Marketing Strategy of Vayable

Vayable Strategic Plan | Marketing Department

STRATEGIC PLANMarketing/Communications Department


Table of Contents

1. Executive Summary2. Introduction to Vayable3. Our Mission4. Our Vision5. Our Values6. History and Current Status7. How it works?8. Marketing Department Overview9. Industry Analysis

10. SWOT Analysis11. Competitive Analysis & Adavantages12. Target Customers13. Distribution Plans14. Promotion Strategy15. Retention Strategy16. Five Year Online Marketing Strategy17. Joint Ventures and Partnetships18. Financial Projection

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2Vayable Strategic Plan | Marketing Department

1. Executive Summary

Image: www.spnorthamericagroup.com

http://www.spnorthamericagroup.com/projects/

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2. Introduction to Vayable

Vayable is a combination of “vaya” – meaning “Let’s go!” in Spanish – and “viable.” In other words, “Vayable” is a place where anybody which includes travelers, explorers, hosts, insiders can get up and go explore the world.

Vayable is a marketplace and a pioneer in online traveling where people can discover, book and offer tours and activities across the globe. We are democratizing travel by empowering people to make a living sharing their knowledge and enriching lives through unique tour experiences, such as to ethnic food tours, private dinners hosted by locals, wine tasting festivals, and underground history, sightseeing and immersive cultural exchange.

Vayable is change the future of travel by:● reinventing how people explore the world;● empowering people to make a living by doing what they love;● bringing people together to share experiences with others.

At the heart of Vayable is a community devoted to experiencing the world better, and making Vayable the future of travel. Travelers are our customers and their guides are our team-members and ambassadors and they help us spread the word, internationalize, and engage the community.

We believe that by taking a trip or making it possible, people can change the world. Among all the other companies who provide tourism service, Vayable has its distinctiveness in terms of novel method that it offers a unique real-life-related journeys with the people who currently live there. Travelers can actively engage into the locals’ life during the tour as well experience sightseeing.

Vayable n.\ˈvīəbəl\


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Vision Statement:

Vayable’s vision is to revolutionize the way people experience the world, provide infrastructure for tourism, and become the go-to spot for curated “hi-resolution” travelling experiences. We want to see Vayable in every town, in every village, in every country around the world. We know for sure that if a model like ours isn’t implemented in the coming years, then there will be nothing but visits to Starbucks and McDonalds available for travelers in ten years. That’s why we are building a platform where people can make a living by doing what they love, and travels can emerge, not just visit, themselves into the culture during their travel.

Mission Statement:

Vayable’s mission is to “enable entrepreneurship and cultural exchange by connecting people through experiences.”

Vayable enables locals to use their time and knowledge to earn a living and generate new sources of income and at the same time the travelers get the opportunity to experience richer, more meaning travel experiences. This has shaped the mission of Vayable: to become the global platform for real-life experiences through shared travelling. In order to achieve this mission, we must live it and embody it.

3. Our Mission


4. Our Vision

➢ We value a world where everyone can travel with a minimum cost and create special relationships with the new people in the new places they encounter.

➢ We value the meaningful connections built across the different nations while they discover diversity with curiosity over others.

➢ We set our ultimate value to be spreading the "shared values" bringing us prosperity by promoting shared economy in the global community.

5. Our Values

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6. History and Current StatusOur Story:

Vayable was co-founded by Jamie Wong who used to help friends with their travel plans as her hobby while she visited 35 countries. She travel-planned honeymoons, family vacations, and romantic getaways for friends– then she blogged about it on WordPress.

As days passed, this begun to spark the interest of an increasing number of friends, who also wanted to share and discover their unique travel experiences and earn some money at the same time. The idea sprang when she saw this as a huge opportunity to make a platform where people could offer their talents to guide and tour traveling seeking guides.

In April 2011, Wong founded Vayable and became the CEO and dedicated herself full-time. She found a technical cofounder, designed the site, and began to develop the technology needed to build the community-based online marketplace.

Present & Past Figures

Since the beginning in April 2011, Vayable has expanded to meet the demands of our customers, the potential travelers. Now, our global team has headquarters in San Francisco and New York with team members and the hosts in 102 cities around the globe.

