Top 15 tips in Digital Marketing, Entrepreneurship and Running E-commerce Startup with Denny Santoso

On March 16th, we invited our mentor from supplier.id and digitalmarketer.com, Denny Santoso, to talk about digital marketing, entrepreneurship and running an e-commerce. It was an entertaining and very informative session. In order to share a little of the knowledge that we received from Mr. Santoso, we will try to summarize the answers into 15 tips about digital marketing, entrepreneurship and running an e-commerce platform.

1. In order to learn more about digital marketing and entrepreneurship, make sure you follow the influencers in that filed and go to conferences. Try to get to know them personally and make sure you refer to them often, so that they will acknowledge you back.

2. Videos are the best way to connect to your viewers in large cities. Mr. Santoso likes making vlogs (video blogs) in order to connect with his followers and market himself and his company.

3. When selling your product, make sure you know which persona you want to take for your target customer and what their difficulties are. Know what makes them want to use your product, what make them do not want to use your product.

4. Always ask your audience what they want and market validate your product.

5. Your first 1000 users should be cheap. Mr. Denny Santoso used Adwords from 2008 until 2011. The easiest way to get through social media is through Facebook or joining together with venture partners.

6. When trying to do mobile marketing, make sure that the content is responsive. If you get alot of traffic from smartphones, then you have to optimize your landing page for mobile.

7. Marketing gets more expensive when you have to compete to market your product. So the cheapest way to market is through referrals and upselling your products

8. Most failures that Mr. Santoso had in the past is through having the wrong team. The ones that worked was due to a solid team and business model.

9. The best business model is the one with recurring revenue.

10. Mr. Santoso prefers paid advertising in comparison to organic marketing.

11. One of the biggest mistake for Mr. Santoso in digital marketing is making ads through targeting related searches instead of targeting competitor.

12. You have to do your research and know what social media platforms your customer is using. Not all customers acquisition happens online.

13. Your source of educating your customer of your product and sealing your deal with your customers might be through different your sources, do your research and know what platforms you should use in your different stage of customer acquisition.

14. When making a business model, ask yourself: "Is it Scalable?" If it is not, then you need to work in making your business model scalable.

15. "Always make a business to be profitable" that should be your goal when creating your startup.