Marketing Strategy, Tactical Plan, and Growth Engine of Dropbox

Entrepreneurial marketing
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Entrepreneurial Marketing
Introduction
Advancements in cloud technology have attracted a large number of players, making the venture not only attractive to consumers but also to many technology developers. Dropbox is one of the leading startup companies in cloud technology, which has experienced substantial growth over a short period in the number of users globally and in its profitability. Dropbox was founded by Drew Houston in 2007 in San Francisco, California. The company offers file hosting services that integrate cloud storage and file sharing capabilities for individuals and organizations. Houston was motivated by personal experiences to offer a solution that could enable computer users to synchronize consumer files across different computerized systems. The services offered replaced the manual uploads or emailing file attachments. Suggestively, Dropbox services were designed to take advantage of the challenges faced by computer users using multiple devices. These services attracted over 500 million users and many organizations, including a majority of the Fortune 500 (Alotaibi et al., 2019). By 2017, Dropbox was the fastest SaaS business to be valued at one billion dollars. The achievements made by Dropbox as a leader in cloud-based digital file storage can be attributed to strategic measures taken by Houston as an entrepreneur in a competitive and dynamic business environment. The measures taken by Dropbox are reflected in the marketing strategy, tactical plan, and growth engine adopted by the company.
Marketing strategy
Dropbox began as a cloud storage service provider with 100,000 users to more than four million within two years. Notably, the company’s approach to marketing did not require significant investment; rather, it took advantage of the products offered and how the company engaged with the users. In this context, Dropbox used word-of-mouth marketing by engaging users and stakeholders in creating awareness and introducing the services to potential customers (Drago et al., 2020). The success of word-of-mouth marketing for Dropbox can be attributed to the timely launching of the company when there was growing competition among companies offering cloud storage companies that were looking for users. This implies that users were aware of existing cloud services and were seeking the best providers. This created an opportunity for Dropbox to use its superior services to win over the competition. Nevertheless, there was a mistake emerging from the word-of-mouth approach that is reflected in how Dropbox created awareness about the product before it was fully launched and market-ready. From another perspective, creating awareness with the testing of landing pages and a private beta program did not only create interest among the people but also offered important feedback that led to the development of a better product. Dropbox adopted a strategic launching approach that did not only create awareness among potential customers but also contributed to a growth in the number of individuals that could be directly engaged by the company (Patil et al., 2015). By setting up the landing page before developing the product, Dr...