Designing a push-pull marketing strategy to drive hyper-local marketplace growth
Marketing experiment with:
Grace Cao
Product & Content Marketer
About
One Market (1m) is a hyper-local marketplace which offers owners of small businesses free technology to help them grow and sell to the right buyers at the right time.
Industry
Marketplace
Headquarters
San Mateo, CA
Funding raised
$18m (seed)
Company size
1-10
Founded
2021
Marketing functions
Digital marketing
Social media
Editorial
Community
Paid ads
Challenge
Messaging, positioning, cross-collaboration frameworks, user research to experience optimization.
Solution
Messaging, positioning, cross-collaboration frameworks, user research to experience optimization.
Results
Communication, alignment, interdisciplinary cooperation, customer analysis towards enhancing experience.
Articles, podcast, webinars, e-books, case studies, infographics and much more, designed to reach.
Field, influencer program,
One Market's story
Small businesses play a vital role in both our economy and our communities. Yet if owners want to understand their company’s valuation or find the right buyer, they face many difficulties. The lack of transparent marketplaces means that owners risk undervaluing or overvaluing their business, often leading to financial losses or missed opportunities. As a result many small businesses simply shut down rather than transferring ownership, entailing vast losses for owners and preventing many promising entrepreneurs from ever running a small business.
Enter Baton, a marketplace for small businesses that offers free valuations to support owners in planning their next move, be it growing or selling their business.
“You can think of Baton as the Zillow for small businesses – a trusted and transparent marketplace where the business, the financials and everything else that’s required is verified,” says Chat Joglekar, co-founder and CEO of Baton. “That’s really what we’re aiming to build.”
Struggling with new product trust in community
Like many early-stage startups, Baton held off on adopting a CRM as long as they could because of the complexity and slow time-to-value typically associated with traditional CRMs.
“Finding and then setting up a CRM is usually a huge ordeal. It’s a really big buying decision and you get locked in,” says Chat. “Making them work for your business in a way that drives growth is very difficult. We knew we had to get a CRM at some point, but we wanted to push that out for as long as possible.”
Baton instead integrated a variety of tools together, including Airtable, Retool and Notion, to track their customer relationships. This worked initially, but like all DIY, stitched together systems it was cumbersome, manual, and incredibly hard to scale. Ensuring that the data stored in each of these different tools was correct and consistent was an increasingly large burden for the team.
“Our biggest challenge by far was making sure that data was up-to-date and consistent across all of our tools,” says Chat. “What stage were people at? Had they given us their data via our onboarding flow? We would actually go to Retool, which we use as our admin dashboard, and manually copy and paste each of those things into Airtable. That took hours of our customer success and sales reps’ time.”
The surging volume of administrative tasks was soon taking up multiple hours a day. This threatened the team’s productivity and scaling potential, leading Baton to urgently search for a CRM solution.
The push-pull marketing strategy: Click and mortar
Today, Attio is integral to Baton’s entire GTM strategy. Using custom objects, Baton has configured Attio around its three key data types: Buyers, Sellers, and Leads. Paired with the newly released Automations feature, these constitute the primary driving forces for Baton’s ever-evolving sales pipeline.
Product content and action for direct connection
I'm Grace Cao, a Product and Content Marketer in the SaaS space. I am focusing on creating the best website building tool with my talented team. A high level of craft is very important to me and my work.
