I own a start-up for an app bringing people together for simple things of life in a secured and efficient way. How do I penetrate the market?

I have recently launched my global consulting company (May 2014), as well as launching a one day event/expo for young entrepreneurs (Feb 2015). I am facing similar challenges regarding the exposure and creating awareness.

I have decided to give my website a face lift, work with a company to push emails out, and also attend 5-10 networking meetings per week in the metro area where I live. I have joined several local business associations, networking groups, and post very targeted industry information on social media. The data base that I have built is just short of 1,000 contacts. These contacts are all accurate. I usually generate 15-20 strong contacts per meeting. I have an open rate of 37% on my email campaigns and the web site has generated over 198,000 impressions in 6 week. Not a lot for the more established industry gurus and sites, but I am pleased with it.

I really work hard on the community connections. This has worked well. Now, after about 8 weeks of activities, my project is known in the metro area. All of my sales and 5 domestic and 4 international start-up clients are a direct result of these activities.

You might want to consider presenting in local Meetup meetings. We have a Tech Village here in Atlanta and the networking meeting draws about 400 people. I am very selective and prepare each and every of the networking meetings one or two days in advance.

I know that it is time consuming and not everybody believes in face-to-face networking like that. It works for me.

Call me if you have additional questions about networking and my results.

I would suggest launching in certain geographical locations ONLY.

Kind of like how Uber does it.

An app like you're describing is pointless if it's value comes from location based services.

Push one small geographical locations through marketing tactics that will bring people to your app download page. Think of localized contest in which the prizes have something to do with the location (major league baseball tickets, for example).

If someone attempts joining from a different location, inform them you're launching soon and keep their emails on file.

This then tells you where the most demand comes from, and give you a good idea of the next location to "open".

This also allows you to test what is working and what isn't because your app will be used by people as if it were already popular all over the world.

Yours is a Geo location based app, I understand.

There are many ways to penetrate your market. First, you need to segment your market into different verticals on the basis of the factors like age, interests, gender or location.

Once they are segregated, you have to design specific marketing campaigns catering to each category, focusing on number of sign ups and a great experience.

Such campaigns can be run both online and offline.

This would gain you both PR and aggressive Sign ups.

Don't follow anyone, make your own story. All the best!

In case you need help making the campaigns and measuring the ROI, feel free to get in touch. :)