Startup Marketing Problems
How do you avoid common issues with marketing such as where to focus when you don’t have a big budget?
By Lenka Davis and Robin Anderson
Startups have a money problem. They never have enough. Not only that, they don’t have enough people, or enough time. And let’s face it, the lack of experience can make everything harder. Given how fast the technology industry moves, trying to stay up-to-date is challenging. Even for those who work in the industry every single day. On the surface, marketing seems to be fairly straight forward. After all, anyone can post on social media, figure out how to run an ad on facebook. Really, what’s the big deal?
There are many reasons why some people choose to pursue the engineering path, while others prefer marketing. Just as an engineer knows how to solve technology problems, a marketer knows how to solve communication problems. A marketer knows how to reach your market, engage with your customers, drive demand. Startups have little resources, their expertise may be concentrated on getting the product developed. With little experience and time, marketing their product before it’s ready usually is pretty low on the list.
What is a startup to do?
Evaluate your needs.
Company Problems
Whether your business started as an innovative product that solved a problem or the other way around inevitably you will run into hurdles. There are phases your startup will go through, with each having their own set of challenges.
Let’s first look at the company problems. When we examine a few company level challenges, there emerges a recurring theme of staying close to your customer. Maintaining a close relationship with your customer may cause you to face one of the biggest company challenges - realizing a need to pivot.
Here are three examples of companies whose customer focus led them in a different direction. In order to become successful, they had to adapt.
Diana Trout, HealthAde kombucha founder
Diana and her founders wanted to sell a hair growth solution for bald men made from homemade (probiotic tea) kombucha, but when they had customers coming back repeatedly for more kombucha samples at the farmer’s market they realized that this was what customers wanted. How did they end up at the Farmer’s market? They had to sell the extra kombucha somehow because they made so much experimenting with different hair growth formulas. HealthAde did not set out to make one of the best tasting kombuchas, but they listened to their customers who drank their extra and delicious tasting kombucha and were able to pivot their business. To hear this segment go to the 20:00 minute mark in the podcast.
Sarah Kauss, S’well founder
Sarah saw an opportunity in the already very crowded water bottle market. She wanted to help reduce the amount of plastic water bottles for those shoppers who purchased goods because they were well designed and fashionable. At the time water bottles were built to be functional but did not necessarily look well designed. In this case Sarah stayed close to her customer by listening to them and asking for their feedback. Before she started, she went out and bought one of every water bottle available at a sporting goods store and then gave them to her friends so they could tell her how they could work, look,and be packaged better. You can hear her explain this in the How I Built This, S’well Sarah Kauss, starting at the 21:00 minute mark in the podcast.
Niraj Shah & Steve Conine, WayFair co-founders
The co-founders of WayFair, an e-commerce furniture and homegoods store, had decided they wanted to continue to be entrepreneurs and build an online business together after a few successful and unsuccessful attempts. So to figure out what to do they spent a couple of months talking to a lot of different eCommerce small business owners. What they found was that consumers were buying from these small business websites, such as grandfatherclocks.com and now the people who were running these businesses were selling their websites. So they bought a bunch of them and made connections with all the companies that made the products, such as grandfather clocks, and connected with all the manufacturers and retailers and put it all on one website. What problem they solved was that people wanted to have a wide selection of products in one place. They would not have figured this out if they had not spent time talking to businesses. You can hear their explanation in How I Built This podcast, starting at the 16:00 minute mark in the podcast.
What do all of these stories have in common? The founders stayed close to their customers and therefore built products or services their customers wanted. They listened to customers' problems, gathered feedback from customers, and offered samples until the founders had people lining up to buy their product either literally or online.
How is knowing your customer a ‘marketing problem’? A company cannot market their product if they don’t have a good understanding of who their customers are. That critical information is what will help in defining your messaging, and reaching customers where they are present. In addition, having a relationship with your customers helps you to build a better product.
So when it comes to marketing your product, many startups do not begin focusing their efforts on marketing until their product is ready for early adoption. This puts an enormous amount of pressure to quickly gain awareness, recognition, and to convert prospective buyers into customers. Depending on the type of product you are offering, sales cycles can be somewhat lengthy. Who has the time to wait?
“Finding new customers is an active task. You’re going to have to get out there, find them, and let them know you exist. And the only way to do that is by developing a solid marketing strategy.”
Once you have a solid product roadmap for development, start building the foundation to market your product. While you may think that starting marketing now is premature, you may not have the time to put in the effort now, you really won’t have time to start building your community after your product is ready.
Where do you start?
Begin with your Marketing Strategy.
Your marketing strategy defines your company mission, identifies your business goals, marketing goals, and who/what/why/where/when of your market.
Who: Your target customers/persona. Defining this enables you to each the right people with the right message.
What: Analyze your competition. Identify your key differentiating factor that will drive customers to buy your product.
Where: Social media, community boards, etc. Learn where your customers are present. That is where you will target your efforts.
Why: Know your customer’s biggest challenge. Create your messaging to communicate the problem your product solves.
When: Frequency of communication. Communicating and reaching your target audience will be dependent upon the media type. Social media posts, more frequent, email less.
By stepping through this process, you will narrow your focus, saving you time and money as you begin to put energy into marketing your product. As a bonus, having a marketing strategy helps when promoting your business, for example, to investors via a pitch deck.
Next, begin creating your Marketing Plan.
Your marketing plan will describe what you are going to do. Recognizing your lack of time, expertise and budget, it’s important to plan to use your resources wisely. Just because you know how to use TikTok doesn’t mean it’s the correct distribution channel for your business.
Your plan of action starts with your Persona. Who they are, where they spend their time, what is their biggest challenge. With that in mind, you can begin creating your company and product messaging. Recognize who your customers are, the problem they are having, and how your product solves their problem, targeting your message where your customers are to increase the likelihood of viewership.
Begin building your community. Everyone starts with zero followers. It takes time for the world to learn that you exist. Doing so helps you to build a better product, and gain a loyal following prior to launching your product.
Your topline marketing goal is to convert prospects into customers, so it is important that you know what communications actions are effective. How do you do that? Take advantage of the insights and analytics provided by social media networks, incorporate automation into your marketing efforts as this will enable you to analyze your efforts and increase the effectiveness of your marketing.
To learn how to define your persona, determine your product/market fit, and build your messaging framework, take a look at our new Marketing Growth Program , designed specifically for startups.
Fun Fact
It was the transportation industry, in the early twentieth century, that allowed companies to distribute branded goods at a national level. This influenced the growth of marketing and advertising, and a much broader mass marketing mindset. As different market segment needs were identified, products were manufactured for each of those demographics such as the Ford Model T being built for the middle class. Advertising agencies gathered market segmentation data from tax registers, city directories and census data and used it to market the right product to the right customer.
Lenka Davis is a Managing Partner at Fly to Soar. She has worked in marketing, managing projects and building tools in the high-tech industry for Fortune 100 companies and also ran her own business. Follow Lenka and the Fly to Soar Team on Twitter @flytosoar.
Robin Anderson is a Managing Partner at Fly to Soar. She has worked as a marketer in the high-tech industry for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 100. Follow Robin and the Fly to Soar Team on Twitter @flytosoar.
Reference
Head imagery: Tim-Bennett
