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Not all firms are destined to survive without end, and that does not imply they’ve failed. Failure only occurs when exit doesn’t result in a favorable return for stakeholders. As this metric shows, among other things 75% and 90% of all startups fail, while for small non-startup firms the figure is around 70%.
One of the commonest reasons a startup fails is poor marketing. Your marketing strategy is just as critical to your startup’s success as securing seed funding. Avoid these mistakes when developing it.
1. Insufficient market research
Every entrepreneur has eureka moments when a great idea involves life. But irrespective of how great your idea is, you cannot build a startup based on just an idea.
You need to withstand the temptation to spend countless hours developing a product before developing other features of your startup. Instead, conduct in-depth market research first, and then use the findings to shape your product development process. You’ll find yourself with a product that your audience really likes, and you’ll be well on your solution to launching more practical marketing campaigns.
2. Ignorance of the customer
When you conduct market research, you’ll understand your goal demographic. You’ll define typical age/gender/salary breakdowns, and that information can be helpful. But beyond the typical metrics, you must focus on understanding your customers’ pain points. What are they stressed about? What’s keeping them up at night? What’s keeping them from clicking “add to cart”?
Knowing your customers’ pain points might help you create more compelling marketing materials that convey value. You must persuade customers that your product or service can make their lives higher, easier, or more enjoyable.
3. Ignorance of self
“Know thyself” is greater than just a Socratic maxim repeated by self-help gurus. It’s also a fundamental marketing concept. As you get to know your customers, you must get to know your brand higher.
You can only create effective marketing strategies and campaigns if you have a solid understanding of your brand identity and voice. All marketing materials might want to align with your brand identity to create consistent messages, build trust, and communicate authenticity.
4. Trying to be in all places at once
Savvy entrepreneurs understand the critical importance of marketing to startup success, and unfortunately, that knowledge can make them make yet one other marketing mistake. Imagine having your brand on every social media channel and your website rating at the top for every relevant search term.
However, when you’re just starting out, it’s best to avoid attempting to be in all places at once. Instead, focus on quality over quantity. Identify just a few of the most influential platforms and focus on them first. Focus on just a few of the most relevant search terms, just one or two key influencers, etc. Similarly, resist the temptation to scale your campaign too quickly.
5. Scaling up too quickly
You already know that you’ll have to spend money to make money, and you’ll must allocate a good portion of that funding to your marketing budget. But remember, it’s not enough to spend your entire annual marketing budget in a single quarter. In other words, don’t rush to scale your marketing campaigns too quickly.
Focusing on quality over quantity will lead you to launching “bite-sized” marketing campaigns. Monitor your results closely—and learn from them—and make adjustments as needed. When your results meet your goals and you feel your strategies are on solid ground, you can launch a campaign at scale without wasting your ad spend.
6. Tracking results chaotically
Of course, before you can track the results of your marketing campaigns, you must know exactly methods to do it appropriately. If you only track results haphazardly, you will get an incomplete picture of the effectiveness of your campaigns and find yourself with wasted promoting spend.
Unfortunately, common tracking methods leave much to be desired. For example, you might think that Google’s tracking is pretty solid, but it doesn’t track every step of the customer journey. It might attribute a sale to one of its PPC ads, completely ignoring the role an Instagram post played in purchasing behavior.
Instead, you’ll wish to track every single touchpoint in the customer journey. Conventional tracking methods don’t do that, which is why my company, Ai Media Group, uses Atrilyx™—our proprietary technology that tracks and attributes every touchpoint to optimize conversion paths and increase return on investment (ROI).
7. Lack of communication between departments
Evolution is inevitable, and in a startup environment, it has to occur quickly. Not only will your marketing team must quickly discover the need for change based on tracking data (and execute on that change), but they’ll also must make changes based on cross-departmental communication.
Too often, different departments in a startup operate in their very own bubble. Without open communication between departments, the marketing team may not have all the information it must grow. For example, the customer support team will gain an understanding of common causes of customer dissatisfaction, but if that information is not shared with the marketing and product development teams, those problems is not going to be solved.
Similarly, with multi-touchpoint attribution, your marketing team can learn about a product development problem that’s causing potential customers to fall off the radar. If there’s a communication disconnect, that potentially fatal flaw can go unaddressed. In other words, you can use attribution to do greater than just sharpen the focus of your marketing campaigns; it might probably also drive product improvements and innovations—but only if your startup promotes open communication.
All brands evolve. It’s vital to embrace change and chaos and learn from absolutely every little thing. If you have a cohesive marketing strategy that features solid tracking of results, you’ll find you can pivot more quickly and effectively, which can drive your startup’s success.