In 2011, Vayable started with just one employee and now in 2014 it has 6 full-time employees in each of its HQ in San Francisco and New York and 5000 guides stationed in 500 cities. In 2011, Vayable’s projected revenue was $20,000 and now in 2014, only after three years, our company expects an annual revenue of $ 60 million by the end of the year.


7. How It Works?

Instead of sending travelers to the usual tourist traps like travel agents did in the past, Vayable is taking advantage of the sharing economy, the rise of an itinerant workforce of freelancer insiders, and the desire among travelers for authentic experiences.

Interested customers fill out a short survey to gauge their interests and travel style, then get paired with a Vayable travel guide based in their destination to design a bespoke tour. Our company has a roster of 5,000 guides stationed in over 500 cities.

Vayable takes a 15% cut of the fee and a 3% commission on the overall tour package. On a $3,000 package, for instance, the company takes only $90. If a guide charges $300, Vayable gets another $45 from the guide. For the month of July, Vayable took in $42,000 from package commissions and another $20,000 in guide commissions.

Commission from travellers: 15% of cost of each tour Commission from guides: 3% of cost of each tour.



8. Marketing Department Overview

a. Who We Are?

We are Vayable’s storytellers. The Marketing team is responsible for sharing the Vayable love around the world. We create the content that moves our users to laughter and tears. We’re accountable for the social, partnership, and distribution networks that spread the good word about Vayable. We bring the spirit of joy, authenticity, and sharing of our product to our users, and we bring our users’ passion, insights, and dreams to our product. We’re the type of people who are struck by creative ideas in the middle of the night and can’t wait to share them.


We promote our business and drive sales of its products and services. We provide the necessary research to identify our target customers and other audiences. We integrate Vayable’s goals, strengths, channels of distribution, competitive environment, target markets, pricing, core messages, and products into one cohesive document known as the Marketing Strategy. As part of the strategy, we develop the list of tactical ideas such as direct mail, print advertising, and search engine optimization that will enable the us to communicate our message to customers and prospects. With a strategy and tactical ideas in hand, now we are ready to take on the responsibility of executing the programs and initiatives to drive sales and revenue for Vayable.

c. Why Marketing Is Important?

Because Vayable is a pioneer in Social Economy, i.e. peer-to-peer tour guiding, the heart of our company and most aspects of our business depend on successful marketing. The overall marketing umbrella covers advertising, public relations, promotions and sales. Marketing is a process by which a product or service is introduced and promoted to potential customers. Without marketing, Vayable may offer the best tours and guides in the industry, but none of our potential travellers would know about it. Without marketing, we will lose customers, consequently, sales will crash and Vayable will fall behind its competitors.

d. How Marketing Helps?

• Getting Word Out For a business to succeed, the product or service it provides must be known to potential buyers. Without marketing, your potential customers may never be aware of your business offerings and your business may not be given the opportunity to progress and succeed.

• Company Reputation The success of a company usually rests on a solid reputation. Marketing builds brand name recognition or product recall with a company. As your reputation grows, the business expands and sales increase.

• Healthy Competition Marketing also fosters an environment in the marketplace for healthy completion.

• Higher Sales Our sales will steadily increase as the word spreads. Without employing marketing strategies, these sales may not have ever happened; without sales, a company cannot succeed.


9. Industry Analysis

a. The Tourism and Hospitality Industry

The global travel and tourism industry generates several thousand billion U.S. dollars in revenue each year. The number of international tourist arrivals worldwide exceeded the one billion mark for the first time in 2012 and is forecasted that to grow around 1.36 billion by 2020 and 1.8 billion in 2030. The direct and indirect contribution of travel and tourism to the global economy is nearly 7 trillion U.S. dollars.

(Source: World Travel and Tourism Council)

In 2012, China was the country with the highest international tourism expenditure with Chinese nationals spent an estimated total of 102 billion U.S. dollars when travelling to destinations outside their home country. Europe was the region with the highest number of international tourist arrivals, totaling more than 530 million. The Asia Pacific region had the second-most arrivals with around 230 million.

