Building a startup comes with an unknown territory. While this challenge opens the door to opportunity and success, it can also lead to early disasters. No matter how many years of expertise your team members have, a new beginning will always present unexplored before problems. We have studied the most common errors that can deceive the most scrupulous decision making. So, here are the 5 marketing fiascos to avoid when planning for a startup.
1. Spending money on the 'opening too quickly'
Money doesn’t buy happiness, but they are the only fuel for a startup. It is completely normal to desire to mark the beginning of your project with fireworks. Most startups take the industry by a storm and invest in expensive commercials, Facebook campaigns, or a futuristic website.
However, the budget will deplete with the speed of light with this one-sided approach. And by the end of your one powerful marketing move, you will gather next to zero intel.
In the initial stage, your startup needs to measure the impact on as many channels as possible. Your teammates may have worked with prestigious companies before, and they are likely to prefer one medium over the others. However, a new business comes with a clean slate.
A startup by definition is a new solution to an old problem but whose success cannot be guaranteed. So, you need the large budget to do experiments and test the online platforms that work for you. You start the marketing efforts with no foundation, no rules, no directions or guidelines. The budget will buy you time to discover the secret recipe for the success of your own startup.
2. Ignoring the power of the people
Once you launch the startup, chaos will break loose. Everything will happen in the blink of an eye. Success can come overnight (if you prepared every factor to make the medium viable for it) or there can be fewer results than you expected. There are going to be many brainstorm sessions, meetings, alerts, and other kinds of urgent business. This is why it is so easy to lose track of what is really important. The entity that will decide your success or failure is the audience.
Let’s take Slack for example. You haven’t seen any commercial from them because there isn’t any. The company saw an exponential growth, and that’s due to the fact that they didn’t follow the traditional path. They redirected the focus of marketing from the product to their target customers.
So, they asked several companies to test their product. They were objective about the feedback and adjusted their project accordingly. The chances are that you heard about them through a positive review.
A good testimonial can jumpstart the success of every marketing campaign. The efforts of attracting new leads would be in vain if you didn’t harness all the potential of your first clients. Today, the typical consumer relies their purchasing decision more on reviews from customers than an authority. The lesson here is to trust the voice of the people more than hunches, predictions, possibilities or probabilities discussed during business meetings with your colleagues.
3. Imitating your competitors
Studying your competition is a big part of your research for the best marketing direction. However, it could become a marketing fiasco if you base all your efforts on this single bet.
While your competition can guide you on identifying the main point of focus for your startup, your identity can suffer in time if you adopt too many similar strategies. It is critical for startups to build their own community as quickly as possible. However, if the target audience receives two similar e-mails in their inbox, they will not be curious about the new company, but confused.
It goes without saying that nurturing a unique angle will set you apart from your competition. So, don’t get caught too much in this vicious circle. Even though you will score quick results, the brand can suffer in the long term.
Besides, the strategies developed by others will not guarantee you any kind of success. The chances are that they are experimenting on their own with new technology, channels, and campaigns. Even though they have created awareness around them, it doesn’t mean that everything they do is perfect all the time.
Thus, the key takeaway here is that you should use marketing strategies to create the identity of your company. Having a brand for your business is like us having our own personality. As long as the startup’s identity protects values such as reliability, honesty, and transparency, the audience will be more likely to trust your services. This concept stands at the basis of social media influencers who can harness enough power in the era of technology to dethrone traditional advertising.
4. Believe in perfection
It is not at all easy to have a flawless beginning when it comes to a new startup. In fact, it is almost impossible to get everything right. But that’s a good thing actually. Any drawback, especially any marketing fiasco can be accepted as an invaluable lesson. You will know what doesn’t work. And by ruling out the bad, you remain with the good.
Unfortunately, many leaders waste their resources on looking for perfection. When a website design doesn’t work, they jump to conclusions and order a rebrand. And that can happen even when the startup is young.
The reasons behind a failure can be infinite. A website may not be successful because the audience prefers other channels or because it lacks certain kinds of information. So, before listening to your perfectionist side, you should weigh in the pros and cons in an objective way. When the stakes are high, your instinct might delude you.
5. Not believing in tracking
Unfortunately, studies show that only 23% of marketers are tracking their campaigns. This is how valuable data remain unknown. With just a shallow glimpse at the facts, you can’t measure the return on your investment.
Each campaign should benefit from tracking or unified threat management codes. You need to know exactly how many users interacted with your brand by registering open rates, click through rates, website visitors, and other factors. The numbers will help you create insights that are true to reality, and they will replace the uncertain variables with facts.
So, these are the marketing fiascos that can damage a startup right from the start. However, these obstacles can be identified at an early stage. You can avoid them by believing in the power of the brand and taking decisions based on solid evidence and not on assumptions.
By Levy Williamson, freelance junior content marketer
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