Marketing Mistakes Startups Should Avoid

If you can't articulate what you do to your customers, then you're missing the mark. There are many 'startup fails’ tech vendors should avoid when they're starting. 

Nona Digital CEO, Mike Scott, and host of the How to be Moderately Successful podcast speaks with Azadeh Williams, founder and managing partner of AZK Media discuss the common marketing mistakes startups make. 

Azadeh Williams> Number one mistake is, zero brand equity. They have a shonky logo, a generic, dull mission statement and a website which screams "Fiverr". They're pretty invisible across social channels - and nobody understands what they do or what problems they solve. The founders can't articulate what they do, or they're shy and they're not public-facing. They don't have the right skills or haven't invested in media training to articulate what they do to prospects and the press in a confident way.

Another mistake is providing no 'experience beyond the product' to attract prospects. There's no inbound content channel, or webinars streams or videos, or a well-articulated buyer's journey to get the customers through the door and then nurture them into becoming sales qualified leads. 

This is a complex ecosystem, and unfortunately, a lot of startup founders either don't understand or undervalue marketing, and we see a lot of this. Even large-scale tech vendors, when they try to grow in new marketing regions after having some level of success in one region, don't realise they need to create a microcosm marketing space in a new region. Instead, they hire an army of salespeople expecting magic to happen in the region, without a proper marketing strategy.

As a result, they're not articulating their messages to local customers and not creating local customer-centric stories or a customer-centric advocacy program in the region. You might have an amazing business in the US, but to grow in the UK, "US speak" won't necessarily resonate. 

It's those things to consider and take seriously from the word go. Because the ones who do take it seriously and invest and understand the value are the ones that succeed here.

Mike Scott> What I want to dig into is a lot of startups, essentially having a hypothesis of what an MVP is. I'll use a startup example we've co-founded recently. We had a hypothesis, let's say we think 1000 users will download this app to use it for this thing. The only way we can prove that is to build something and see if they'll download it.

In this particular startup, we do not know what product-market fit will be, we do not even know who our customer base is going to be. To be honest, we don't even know what the monetisation model is yet. All we are clear about is there is a problem. 

We haven't even figured out whether it's worth solving yet. t is in the early stages, it's not even a business at all, it's a hypothesis you're trying to prove through building a piece of tech and then giving it to a subset of users and seeing if they respond. 

But many startups have not got a product-market fit. They have not yet gotten to the point where they know exactly who their customer is and they have not yet gotten to the point to even know exactly what their minimum marketable product will be.

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