Marketing a startup isn’t as straightforward as you might hope. More often than not, you’re starting from the ground up. You have a blank slate and are paving the way to a new audience with a new product that serves a never-before-tackled need.
This. Is. Awesome. But, also means that you can’t market your product, service or business in the same way as the rest of the industry. This fundamental difference makes for some crazy interpretations of how marketing does and doesn’t work for startups. Don’t hamstring your business by falling for these common misconceptions:
You don’t need marketing
All too often I see industry “mentors” telling startups that they don’t need marketing. In all honesty, it’s absolutely infuriating. Entrepreneurs rely on the opinions and guidance of mentors to help grow their business. Choosing to not develop a marketing strategy is the exact opposite of stimulating growth.
The mindset isn’t completely unjustified. More often than not, these mentors are not marketers themselves — making it difficult to see how business growth and marketing go hand in hand. There’s a perception that marketing is expensive, time consuming and generally fluffy — which, depending on the marketer you work with, with can be very true. But, not at MARKETMOX.
And here’s why: the lean startup methodology can be easily applied to marketing. Lean marketing. (Oh, are you interested now?) And when you start to look at marketing through that lens — holistic, efficient, strategic — it starts to make a ton of sense for even the smallest of businesses.
It has to be flawless
As an entrepreneur with background heavily swayed by design and user experience, this one was difficult for me to accept at first. To me, it matters what people see and how they experience my brand — but in deciding what it was that I wanted to show them and running with concepts, I was missing out on a fundamental opportunity to learn more about what it was that they [read: you] actually wanted.
At the recommendation of numerous business-minded friends, I picked up a copy of Eric Ries’ The Lean Startup. On a first read, I was immediately defensive. “What do you mean the design doesn’t matter, Eric?!” It was tough for me to love, to say the least. I started searching for stories and watching conversations on my social networks, hoping to see how my interpretations were flawed. And, man, were they flawed.
Ries builds on the concept of the MVP — Minimum Viable Product. In my web development days, MVP became the call letters for “the powers that be say we’re going to launch some more crap today.” That’s really not the end-goal of an MVP — nor should it ever be. But the truth of the matter is that you can’t invest excessive amounts of time into making your product or service “perfect.” The same goes for your marketing.
Your marketing efforts, like your product development, can be data-driven, thoughtful and strategic. Without wasting away months and months on focus groups, color swatches and branding iterations — we can get you up and running with a beautiful brand that instills trust and intrigue in your product. With that, we’re able to see what your audience responds to best — and optimize your brand in the long term as your product grows and evolves.
Everyone is my audience
Never has a statement been less true — but believing this phrase is a mistake I’ve seen even the biggest of businesses make. You have an audience. You have a very specific niche of the world that is thrilled to be obsessed with your product or service. Those are the people you need to locate and engage. Blanketing a generic message across a generic audience will only work for so long — if it works at all. Identifying your target audience is a simple part of the process and will completely change the way you look at your marketing efforts.
If I can just get lucky
Rarely should luck part of the strategy when growing your business. You can’t rely on luck, but you can certainly rely on good, strategic marketing efforts. I can’t tell you the number of times that business relationships have formed out of conversations I’ve had from reaching out to someone months or years in the past. Persistence, focus and dedication to a thoughtful marketing strategy will pay off well before luck ever does.
Social media is all organic
Social media, managed well, can be a successful tool for fostering community and boosting retention among your audience and customers — just look at the success Mat & Kitchen owner Tandy Gutierrez has seen with it.
As she notes, that type of success takes relevant, engaging content and years of consistency building relationships online. For those that are just diving in, it’s ok to activate your audience with paid advertising and boosted posts. The trick: make sure it’s strategic.
Know your audience, know your goals and know your expectations. Before investing a dime, be sure to have a clear plan for how the campaign will be measured and what will determine its success. And if you don’t, or don’t know how to start, reach out to a marketing professional to help guide your strategy.
It just needs to be “discovered”
Discovery may be half the battle, but it’s not the answer to your struggles. Like luck, you can’t rely on your target audience to magically find your product, love it, share it with the world and leave you happily ever after swimming Scrooge McDuck-style in vaults of money.
When products are “discovered,” it most often begins with a strategy (I don’t think I can use this word enough) for catching the right eyes. Marketing plans may call for engaging influencers that align with the brand, creating social buzz related to the product or hosting a launch event to make some noise in the industry. The possibilities are endless, but one truth remains: doing nothing to market your product will leave you with exactly that —nothing.
This product sells itself
It doesn’t. The products and services that we see all day every day were once marketed to us in some way, shape or form. The number of brands that can say they’ve sold a product with no marketing whatsoever is…well, it’s none. The simple act of naming and branding a product is, in and of itself, marketing.
Working with a marketing expert that understands this on a fundamental level can help you to ensure that your brand and marketing efforts accurately support your business goals. I’m a huge supporter of holistic marketing methods — which means MARKETMOX considers your brand and strategies from all angles to build success for your business, not just your marketing campaign.
These misconceptions all point in one direction: you really do need marketing to fuel your startup’s growth. It’s incredibly rare that a product, service or business as a whole will thrive without some effort to communicate with its target audience — and that’s especially true for startups.
Many misinterpret “marketing” as being a large advertising investment when, in reality, it’s a strategic thought process for how you want your brand to be perceived and shared. No, you don’t need to break the bank on a huge advertising effort to launch your product — but you do need to market it. You need a strategy. You need a plan for engagement growth. Ditch the misconceptions. Let’s get your business on the right track today.