Whatever the size of your business, whatever industry it is in, marketing will be a core fundamental that helps your business take the right route to succession. Of course, you need the correct product, the best people and a need for your product or service, but without marketing, there is every chance that your brilliant brand won’t be discovered.
Many startups put aside cash for a marketing budget, but it’s how that cash is spent, and where it’s spent that often ends up being detrimental to the business’s goals. A study from explodingtopics.com found that 22% of startups that fail didn’t have a sound marketing strategy in place.
Startups tend to have less cash to spend than larger businesses, so the efforts need to be more concentrated. Where a big company may be able to dip its toes into a host of marketing avenues to achieve the desired results, a start-up has significantly more limited resources and therefore must be considerably more careful in its planning. Putting all your eggs into one basket certainly won’t work, but attempting to put multiple eggs into multiple baskets will spread your cash and your team too thin. Think of it like putting $1000 on a number in a game of roulette. The odds are against you, but the return might be good. Then think about splitting that $1000 across 20 numbers, sure, your odds of success are increased, but the return is not what it could have been. That is why many startups, even with relatively limited funds, turn to creative marketing agencies to assist them.
A team of experts that can pick apart the aims, ethos and background of the startup and harness all of it for good by delivering the message to the right audience at the right time in the right way.
The creative marketing agency London experts, Hub, are one such company that offers its support and guidance and has provided businesses of all sizes with successful marketing strategies that deliver results. With over 1500 startup investments in London in 2022, the demand to be part of something new and innovative remains high. How many succeed though will only be known over time.
What about the businesses that go it alone? If you are one of them, read below to discover the mistakes other startups have commonly found themselves making. Read below and avoid making them to stay ahead of the competition.
Table of Contents
Failing to identify the target market
Perhaps one of the most common mistakes made by a startup is the failure to find the correct target market. Your team may have created an innovative product, may have curated some incredible POS, and launched some engaging social media channels but a lack of customer research could see you targeting the wrong people completely.
This poorly identified market will end up seeing your advertisements and hearing about your brand but with no interest in it at all. At the same time, by not identifying a target audience, you could actually spread your message too far and see the impacts of your marketing significantly lessened. (Remember the roulette analogy at the top of the page?)
Each audience requires a slightly different approach to consuming information about your brand. Factors such as age, location, gender and more all play a part and effectiveness can be found in its unique personalization. A creative marketing agency will carry out in-depth customer research using tried and tested means to find exactly how each persona type consumes and responds to marketing efforts and whether your brand will be relevant to them.
Not being authentic with your marketing communications
Occasionally, an “if you build it, they will come” type mantra is adopted by start-ups, especially those that feel they have a superior product and on-point branding. The issue here is that quite often, messages become mixed. Such is the confidence in the business, reality begins to become clouded. This can lead to inconsistencies in brand messaging across a host of platforms. A consistent brand voice and identity should be at the forefront of any marketing plan for a startup. Without one, the authenticity of the product could be doubted, and the values of the brand questioned. Utilising the knowledge of marketing consultants or a creative agency can correct this and ensure your message is reliable, consistent, and ultimately trusted.
Over-spending and over-expecting
You may hear people claiming it’s a case of “go hard or go home” but in marketing, especially for a startup, this is a risky strategy and one that could see funds wasted. Deciding to channel your efforts into big-budget marketing such as TV ads or national press campaigns could see your initial objectives fail before you have even tried alternative methods of promotion. It makes much more sense to assess marketing avenues that allow safer use of your budget and have your message seen more consistently. Consider more use of social media, email targeting, blogs, and sponsored web content. These provide you with a more budget-friendly option and with the help of your marketing team or creative marketing agency, will all be used for the specific target audiences you have established.
Failing to measure results and working to improve them
When establishing the core objectives for your business, you should be factoring in how to monitor and measure them. Without doing so, valuable insights that allow you to finesse your business will be missed and as a result, the development of the brand will stall.
Of course, if you see multiple sales or increased engagement, it is a huge positive. If those all came at a cost detrimental to the business though, were those sales worth it? If you spent $200 on paid ads and generated a few social media comments and a $10 sale, you could soon be on a slippery slope.
To see that this doesn’t happen, set your business clear and defined marketing objectives with KPIs that can track and monitor the performance. Think of monitoring, website traffic, clicks, conversions, and dwell time. Consider reach, customer reviews and ad effectiveness. Use dashboards and reports to help you track, monitor, and resolve marketing challenges. Factor in the surveys, product testing and methods of advertising too and you’ll have a comprehensive data set to work from that will drive sales up and put costs down.
Believing that imitation is a path to success
When carrying out your competitor analysis at the beginning of your start-up journey, you will have assessed who and what is likely to deliver the biggest challenges to you. These will be the successful companies, the ones you aspire to usurp over the coming months and years. Whilst following their lead and attempting to replicate their success is to be expected, you should steer clear of copying the way they got there. Imitating their marketing campaign, either through plagiarism or parody, could harm your brand integrity and see you fall at the first hurdle.
Being unique is where the secret lies, especially when establishing yourself. Look at what makes you better than the competitors, what makes you different and why consumers would be picking you over any other competitor. Once you become more established the avenue of parody does open up to you a little more but be prepared for the fallout and only do this if it suits your product and brand ethos. Trying to be something you are not is perhaps one of the biggest mistakes many businesses make!
There are plenty of opportunities to succeed out there, you just need to ensure you navigate the challenges and diligently work through the processes to ensure your brand doesn’t become one of the 90% failure rate for new startups.
