While designing business ideas and establishing strategies, entrepreneurs should focus on marketing strategy. However, start-up marketing is a critical matter that you should consign to professionals! If start-ups work with a professional and an experienced digital marketing team who knows the field, they can gain a new professional perspective and focus on advancing their products.
Let’s say you anticipated the future or spotted a gap in the market. You identified the needs. Now you have a great business idea. You are going to attract people like bees around a honey pot! Your heart is pounding with excitement. You have already started to form ideas and dreams about your company name, logo, website, app designs, and even the influencers you can collaborate with. Of course, we would not want to stop you from getting excited. In the end, excitement is perhaps among the essential personality traits of an entrepreneur… However, an entrepreneur needs to have even two more significant characteristics not to fade within a short time: Being objective and patient. If you have the right people, who can say that the emperor has no clothes and give hope when necessary, with you from the beginning of your journey, you can see the fate of your business. Well, why did we dwell on our blog post titled marketing? When it comes to start-up marketing, we actually circle around these two facts we will face:
- Having a perfect product will not enable you to introduce your start-up to the masses by itself.
- If your product does not work, you cannot reach millions even with a top-notch marketing strategy and budget.
Let’s begin. Are you ready to know why start-up marketing is a critical matter that you should consign to professionals?
If you want to hit the nail on the head, you must see the target…
At the very beginning of your journey, you should also face the second truth so that you can most successfully embark on your path in the long term. Before even developing your business plan, you should also focus on your marketing elements and the elements of your brand identity, such as your company name or logo. Well, yes, you heard that right: We are talking about start-up marketing even before developing your business plan. That’s because your market research and marketing strategies will play a key role in determining your financing needs and perhaps help you realize that the total value of long-term net profits you expect to gain at the beginning is not that appealing.
Does the product or service you offer have any equivalent in the market? What are the value propositions that differentiate you from the others? First, you should surely know yourself and the product/service you offer. While doing that, you should also pay regard to the market you are addressing and your competitors. Besides the traditional methods such as SWOT/PES analysis, you should also scrutinize yourself and your market with all kinds of analyses and approaches you can find. At this stage, you should remember receiving as many reviews as possible from your inner circle, family, and friends, who can frankly reflect on their ideas to ensure objectivity.
…then, you need to aim at your target.
At the end of all of these researches, you may realize that the inauthenticity of your product. However, this fact does not have to push you out of the market. Maybe what will differentiate you from the others will be the different messages you want to convey, the emotions you want to evoke, and the different lifestyles you will address. Thus, your marketing strategies will develop via many various channels, collaborations, and campaigns. With start-up marketing, the road ahead of you is now starting to lighten up.
Here, you can now foresee the approximate amount of your marketing budget and decide upon whether it’s worth it. Thus, you can scrutinize the key issues that will reveal the guidelines of the financing part of your business plan. You can also assess the adequacy of your capital resources, how much of them you are willing to risk, and whether you will hunt for investors. Then, you can reevaluate your business and production models.
Now you have decided that your start-up will be profitable. In this light of your product, market, goals, and all the questions towards your value propositions, you have created your brand, brand spirit, and identity that matches your vision and mission. With your brand shaped in flesh and bones, you are now ready to meet your customers. You have pushed the button for start-up marketing. Now what?
Your audience shouldn’t be able to stop looking at you during the entire game…
Of course, getting into the market with a tremendous and exciting promotional campaign is every start-up’s dream. However, keeping the promises given with excitement is just as significant. For customer satisfaction, your actions must follow your words. You should keep your promises without giving any chance to undermine them.
However, you should even aim beyond customer satisfaction if you want to achieve customer loyalty. If you want to be in your customers’ lives, you should constantly follow them and be the first one who learns about their lives. By saying that, we mean monitoring more than just how your customers use your website or application or paying attention to their complaints and requests.
A/B tests, feedback, click-through, and conversion rates are all unquestionably valuable and constructive information sources for your business. Besides these, however, you need to know them quite closely and follow (even guess) the newest trends that your target audience has started to adopt and which events and people excite them. Namely, everything that is on their radar. As a start-up existing in the digital age and a fierce competition environment which does start-up marketing…
…however, a rough start should not intimidate you either
Sometimes, no matter how appealing your display window is, no one would look, or the only thing you get will be a useless crowd. The customer who knocks on your door returns empty-handed or purchases only one thing but never passes by your store again.
That’s when you should be patient. If you are an entrepreneur in the first option and have faith in your product, you should keep pushing forward. For instance: Did you know that Airbnb has been launched three times? We’re pretty sure you didn’t hear anything about the first two launches either. We also have good news: Many options can help you identify your problems in the digital age!
From time to time, you may have to shift your costumes, lines, or audience. If you have faith in your product, keep believing that one day you will find the magic formula that will sweep you off your feet. That’s what start-up marketing is…
In a nutshell, the first step of start-up marketing — even your initiative — should be being honest with yourself and examining your idea thoroughly. Thus, you can define your vision, target audience, and goals and develop the most suitable strategies to reach and achieve your goals. If the costs of these strategies are tolerable, you will establish your brand and enter the market. Your first launch, however, may not be successful or as brilliant as you hoped. You should keep pushing forward to optimize your success formula that will take you a step forward each time.
What if we told you that you could idealize your formula faster and that something could allow you to achieve success in a shorter time…
Even beyond start-up marketing…
Collaborating with a digital marketing agency can enable you to have the recipe of your optimum success formula in a much shorter time and offer you more benefits than you think. A professional and experienced digital marketing team can be frank with you and deliver new perspectives. Since the stages of determining market, target audience, brand identity, messages, and the paths to proceed are more challenging in start-up marketing, knowing that an experienced team is taking care of business and manages these stages in every aspect will give you a sense of confidence and move your starting-line further with more confident steps. Having more professional and confident rhetoric and stand can open doors that would never open, even in finance.
How will you continually measure your success while proceeding on your road and ensure that you do not stray from your path? Or will you always be able to see shortcuts? Monitoring all of these constantly, a digital marketing agency can significantly reduce your workload and allow you to stay focused only on developing your product/service with the data it will deliver to you.
We live in a world where advertising is less and less trusted while products/services are increasingly focused on lifestyles. Instead of ads, people pay attention to those who know the business and follow the ones they find close to themselves. In this world, strengthening your content management, which is the voice of your brand and allows more people to pay attention to this voice, and keeping pace with the latest trends in digital marketing is perhaps among the most crucial elements of your business in terms of growing and expanding the organic bonds of your band. Will you undertake such a vital task yourself or collaborate with an experienced team focused on this field?
That’s the end of our start-up marketing 101 lesson. See you in the new lessons…
