Avoid these 5 Common Mistakes in Startup Marketing

Avoid common mistakes that make your marketing efforts inefficient and lead to wasted resources.

In the past years, I have worked with Startups and SMEs in all sorts and I frequently see the common mistakes that many startups or SMEs are making when they do not have enough expertise or experiences with Marketing in house.

Here are the five common ones, how many have you identified with your startup?

1. Try to Sell to Everyone

The first and very important is to define the target audience. I don’t buy it when you say ‘everyone could be my customer’, or ‘ xxx and xxx and xxx could be my customer’. It is not good enough. The reason why it is called TARGET Audience is that you need to TARGET. Especially for startups, without the market data and extensive market research, it is hard to have a clear picture of who your typical target audience is. But you can conduct a personal interview session with 10–20 people who you think could be the typical customer type. Ask them questions about what challenges they face in certain areas, what kind of solutions they are looking for, what is important for them to choose the solution provider. And get some feedback on your product offerings. Go deeper into the conversation, and find out the WHY behind each answer, that’s where you will get the real insights about your target audience.

If you can not describe and be confident about who is your target audience, then your marketing efforts will not be as effective as it could be, such as the mistake coming up next.

2. Try to Be Everywhere

Be it a B2B or B2c business, be it a technology or consumer business, many startups try to be everywhere. What I mean by everywhere is, be active on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok… all social media channels, you name it. They thought if they can be everywhere, there will be more people to hear about the company and buy the products or services. But it is not so.

Because as a startup or an SME, you need to focus on building a brand that is relevant to your TARGET AUDIENCE. You need to be present in front of potential customers and show them what is their problem, what is your solution for their problem and why choosing you. If they are not your target audience, they will either not need your products or unlikely buy from you.

Each social media attracts a certain group of people by user profiles, by values, by themes. If your brand is not relevant to the group, you better not spend the energy and resources there, instead, focusing on where your Target Audience is. Think about these questions, if you are providing industrial products and your customers are businesses, do you need to be on Instagram? If you are selling a high tech SaaS solution to recreational aviation clubs, do you need to be on Pinterest? The point here is to identify the MOST relevant channels for your audience, especially you have a limited budget and resources. Even when one channel is 80% relevant, the other is 40% relevant the third is maybe 20% relevant, it is nice to be one all three, but as a startup, I’d suggest you start with the first and second channel and build a really strong brand. Then when you have resources to build on the third one, it will be much easier because you already have a strong brand presence from the previous channels. The beautiful thing about digital marketing is that you can target the right audience by choosing the regions, languages, positions, age groups, interests, and so on. This helps you to be more effective at targeting. Then, as a result, marketing ROI will also be much higher. Remember, marketing is an investment, not an expense.

3. Inconsistent Branding

When you don’t have a full-time designer, it is difficult to design something which is nice and has consistent branding across all communication assets. But when you show the brand with different ‘looks’ in different places, there will be no unique brand image established in the minds of people. On the other hand, with a non-professional looking, you are conveying an unprofessional or low-cost impression to the target audience. That is why it is important to invest in designing a distinctive brand and brand guideline. So wherever you promote your business, your design will always be consistent. One good example is IKEA. When you think of IKEA’s billboard, it is always blue, yellow, and one piece of furniture in the middle. Or the Heineken brand, it is always about the green, the iconic bottle, and the star. As a startup, you might not have the type of marketing budget as IKEA or Heineken, but you can hire freelance designers on fiverr.com, upwork.com, 99designs.co, with the right marketing strategy in mind and a clear briefing, you will be able to get something really great out of it. Having a unique and consistent brand image will create this association or image in people’s minds when they hear of your brand. When it is not consistent, people don’t remember you, or they have a negative association with your brand.

4. Lack of Marketing Strategy

It is the most important and first-to-be-addressed mistake. Why I put it in number 4 is exactly the reason why many startups lack strategy. Because they rushed into making the first three mistakes. For founders who do not have experience with marketing, what they think of marketing is nice designs, logos, videos, websites, social media, advertisements, and so on. As a consequence, they hire people to design websites, logos, social media persons to create accounts and making posts online. They rush into the execution phase without having a marketing strategy or brand management. It is quite similar to companies start building a product without knowing for whom it is for and to solve what concrete problems, but instead, they just had an idea and start building something. It is the same kind of mistake they make in marketing.

