The application of lean marketing for growth-hacking: Implementation of IMC strategies for start-up businesses

In a world that requires rapid adaptation to the current trends of marketing, entrepreneurs should choose their methods wisely to be up-to-date about the strategies that make them successful. An entrepreneur must figure out the most effective solutions to minimize the possibility of failure. Within this perspective, IMC has gained great importance since digital tools have entered the marketing world. By definition, IMC is the variety of methods that are in an effective interaction with each other to achieve the goals of a marketing campaign and create maximum impact with consistency. This study aims to show how IMC strategies can be implemented for start-ups, and which indicators they should take into consideration to plan a marketing strategy. The importance of this study involves (1) the results were expected to provide valuable data to the literature, (2) it's underlining the importance of a number of KPIs before, during or after a certain strategy applied. Within the theoretical frame, each KPI is defined and the relation between those KPIs and IMC have been investigated. For this purpose, an interview has been conducted with 73 entrepreneurs and the relationship between business segments, communication platforms, KPIs, communication strategies, tools, brand value, brand message and marketing communications is analyzed. Maxwell's interactive model of research design is implemented (1) to define the main media for start-ups and related KPIs to assess the performance of them, (2) to find an alternative IMC strategy in order to be used for start-ups within the scope of lean marketing. As a result, this study verifies that social media is a key platform for marketing. This thesis may also benefit future studies as it can make a ground point to investigate key platforms and metrics which should be paid attention to catch up with the current needs of the marketing industry.