs up for it. However, he does not use the product after signing up. The best way to engage such users is to nurture them using email marketing.
2. Emails help in providing a first hand experience of a product right into the inbox of a user. Crisp and to-the-point emails still work and have a substantial impact on user retention.

Support Desk & Ticketing System

1. One of the most important things behind a successful product is the ability for the team to offer technical support. Binance runs a 24×7 technical support team which allows them to listen to the customers and solve their problems.
2. There are an umpteen number of ticketing solutions available in the market, however, it is critical to choose the right solution that can integrate with the product lifecycle that is being followed in the team. For example, if you use FreshDesk as a ticketing system, you will face difficulties in setting up tight integration of the ticketing system with a CRM solution that is of a non-FreshDesk brand. This will impact the user experience of your customers as your sales team will not be aware of the customers’ support issues due to lack of integration.
3. These are problems that start arising once systems are deployed. Somish helps in cutting down the experimentation time and straightaway helps in using tools that can be integrated to provide a unique customer experience from day one.

CRM Automation

1. Another very important aspect of unique customer experiences is the ability to record customer details in the CRM. If you are building a B2B product, CRM automation becomes even more relevant. Imagine a scenario where your marketing efforts helps you in getting a lead on your website, but then you don’t have a sales engine to actually tackle the lead and ensure follow-ups are being done regularly.
2. This often results in the marketing expenditure being wasted and leads not being followed up with. To avoid these scenarios, there are numerous CRM solutions available in the market at different price points, starting with Salesforce, Zoho, Pipedrive, FreshSales and many others too.
3. Somish helps product companies select the right CRM solution that can automate lead generation from all possible avenues and collate in the CRM solution. Further, Somish also assists in setting up follow-up automation as per the requirements of the team. This can include 2 day, 5 day, 8 day follows or even one follow up a day.

Finance Integration

1. Once the technology, marketing & sales engines are setup the obvious next step for a business is to see how all verticals come together from a financial perspective. Is the business making money? How much am I spending on COGS (Cost of Goods Sold), SG&A (Sales, General & Admin expenses)? What are the benchmarks of similar companies in my industry? What is the actual profit margin of my business?
2. These are some of the questions that the management worries about once the business starts rolling.
3. It is important to note that for enabling data driven decision making, it is absolutely critical to orchestrating technology, marketing, sales and finance division in a way that data is exchanged seamlessly to generate reports that can help the management in taking the right decisions.
4. With 14 years of experience, Somish enables such integrations across tools to provide a holistic view of the entire business.

Business Intelligence & Analytics

1. The final step for an organization in the product lifecycle management is to enter the phase of “Continuous Improvements”. This is achieved through the use of business intelligence that works on the data collated in the technology, marketing, sales & finance divisions.
2. BI has become a talk of the town with looks like Tableau, Plecto, Zoho Analytics providing a much needed impetus in intelligence.
3. Somish has extensive experience in deploying the right BI tool for a crypto-based product business. The idea is always to simplify the experience for both the end-user of our customer but at the same time, also for our customers.

We are launching the SPARK service for businesses that are already working with Somish on the technology development/consulting side.

If you’re worried about the go-to-market strategy of your blockchain/crypto product, feel free to hit us up. We would love to have a chat.

Contact Us Now