As of March 2014, each overseas traveler spends approximately $4,500 and stay on average 17 nights when they visit the U.S. Direct spending by resident and international travelers in the U.S. averaged $2.4 billion a day, $101.4 million an hour, $1.7 million a minute and $28,154 a second. Seeing this as a huge opportunity, our team has conducted a research in the Internet and found:

People spend an average of 29 days, researching on 22 sites online and planning for 30 hours on a single trip, and take 3- 4 trips a year. On average, people spend another 6-10 hours trying to find a tour guide or agency to help them set up, show around, and guide through the cities to which they are travelling. This is a lot of precious time spent figuring out where to go and what to do! Our research has given us critical insights. We discovered that the Marketing Team at Vayable can contribute in excelling the company to become a global pioneer in shared economy and tourism business by utilizing this wonderful opportunity.

In 2014, globally:

● Travel and Tourism (T&T) growth is expected to outpace growth in the whole economy (4.3% in 2014 vs 2.8 % in 2013)

● Globally, Travel and Tourism is expected to generate around 6.5 million new jobs.

● Presently at 8.3%, China is expected to grow the most of any G20 countries in 2014 in this sector.

● T&T investment has been forecasted to increase by 5.6%.● It is anticipated that there will be a 4.8% increase in visitors exports.

The graph above shows how travelers have increased their expenditure over the last decade. (Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics)



b. Future of Shared Economy

The sharing economy is a little like online shopping, which started in America 15 years ago. At first, people were worried about security. But having made a successful purchase from, say, Amazon, they felt safe buying elsewhere. Similarly, using Airbnb or a car-hire service for the first time encourages people to try other offerings. Next, consider eBay. Having started out as a peer-to-peer marketplace, it is now dominated by professional “power sellers” (many of whom started out as ordinary eBay users). The same may happen with the sharing economy, which also provides new opportunities for enterprise. Some people have bought cars solely to rent them out, for example. Incumbents are getting involved too. Avis, a car-hire firm, has a share in a sharing rival. So do GM and Daimler, two carmakers. In future, companies may develop hybrid models, listing excess capacity (whether vehicles, equipment or office space) on peer-to-peer rental sites. In the past, new ways of doing things online have not displaced the old ways entirely. But they have often changed them. Just as internet shopping forced Walmart and Tesco to adapt, so online sharing will shake up transport, tourism, equipment-hire and more. The main worry is regulatory uncertainty. Will room-renters be subject to hotel taxes, for example? In Amsterdam officials are using Airbnb listings to track down unlicensed hotels. In some American cities, peer-to-peer taxi services have been banned after lobbying by traditional taxi firms. The danger is that although some rules need to be updated to protect consumers from harm, incumbents will try to destroy competition. People who rent out rooms should pay tax, of course, but they should not be regulated like a Ritz-Carlton hotel. The lighter rules that typically govern bed-and-breakfasts are more than adequate. The sharing economy is the latest example of the internet’s value to consumers. This emerging model is now big and disruptive enough for regulators and companies to have woken up to it. That is a sign of its immense potential. It is time to start caring about sharing.

Source: http://goo.gl/GVcPhT


10. SWOT Analysis


11. Competitive Analysis & Advantages

Similarly to the industry analysis, our competitive analysis is not report listing of every detail about every competitor. We have focused on defining who our key competitors are, and we have focused on their weaknesses and strengths. Most importantly, we have used this analysis to determine our current competitive advantages and ways to develop additional advantages.

a. Voyagin

Compared to Vayable, it is focused on allowing you to discover authentic travel experiences. Particularly in Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and Philippines. It does have some competitors, however. Gidsy.com, SideTour.com, and Vayable.com all have their big presences in the travel experience marketplace. But most of them don’t have a wide variety of choices, especially in terms of travel experiences in Asia. So Voyagin is hoping to fill this vacuum, aspiring to take the lead in this niche market. They’ve already collected more than 350 travel experiences from locals in India and Southeast Asia countries as of today.(image: voyagin.com)

b. Getyourguide

Besides booking fun stuff to do, anyone can host activities. Think unique walking tours guided by. Compared to Vayable, it offers more various activities for tourists (Over 19,700 activities provided by professional suppliers in more than 1,930 destinations worldwide and has distribution partnerships with more than 1,500 online travel agencies, travel operators and media companies, such as TripAdvisor). ( image: getyourguide.com )