• Startup founders first need to understand who your target audience is, given that the product is built and you know what problem to solve.
• Check your competitors, do they all have similar branding and how can you stand out? For example, when we think of blockchain technology, 90% of the sites use the network pattern in their design. Many swiss financial service providers use the swiss mountain on their website. It requires some work to do the research and think of what kind of design that is relevant to your target audience but also unique. Then you will have a nicely designed brand that is relevant to your business and make you stand out.
• What is your current marketing objective? Do you already have a famous brand that people know of and you need to make more sales, or you have a new brand that needs to be built and make it aware by your target audience? Different marketing objectives will result in different strategies and approaches.
• Where is your target audience? select the right channels to reach out to them, sometimes you need to be a bit creative and think outside of the product category. a simple example, if you are selling children’s books, you can promote it in amazon, bookstores, and so on. But you can also send free copies to your local libraries or schools with additional information about your books and website printed on the backside of the book. If you are selling wine, besides promoting at wine fairs or wine stores, you can also partner with local specialty stores where they carry locally produced cheese, jam, and fresh food. Since your target audience will likely shop there. In consumer marketing, it is called cross-category selling, but the same principle applies to other products. Besides offline, you need to be at the relevant online channels. Refer back to mistake 2.
• Define and curate relevant and useful content for your target audience. Social media is not the place to post ‘Happy New Year’ or “Wish you a great day” on your channels. It has NO VALUE. Think of what kind of information that is relevant and useful to your target audience and by bringing them this content, they get value from you and you can build brand familiarity and trust. For example, if you are selling wine, you can post tips on how to choose the right wine, you can post information about a certain grower, you can post information about wine events and so on. You do not have to make every post a sales pitch. That is mistake 5.

 

5. Confuse Brand Building with Sales

I totally understand that you need to generate revenue as soon as possible and ideally a large amount of revenue. But for a new brand, without awareness and credibility, the likelihood of a person who hears about your product and purchases immediately is close to zero, unless you are solving a big and urgent problem and you are the only player in the segment.

There is a term called a consumer journey. It outlines the different touchpoints a potential customer/target audience interacts with your brand. At the end of the journey is a purchase. Many startups confuse the journey with purchase. The journey is what the potential customers go through, be it hear about your company, see your advertisement, or tried your products. After that, if you do everything right, he or she will or should have built trust with your brand. When the moment arrives, that they think they ‘need’ your product or want to buy from ‘you’, then you have a sale.

If you put all your marketing efforts into selling, you will not be able to build a brand and trust with your potential customers. For example, if your social media, instead of conveying the information about choosing wine, wine tasting, wine growers and so on, you make every post about Buy Buy Buy, it is not only too blunt but also not going to lead to the buy and you lose the opportunity to build a ‘relationship’ with your potential customers.

Brand building is to create the awareness, credibility, and association of your brands and serve as a foundation to achieve the sale. Think of it like building a staircase, a person can only reach the endpoint once he walks all the steps. Marketing and Sales should work hand in hand and collaborate closely to help the customer reach the purchase stage. So, do not confuse these two. For some products sales efforts are more important, for some products brand building is more important. It depends on your business then marketing and sales strategy can be customized.

One exception is that you are selling a commodity and brands do not matter at all. Then your customer will always choose the cheapest option and you have no brand loyalty. People are willing to pay more for the brands they love and stay with them and promote them. If you build this kind of relationship with your customers, then I give you a big thumbs up!

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Here are the 5 common mistakes of startups make. Have you experienced any of those or do you have success stories to share?

If you have any questions regarding marketing for startups, please feel to comment below.

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We are Promote and Scale, an agency specialized in digital marketing and lead generation for early-stage tech and e-commerce start-ups.

It is our mission to help you stop wasting your time and money on ineffective and inconsistent marketing activities. It is our vision to offer you comprehensive, high-quality, and efficient marketing services, so you can focus on what really matters — building your product, business development, and acquiring new customers.