Founders are pulled in a million different directions and their decisions often have to be made on the fly - especially when it comes to marketing. Part of this process is failing in order to succeed. But knowing what mistakes to avoid within that process can propel a startup’s success into the positive, so we decided to share a few here to keep you on track.
1. Hiring a Marketer Before You Know What You Need
This is the number one mistake founders make and the reason we founded fivefoottwo marketing. Founders often rush to hire a full-time marketer without really understanding what level of skill and what type of experience they need.
We’ve seen the following scenarios play out:
Hiring a marketer that is too senior. These people certainly have the right experience but they come with a high price tag. Also, they aren’t as willing to get their hands dirty and really dig in.
Hiring a marketer that is too junior. While these individuals are less expensive and eager, they tend to lack the experience and need a lot of guidance.
Hiring a great growth marketer when what you really need is a product marketer. NOTE: finding one who can do both puts you back in scenario one above.
What we recommend:
Work with advisors and those with experience in marketing at startups to assess your marketing opportunity. Before jumping into creating that job description and throwing it on Angels List, consider hiring an agency that specializes in the stage of business you are in.
Spend some time to build out your goals and marketing strategy. Then determine what you need for a marketing foundation around it. The right agency can be agile and pivot quickly when things need to be optimized. For example, an agency can help you shift back to product marketing when you realize you don’t have what you need just yet to dive into growth marketing. They can also help determine when you’re ready to hire a full-time marketer and bring on the right person. All of this can be done for the fraction of the cost of a full-time hire so you can put your money into the actual marketing.
And when you’re ready to hire, check out our quick guide to hiring marketing.
2. Not Taking Time to Know Your Audience
Founders are passionate. The reason you founded your business is because you experienced the problem you are trying to solve either directly or indirectly. This immediately makes YOU the audience and you KNOW what your audience wants - right? It’s not that simple. It’s important to step back and analyze your target audience from a third-party perspective for two reasons:
You are too close to your product/service to understand what your audience needs to know or learn
You will learn things from your customers that you never expected, so you need to be listening!
What we recommend:
Do a full audience analysis. Start by building out personas (product marketing function). Next, talk to someone who fits each persona and get to know them better. Your customers are your most valuable assets, so use them. The following can help you organize your thoughts to make sure your audience analysis gets you the information that you need.
Who they are: For B2B brands, start with demographic data like title, industry, company size and location. For B2C brands, start with demographic data like age, gender, household income, education and location. Once you identify your key demographics, you can begin to segment your target audiences by slicing and dicing that data to really hone in on the low hanging fruit. Check out our crowdcast on marketing hacks for startups to learn more about defining audience attributes.
Where can you reach them/where do they spend their time: Determining where your audience is getting their information is critical to marketing success. You must think outside the box and do the research. For example, think about penetrating specific groups on social media or community platforms. And don’t go based on what you think or have experienced - get real data to drive these decisions.
What is your customer's number one problem: Once you’ve identified your audience segments, Identify the number one problem that they face in their work or personal life. Keep in mind, even though the high-level problem might be the same, there is nuance for each persona.
How does your product or service solve the problem: Once you’ve identified your audience segments and their specific needs, you can develop messaging targeted towards solving the problem. You can take these concepts and apply them across your content and campaigns. This leads to our next section, consistency of that message for effectiveness!
3. Lack of Consistency and Frequency of Message
Consistency of your message is key. Do you re-write your value props every time you create an ad? Does everyone in your organization use a different “about us” message in customer communications? Then you have made a huge mistake! The more consistent you can all be in how you communicate your message, the more effective it will be!
Now, if you have a clear message, you need to make sure your customer sees it - frequently. A customer will not retain your message in one sighting. On average, it takes 3+ views for them to retain the message and often more before they act on it. And that’s being soft on the matter - some say you should adhere to the “rule of 7” and others will put that number as high as 20 as seen in The Financial Brand Blog.
What we recommend:
Spend time to effectively develop your core messages for your elevator pitch, about us, value props and key product feature information. Then train every employee to use these messages exactly as you have defined them
Determine your communication plan within your marketing strategy. Ensure that everything that a customer/prospect sees is consistent.
Create a guide for all communication moving forward for everyone to have access to.
Make sure both your paid, owned and earned media efforts map out an effective frequency of delivering that message.
4. Choosing the Wrong Marketing Technology
If you’ve seen the marketing technology landscape, you know how overwhelming it is. Many times, founders and startup marketers will implement a technology solution that they don’t have the time to fully understand and has an expensive subscription model.
What we recommend:
Analyze your current and future (up to six months) needs for your technology. The key is to implement systems that will make your life easier, not harder. Recognize when there may be a need to bring in an agency to both select and manage your implementation so that you know what you need before paying a lot of money for something that does not work as you need it. A technology vendor that truly wants to partner should be honest about their solution and if it’s the right fit for you. Many of the initial marketing technology implementations we see look like the following:
Marketing automation/email marketing: Most likely you have some sort of contact database. The sooner you implement a marketing automation tool, the better. Consider using a tool like MailChimp or HubSpot. They are easy to set up and use. A word of caution - the price can tally up quickly on these products based on the number of contacts and/or features.
Social media management: Social media doesn’t have to be hard. Many social media management platforms are free and will save you a ton of time by allowing you to schedule your content in advance, so you can set it and forget. Check out Buffer or Planable.
Content management system (CMS): You don’t have to build your website on a CMS but unless you have a development team willing to make updates to your site or money to spend every time you want to make a change, we highly recommend it. At the very least, your blog should be built on a CMS so you have control over posting. A CMS will give you the autonomy to make updates to your website as well as help you optimize your site for search engines. A few options we like are WordPress, Netlify and Webflow.
Google analytics: GA is free and is a wealth of information. This blog from Hootsuite will help you get started in 5 easy steps. When you’re ready to get more advanced, check out Google Data Studio to help you visualize your metrics.
PRO TIP: A lot of marketing technology has startup pricing. If you don’t see it on their website, ask. We’ve seen up to a 90% discount.
Make Failing Less Painful
At the end of the day, failing is part of the game of growth and success. But if you can apply small practices when it comes to marketing, it won’t hurt as bad - at least financially. Should you decide to go a bit deeper into any of these ideas, we are here to help. Feel free to send me a note directly at laura@fivefoottwomarketing.com.