c. Guidehop, Inc

Guidehop has about 1,000 activities for sale, ranging from a haunted house tour in McKinney to a tour of the 2012 Summer Olympic sites in London. Customers browse through a range activities in their city to see which unexpected new experience will grab their interest. With photographs, videos, written descriptions, and reviews from other customers, they can get a clear sense of what they’ll be embarking on. One of their distinctive advantages is the payment method that can be made quickly, easily, and securely online, so all that’s left to do is have a great time exploring with a nifty local guide. (image: Guidehop.com)

d. On The Road

Founded by Veteran Technology entrepreneur, Michal Bláha in 2004 to provide a valuable connective resource. It is the newest online trip book that gives customers the ability to share their journey every step of the way with those back home. By providing them with great tools such as an interactive map, They are able to track their locations and plan your next destination. Customers can easily publish photos and videos to share with friends and family. Its distinctive feature is placed on simplicity. Every account is accessible through web interface or email. From customers’ personal OnTheRoad account they can access all their email contacts and select who they would like to keep informed. ( image: Ontheroad.com )

As a part of our fiver year strategy we will be using this analysis to determine our current competitive advantages and ways to develop additional advantages. We will be keeping track on our competitors constantly.


12. Target Customers

Biggest concern to take account when planning a holiday or a trip is probably information about the destination. there are always limited sources to information and in order to be satisfied with the information would involve time and surfing through many websites and books on travel guide. This is a tedious process for most people when planning a holiday. There were 19,274,036 people that travelled overseas and out of those population 60% of them used internet to arrange their holidays. However Vayable allows customers to experience the richness in culture and provide a bridge path to travelers. We endeavor to share our culture in exchange exploring the worldwide allowing travelers to experience the memory with others through information on website and mobile application. The smart device application enables travelers to access Vayable whilst on the move. We aim to provide the best and easiest possible access to information and experiences to travelers.

Source: UD Office of Travel and Tourism Industry


13. Distribution Plan

Before the intervention of peer-peer travel service model, the traditional distribution was done through travel agencies. The distribution was done by this process. Due to this complicated process, lots of additional fees resulted in to the hands of the consumers. Also, the suppliers of the tour programs should pay a bit of a fee to the people in the middle. Additionally, when consumers usually purchased package tour programs from agencies, they had to participate in the programs which they had no interest in it. The consumers did not have much freedom to choose what they wanted to do.

However, in the case of Vayable, the distribution process is different from the traditional way. The supplier could directly get in contact with the consumers. This kind of distribution process, acts positively to both the suppliers and consumers. The suppliers do not have pay additional cost to the middlemen and the consumers too. So the distribution plan that Vayable currently has results beneficially to both sides.


14. Promotion Strategy

Promotion strategies consist of contests, Customer Referral Incentive Program, and Branded Promotional Gifts Since Vayable is not a well-known company, we have to focus our promotion strategy on making people aware of our company by emphasizing the cost-effective way of traveling all around the world. First, Contests are a frequently used promotional strategy to promote Vayable and put the logo and name in front of the public rather than make money through a hard-sell campaign. People like to win prizes. Sponsoring contests can bring attention to your product without company overtones. Second, the customer referral incentive program is a way to encourage current travelers or customers to refer new customers to our website. For example, we can advertise free tour guide offers, big discounts and cash rewards as some incentives we can use. This is a promotional strategy that leverages our customer base as a sales force. Lastly, Branded Promotional Gifts: giving away functional branded gifts can be a more effective promotional move than handing out simple business cards. Put the logo on a T-shirt, ink pen or key chain. These are simple gifts that we can give our customers that they may use during their tour, which keeps our business in plain sight rather than in the trash or in a drawer with other business cards the customer may not look at.

Source: Flickr

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15. Retention Strategy

Nowadays, technology is making traditional travel experiences in places like Europe more accessible to a wider range of people in a shorter range of time in an affordable way. Vayable will change the way people think about travel and their time off. People need to go deeper searching for a unique travel experience.

Vayable intends to evolve into a comprehensive travel service, beginning at the discovery and booking phase while extending into day-to-day travel details.

