The marketing strategies will be aligned to address the marketing objectives of Ontraport in relation to the place, which is one of the four aspects of marketing mix. The business will market itself through online platforms such as social media and offering webinars to its potential clients. other places sought to market the company will be the Certified Ontraport partners, Marketing consultants, referral partners among others. The clients shall also get a variety of services and products online especially through the company’s website. The target market remains the online solopreneurs and small and midsize business enterprises (SMBEs) and SMBE retailers (smalBizCRM.com) which is to be found in medium to large US cities that lack substantial online presence and activity. The primary focus shall be on Boston, MA; San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; and Denver, CO as these have large concentrations of SMBEs per capita.
The marketing strategies shall be tailored to address the needs of award winning authors, motivational speakers and personal development professionals who would want to monetize their membership sites in order to monetize their large followings and client bases. Many of these target clients have heavy online presence through social media (facebook, twitter, and LinkedIn, google+ among others). Ontraport shall offer to manage the social media profiles of the target clients and interact with the clients. An example of a small business customer is tickederby.com which is an online service for promoting and selling tickets for an event and which allows a promoters customers to become social media marketers and resellers of event tickets (TicketDerby, 2015).
The specific marketing strategies are-
After the segmentation of the market by industry, location, and size, it will then be suited to products and brands. The market will be broken down to reactions of clients in terms of readiness (for the untouched market). The products will also be rated on their usage (say light, medium, and heavy) for clients who are already using Ontraport products. Brennan, Canning, and McDowell (nd) state that specific ways of addressing a target market help to distinguish one from another and increase customer loyalty.
Ontraport will collaborate with high-profile solopreneurs to create interest, engage with potential customers. Aggressively increase certification of Ontraport Partners (Ops), e.g., integrators and marketing consultants. The solopreneurs will be suited with the SAAS marketing funnel, which will be availed to them in modules or as an integrated system. It will increase participation and interaction amongst Ops; Ontraport leadership, technical, and customer service staff, and existing Ontraport users and potential users. The use of webinars to train and increase the participation of OPs and marketing consultants will be enhanced. The company will also sponsor weekly marketing strategies webinars featuring established successful online marketers who use Ontraport. The purpose of the Certification program is to optimize the consultant’s toolset and enable them to engage clients in a better manner.
The Ontraport Certification program ensures that the attendants get to master their potential demands and the test done at eh end of the program proves the rigorous and effective nature of the training. The courses are offered across the country in different cities. For instance the most recent course was offered from June 15-19th at the Ontraport Campus, Santa Barbara, CA. The attendants reserve their seats online.
Ontraport has enjoyed partnerships with leading Gateways and Online Retailers. Some of the major partners include PayPal, Alavon, Eway, Stripe, Clickbank, Samcart among others. as such, the integrations enhance Ontraport’s objective to reach to many clients.
Ontraport will also enhance its services customers by allowing them to place orders of products online. The company has an edge over its competitors such as Infusionsoft in this area since customers can order Ontraport online and move through the steps with relative ease. This leads to a shorter lead-to-customer cycle, which is less intimidating to customers (brightideas.com).
As a marketing strategy, Ontraport offers a free 2-hour implementation session in which new users can get the services of an experienced attendant in charge of their account. As such, the new users get to learn of Ontraport’s features and products in an easy and accommodative manner (brightideas.com). The ability of clients to serve query, use products and services availed online enhances the company’s objective of reaching and serving more SMEs in the target cities.
Ontraport has availed several consultants to work with their clients. The consultants who include Amrieka Takhar, Alejandra Ortega, Anastasia Barre, Anderson Willis among many others are outlined on Ontraport’s website with their brief qualifications and website links (ontraport.com). The purpose of outlining the consultants is to help Ontraport’s clients have a diverse consultancy to select from due to differences in locality and business needs. In line with the objective of addressing the business automation needs of businesses in US cities that lack substantial online presence and activity, Ontraport’s website has a “Consultant Finder” which can help clients locate consultants in target cities such as Boston, MA; San Francisco and Los Angeles, CA; Portland, OR; and Denver, CO.
The consultants have also pushed Ontraport’s marketing strategies further. Funnelcake, one of the consultants appreciates the diversity of Ontraport’s clientele. As such, Funnelcake offers to transact a lot of business talk on the phone with the client at the consultant’s expense and this brings about great convenience to clients. The consultant also elaborates or creates a map for the client on how Ontraport can meet the business automation needs from the client’s perspective.
Ontraport has maximized on ensuring that its clients are familiar with their dashboards and how they can decipher all information posted therein. For instance, the Ontrapalooza platform can give clients a sales funnel reporting. After clients have built their sales funnel, they can add the metrics associated with the sales funnel (in purchases, page visits, opt-in form conversions etc) to their dashboard. Such conveniences are easy for client to use and obtain credible results while they also ease the human interventions that clients would need from Ontraport’s support team.
In comparison to its competitors such as Infusionsoft, Ontraport has reduced its set-up time to 1-4 weeks. Infusionsoft’s set up time is 4-8 weeks (brightideas.com). The short set-up time is a great marketing strategy of giving customers the full benefits and proving the resourcefulness of each client’s investment within a short period.
Ontraport has an effective CRM. Although the CRM is limited in scope as compared to that of its competitor Infusionsoft, it has a critical tagging and lead scoring system, which can be automated and utilized in order to accommodate high involvement. Ontraport has 150 custom fields and they accommodate diversities of many startups.
References
Ontraport vs. Infusionsoft: Which Marketing Software is Right For Your Business
Retrieved 20 June 2015 from http://brightideas.co/ontraport-vs-infusionsoft/
Ontraport.com- Certified Consultants Retrieved 20 June 2015 from https://ontraport.com/community-consultants/
Ontraport.com- Case Studies: Retrieved 20 June 2015 from https://ontraport.com/case-study- template/
Brennan, R., Canning, L., & McDowell, R. (n.d.). Business Market Segmentation. In Business-to-business marketing (3rd ed., pp. 136-161). SAGE Publications.
smalBizCRM.com Reviews Ontraport CRM. (2014, June 04). Retrieved June 20, 2015, from http://www.smallbizcrm.com/crm-software-reviews/ontraport-crm-review/
