As the number of social media users worldwide has entered the billions, a social media presence has become an important tool for companies to reach and interact with current and potential customers. As firms increase their social media activities, challenges arise that can undermine the value of a social media presence. For instance, managing accounts on multiple social media platforms and timing posts strategically can be time-consuming. In addition, businesses in regulated industries such as finance, insurance and healthcare face regulations regarding what they can say on social media and elsewhere. A tweet or Facebook post containing prohibited information can lead to fines and other penalties.
What Is the Solution?
The folks at Gremln recognize these challenges and are helping businesses and individuals streamline their social media efforts. Gremln’s social media management system allows users to optimize their social media activities by managing multiple accounts, creating scheduled posts, checking for impermissible disclosures, and more. Gremln offers multiple levels of its service to meet each customer’s needs and boasts generous free trials and outstanding customer service. And if the standard offerings are not enough, Gremln offers highly customized enterprise solutions that are tailored to a customer’s specific needs.
A central theme of the CELect program is that entrepreneurs are constantly looking to add value to their businesses. Gremln adds value for its customers by not only saving time with social media management, but also by catching prohibited posts before they become a costly mistake. Likewise, the Gremln CELect team seeks to add value to Gremln’s business by providing in-depth analysis of customer retention and upgrade behavior.
Our Interaction with Gremln
A week after the project kick-off presentation, we met back at T-Rex to sit down with Gremln’s founder, Ryan Bell, to determine where our efforts would best support Gremln’s goals. Throughout the meeting, we were all impressed by his dynamic disposition: welcoming, polished, approachable, informative, efficient, well-spoken—a perfect persona of the product. The following week we ran our plan of action by David Bell, Gremln’s Chief Marketing Officer. Together we refined our team’s objectives in terms of how we were going to collect our research, who we were researching, and the questions we will answer. Not only were we able to learn about Gremln from its architects, David and Ryan, but we were also able to observe, and in turn learn from their managerial styles, interpersonal skills, work ethics, and how they prioritize projects.
Our Project Objective
Gremln is interested in getting more basic users and trial users to subscribe to their paid solutions. Our goal is to improve this conversion rate.
How Will We Do It?
Our strategy for finding the holes in Gremln’s conversion tactics starts with interviews with current Gremln users, both free and premium. By sending out an email to Gremln’s current database of users we were able to easily access an audience that had an opinion on why or why not they decided to upgrade.
Our interviews consisted of questions ranging from uses of Gremln’s services, thoughts on their websites, and what uses Gremln does not include that could be of service to them. Compiling this data should lead to the holes in Gremln’s strategy. Plugging these holes then becomes the bulk of our strategy.
Post By: Mikey Parker, BSBA ’14, Ben Ryan, JD ‘14, Robin Schnitzer, BSBA ’15, and Marco Sotela, BSBA ’14, students in the CELect entrepreneurship course with Prof. Clifford Holekamp