The company will move out of its San Francisco headquarters to set up a temporary office in Paris, followed by stints in Spain, Italy, New York and Buenos Aires. The move will both cut operational costs, according to Wong, and help the company solidify relationships with travel guides and develop insights for travelers. In the future, we are planning on taking a 15-30% commission on hotel bookings completed through the site. The bulk of Vayable’s future revenues will come from hotel bookings. As the customer demand for hotel bookings has started increasing according to the market research report done by Ipsos Korea, a professional marketing research company.


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16. Five Year Online Marketing Strategy

1. Keyword Strategy : Identifying keywords and optimizing our website for them.

Currently, Vayable is under vayable.com domain. With the projected business expansion, we suggest the derivation to local domains—mainly .fr and .es domains as we have already gained a huge market portion in France and Spain. This expansion will further go to other local domains as we conquer the market. This lesson is learnt from Airbnb, as Airbnb has proven a considerable growth after their breakdown into local domains. This would allow Vayable to optimize keywords on to the website more effectively.

Also we suggest more frequent updates according to Google’s Panda updates. As for today, (11/24/2014), on Google.com, “Vayable New York City” brings 11,000 search results including top 2 results, 1. https://www.vayable.com/new-york2. https://www.vayable.com/experiences/search/New+York+City

Even though these two links land into two separate pages, they are carrying similar contents. Therefore, our team suggests a better keyword search optimization with quality contents.


https://www.vayable.com/experiences/search/New+York+City


2. Search Engine Optimization Strategy : documentation updates we will make to our website so it shows up more prominently for our top keywords.

Our new Five Year Online Marketing strategy emphasizes the importance of a SEO strategy which keeps track on frequent updates on our website. This includes every listing by insiders, Vayable created contents and blog updates on the website. We have estimated the need of extra funding on this section in order to compete with new competitors.

Screenshot taken from : Inside Industry - hoosh.com ( 11/24/2014) | Category: Adventure Travel

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The pink bar in the 2nd graph shows the average share of search of paid and organic visibility for the top 5 domains based on the top head keywords in the category. Under Category Content Distribution, we can see what content types dominate the search results for these categories: mainly classic (web) textual results with a tiny bit of video and the rest goes to Ratings, Blogs, News, etc. What’s interesting here is the somewhat higher visibility in the “Other” content type.

3. Paid Online Advertising Strategy: Suggested online paid advertising platforms

Vayable doesn’t use any google ads currently. Our team suggests to start with Google adwords which costs approximately $300 for 5000 clicks. Sometimes we forget that aside from high positioning in Google SERPs, people also need to be visually stimulated for a good click-through rate. Our department would chose to invest in Google display advertising with banner ad campaigns including images from actual advetures being offered on the site. This would allow Vayable to attract international traffic and increase our listings dramatically.Depending on pace of the expansion on the website, we suggest using Google visual adverts in future. This approximately costs $ 0.01 for every display on google websites.

This is of the best ways to measure the visibility of websites is reflected in a visibility score algorithm that considers search and click behavior as well. To that end, we might wonder if Google Display Ads would help Vayable ins search. More than search, this would help brand recognition as there is a bigger competition in peer-peer travel services.



4. Social Media Strategy : How we will use social media websites to attract customers?

Understanding — and communicating — the uniqueness of places to experience-driven travelers through social media be the biggest turning point in Vayable’s success. Vayable’s current referral system through social media has actually brought more traffic to the website.

Introducing Vayable Referrals: Give $10, Get $10

(Following section on Vayable Referrals is copied from http://blog.vayable.com/2014/08/13/introducing-vayable-referrals-give-10-get-10)

At Vayable, we believe that travel is always more fun with a friend. That’s why we’re introducing our new referrals program: you can give $10 in credit to a friend, and get $10 in credit for yourself. Cool.

Here’s how it works:Anybody with a Vayable account is given a unique referral link. Find it on your profile page.

Use this link to invite friends to sign up and book an experience on Vayable. (Maybe you can even do something together?) They’ll get $10 off their booking*, immediately. Once your friend has gone on their experience, you’ll receive a $10 credit straight to your own account. You can apply this toward the next experience you book.


