How we went from Zero to Gourmet Live?
- Palate Mkt is a Favcy portfolio startup that enables mom-and-pop gourmet brands to set-up their digital stores.
- Aditi Kapoor and Ruchi Sibal, the founders, share their journey as a product ready startup and how they designed and executed every phase of Palate Mkt's launch.
- With a well structured traction strategy and three-phased architectural planning and execution approach, PalateMKT is prepared to successfully onboard several gourmet food producers and suppliers.
Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard - Guy Takeo Kawasaki, Author and Silicon Valley venture capitalist.
Even the most sublime solutions can fail to make an impact on the market if the target audience cannot establish a link between their problem and the solution. At PalateMKT, we didn’t want to launch our product and wait for our key stakeholders to realize its value over time before coming on board. As a gourmet food aggregator site, we knew our appeal was niche: we understood that we would need to be bold from the offset if we were to succeed.
This meant taking early-stage traction and growth seriously and executing every phase of the Palate MKT launch with surgical precision. When our product was ready to launch two months ago and we needed to onboard vendors as the primary stakeholders of our startup ecosystem, we decided to devise and roll out a well-structured traction strategy.
Formulating the Plan
Before we could start recruiting customers, we needed to onboard mom-and-pop gourmet food producers and suppliers onto the platform. We wanted to reach these mom-and-pop gourmet food brands that had excellent products but needed help to increase their market reach. These businesses represented a micro-target segment and had specific pain points that needed resolving.
Palate MKT realized that we could help them scale sustainably by offering back-end support for accounting and logistics. With this objective, we developed a powerful architectural plan guided by the Favcy VB growth team.
The Three-Phase Traction Campaign
We initiated a series of events for sustainable vendor acquisition and systematic traction through measured activities. Instead of starting multiple marketing and customer acquisition activities at once, we adopted an assembly-line approach to developing a three-phased inbound marketing campaign.
We designed each phase to establish this campaign as a growth asset for PalateMKT. The broad framework delineated the course of action into meticulously planned and interlinked phases, which were:
- Reach: To reach and attract quality leads for platform onboarding and partnership.
- Conversion: To convert nurtured leads into actual vendor partners.
- Customer Success: To onboard and support vendor partners in successful platform usage.
Since we wanted to begin by reaching our targeted mom-and-pop gourmet food brands and present the value proposition of Palate MKT to them, the first phase focused entirely on customer reach.
Reach
In this phase, we explored two distinctive methods simultaneously. One was aimed at scrapping leads with the help of lead generation tools, and the other was designed to run ad campaigns linked with landing pages.
- Scraping leads: This was something that we could start doing immediately through automation and manual intervention. We planned to scrap Google and Facebook using a lead generation tool, defining a micro-targeted audience that was limited geographically to in and around Delhi. We would then contact these leads through cold calls targeting conversion, with a pre-designed script for introducing Palate MKT.
- Landing page-linked ad campaigns: Ad campaigns focusing on reach were designed to run on Facebook to generate awareness about the platform and attract the target audience to the website. This method involved designing high-quality ad content with relevant keywords and key phrases. We created multiple ads and ad sets to maximize market reach. These campaigns would run and continually be monitored for impressions, CTR, and conversions.
Conversion
Ad campaigns and scrapping efforts would generate high-quality leads. We planned the conversion phase of the traction and growth campaign to convert these leads into vendor partners. While the ads would make our prospective vendor partners aware of our brand, they would not create a two-way communication channel.
For us to know who our potential vendors were and what assistance they would require to start doing business with us, we created long-form landing pages. These pages were linked to the targeted ads designed for Facebook.
Whenever someone would click on our ad, they would be routed to the PalateMKT landing page with detailed information about our product and offerings.
A lead needs to realize their need and accept our value proposition as a viable solution to become a customer or partner. Therefore, we designed our landing pages to facilitate this very transition. A hammering effect would be created by iteratively providing the following information to every lead:
- Who is Palate MKT for? (mom-and-pop gourmet food brands with limited reach, a huge competition, or offline-only presence.)
- What are the pain points or problem areas that are keeping such businesses from creating a successful online presence?
- What are the benefits of setting up an online store?
- How can Palate MKT help?
- What are the steps to join Palate MKT?
- What is the cost of the partnership?
- What are the special offers or discounts for new members?
Every microelement of the landing pages was developed from scratch. We held and underwent exhaustive content ideation exercises to define the content to go up on each landing page. This was followed by careful wireframing to shape the structure and communication flow of each page. With the content and structure finalized, we got a dedicated web developer to design the pages, with particular attention paid to the UI and UX.
We also wanted the landing pages to be appealing and dynamic and prompt a dialogue between the visitor and the brand. Therefore, we added descriptive videos, graphics, and illustrations accentuating our message to these pages. Just like the content, we designed all the media from scratch.
Furthermore, we set up a cold-calling team to support conversion activity for leads captured through the landing pages. If a prospect only partially filled the landing page and left, our support team would reach out to them via a call to resolve their concerns and queries.
Customer success
Our next phase of growth and traction would begin when potential leads would convert into vendors buying an annual or lifetime membership. The customer success phase was designed to ensure that every vendor partner could completely understand the Palate MKT platform and use it with zero hassles.
With the help of email automation, we wanted to handhold every single vendor partner and facilitate their onboarding smoothly. Any kind of extra help or assistance that they required for setting up their digital store – rest assured we would supply it through deeply informative knowledge resources. For this, we partnered with Grow Nitro for automation support.
Even though automation saved us an immense amount of time, we naturally wanted to maintain a degree of human touch in our service and support by appointing an inbound caller. This tangible touchpoint would allow vendor partners with very little patience for technology and emails to get their queries resolved in real-time.
Ultimately, all these collective efforts have prepared PalateMKT for a strategic product launch. With a three-phased architectural planning and execution approach, PalateMKT is prepared to successfully onboard several gourmet food producers and suppliers. And, we are equally ready to cater to a dynamic and diverse market of buyers and influencers.
Stay tuned to receive the latest industry trends, investor insights, our exclusive angel bytes, and much more!
A platform for first-time angel investors to learn the science of early-stage startup evaluation. Get exclusive access to pre-vetted deal flow and make your first investment.
Subscribe to our newsletter 👇🏻 Don't worry, it'll take just few seconds :)
Reach out to us: