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Startups fail for many reasons. One is bad marketing—and it’s something entrepreneurs don’t pay nearly as much attention to as product development or capital raising.
I’m a professor at a leading business school, Babson College, and have spent most of the last three many years helping aspiring entrepreneurs learn the best way to market their businesses. Marketing can increase sales, help your small business reach its potential, and enable internal alignment with goals.
Many entrepreneurs, nonetheless, are confused about the role of selling. Some treat it as something secondary. Some go too far, promising advantages they can not deliver. Others do not go far enough, failing to make use of marketing to generate buy-in from employees, stakeholders, and customers.
Here are the three most typical misconceptions about marketing and what your organization should do to vary them.
Myth #1: Marketing is about selling product features
One of the things I like most about entrepreneurs is their passion. The founders I coach and mentor are steeped in the details of their products, while also having a general belief that what they’re working on is a game-changer.
But entrepreneurial passion can create blind spots. For example, founders are often so excited about what they’re building that they begin with the features of their product and ask, “How can I convince customers of the value of these features?”
The result is a disconnect between entrepreneurs, who are absorbed in their offering, and customers, whose attention is often focused on solving their very own problems.
What must you do as a substitute?
As painful as it could be to confess, entrepreneurs should recognize that customers largely don’t care about the thought that goes into a product. What they really care about is solving their problems.
Every startup began by pondering about a customer problem. But over time, entrepreneurs can lose sight of that north star and get bogged down in a long list of specific features.
To deliver real value to consumers, go back to the earliest stages of your organization’s development, when you were continually asking, “What’s the need to build this?” Marketing should start from that customer-centric view and work backward to the product, relatively than starting with the product and rationalizing why customers should care.
Myth #2: Marketing requires you to go big or go home
Entrepreneurial passion may fuel overly ambitious marketing, in which corporations exaggerate advantages or even distort reality.
It happens more often than you would possibly think. One Gallup poll found that “only 27% of employees strongly agree that they always deliver on their promises to customers.” Overpromising about what your product can do almost at all times backfires on your organization and can result in financial, reputational, and legal consequences.
That’s true of failed startups like Theranos, which claimed to supply revolutionary blood-testing technology, or FTX, which supposedly heralded a recent era of cryptocurrencies. The same is true of established corporations. Gerber settled false Claims that one of its infant formulas prevented allergies. Volkswagen (*3*)deceptive The Clean Diesel campaign led to the world’s highest-earning carmaker paying a $25 billion fantastic.
What must you do as a substitute?
Marketing teams must balance courage with honesty, never letting the desire to go all out override reasonable expectations about what the company can deliver. You can encourage customers with a big picture without pushing them to purchase into specific guarantees.
When your organization creates the next marketing campaign, make sure you’re not promising greater than you’ll be able to deliver. Monitor whether your product isn’t meeting expectations—and if it is, report the issue to your product teams and adjust your messaging as quickly as possible. Marketing’s role isn’t just to specific value; it’s also to assist make sure you deliver it.
Myth #3: Marketing is all about selling to potential customers
Another mistake entrepreneurs make is treating marketing as just selling a product to customers. That’s a big a part of it. But marketing is also about getting your team on the same page and getting buy-in.
Lack of Internal Fit Is More Common Than You Think – Another Gallup Poll found that only 41% of the company’s employees “know what my organization stands for and what makes our brand stand out from the competition.” Imagine this: Most people in your organization is probably not sure what your brand stands for or what makes it stand out. As a result, employees are less engaged and less effective.
This is a huge gap that marketing can and must step into. An effective marketing function helps align every worker on the team with the company’s value proposition, market, and customer segments.
What must you do as a substitute?
Instead of introducing marketing later in a company’s development to sell what has already been created, integrate it from the starting. Use marketing to make sure everyone in the organization has a sense of the company’s core value proposition.
You could launch an internal marketing campaign to drive worker engagement. Or you possibly can host a pop-up event that mixes worker appreciation with an effort to speak the company’s mission. Consistency is key. Don’t assume employees understand the founders’ vision.
Summary
In an era where technology is evolving so rapidly and corporations commonly promise things that sound like science fiction, it is more necessary than ever to make use of marketing to create and deliver compelling value and enable focus on the organization, the market and the customer.