Vayable Insiders and their stories

Vayable’s mission has always been to help people to see the world differently. We started with our community of local Vayable Insiders hosting adventures. Two years later, we have grown to nearly 5,000 guides in over 500 destinations and have connected thousands of people throughout the globe–from Buenos Aires to Bali–on our community platform. We are thrilled to announce that we’ve expanded our platform to better accomplish this mission with the launch of Vayable Insiders.

Vayable loves telling a good story, whether it’s through a movie completely made of crowdsourced Vine videos or an ad featuring birdhouse replicas of its most intriguing properties. We would give a platform for its users to do the same thing through “Stories from Insiders,” which shares the real-life experiences of Insiders and Travelers and how their lives have been positively changed or impacted by Vayable.


When it comes to social media campaigns, crowdsourcing content from fans can be tricky to manage without a solid strategic plan — without proper creation and channel management, even a well-intentioned hashtag can go horribly awry if left to the masses. In our upcoming social campaign, Vayable will create a platform that allows users to create a personalized version of their new logo, new theme and new slogans. After selecting colors and patterns, users can then share their customized logo along with a photo and favorite Vayable memory via social media. The posts will be tagged with #VayableAnywhere.

17. Joint Ventures and Partnerships

The most significant characteristic of “Vayable” is a sharing services such as offering a local tourism. Currently, “Sharing Economy” — sharing the resources — is becoming a new theme in the economy among developed countries. To make Vayable as a major company in the market, it should collaborate with other similar company that takes advantage of theme of “sharing economy.” Vayable has two options to make a collaboration: Airbnb (selling housing services) and Uber (selling transportation services).

Starting with the first option, Airbnb, according to the Airbnb official website, was “founded in August of 2008 and based in San Francisco, California, Airbnb is a trusted community marketplace for people to list, discover, and book unique accommodations around the word — online or from a mobile phone.” It is the number one company which tourists primarily search to reserve the accommodations. Since Airbnb is a big and stable company it requires lot of expenses such as time and budgets to bring the customers from them. Rather than benchmarking the Airbnb, it is better to collaborate with them to provide integrated services to customers. This make us to kill the two birds with a stone because Vayable can save budgets for other products and have specialized image at the same time (Airbnb — accommodation and Vayable — tourism).

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In general, the most important three services that traveler look for are a cheap accommodation, transportation system, and memorable tour. Assuming that Airbnb takes part of accommodation service and Vayable covers memorable tour by local people’s service, it would be better if Vayable can make a partnership in transportation sector. However, there is no specific company that offers a worldwide local car sharing service at the time. Among all the other options, Uber is the best bet in terms of its characteristic that it enables the local people to drive their own cars. Uber is currently operating under 50 countries which covers North America, Central & South America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, and Asia Pacific.

To demonstrate the collaboration, marketing department suggest to make one unity official website. There are three benefits if this makes happen. First, customer will be much more convenient to access our three different types of services which will lead a synergy effect to increase the sharing market. Putting a package services with certain amount of discounts is also considerable. Secondly, three companies can reduce their management fee. It is obvious because the website is integrated to one official website which will reduce great amount of management works. Finally, three companies can build a superpower together to survive in a competitive market. Since the basic concepts of Sharing Economy is so simple there might be a many benchmarking companies who can targets Vayable with developed service.



18. Financial Projection

Projected budget for the Marketing Department is based on following assumptions:

• Forbes reported that Vayble’s July 2013 revenue accounted $1.4M. That suggests, $17M/yr runrate. We assumed that 15% of the monthly revenue accounts to the Sales Revenue. •Comparing to the 2012 and 2013 average monthly sales revenue, we have assumed that Vayable generated $280,000 during October 2014.• We assumed that in 2014 Vayable has allocated 10% of the sales revenue to the Marketing Department. • Due to the rapid growth and the Five Year Strategy, we suggests an allocation of 15% of monthly sales revenue for the first 6 months of 2015.

Projected Budget for the Marketing Department ( 2015 January – 2015 June)

Since Vayable is relatively a new company, we suggest to increase the marketing budget in every year. There for we have forecasted 15% from the monthly sales revenue for the Marketing Department.

Marketing Strategy of Vayable

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