Although you may be operating your business on a small scale right now, as a startup entrepreneur, there are several processes or elements of running your company that you should never scrimp on. One of these is marketing.
Whether you are still establishing your startup or already busy running it, marketing has to be one of your top priorities. This is because a well-designed and implemented strategy can promote your brand effectively. This will enable you to gain new customers and retain your current ones — both of which translate to guaranteed sales and improved profits.
Additionally, with the right marketing campaign, you can boost your startup’s reputation. This will go a long way in helping you stand out further and achieve your long-term goals for your company.
Due to these important reasons, skimping on and neglecting marketing is a mistake you should avoid making.
Marketing Pitfalls to Avoid
Aside from failing to make marketing your priority, there are other mistakes you have to avoid if you want to get the most from this crucial business process.
Top marketing companies in the UAE share a list of the common mistakes you have to avoid if you own a startup:
1.Operating without a marketing plan
Managing a startup without any kind of marketing plan is the biggest mistake you can make.
When you don’t have a marketing plan, you will fail to achieve many of your business goals. This is because many of these are linked to the objectives you want to reach with your promotional strategies: brand recognition, lead generation, higher sales, and other targets.
A marketing plan will serve as your map regarding how you target your customers and work on achieving all your goals. If you don’t have one, you will end up reaching out to the wrong audience and sending messages that confuse them, thereby giving you opposite results.
As a result, marketing will be more of a hindrance instead of being a valuable tool you can use to grow your startup.
Additionally, a marketing plan will let you know which strategies are working and which ones are not. This will help you identify which methods to invest more money and time into and which ones you should let go since they are not giving you any results.
2. Aspiring to have the perfect brand
Although there is nothing wrong with letting your audience know that you are a brand working hard to gain a certain level of perfectionism, spending too much time and money on this effort won’t give you the results you are looking for.
Striving too hard to create the ideal brand image often takes too much time and money. If you invest too much of these in marketing, you will have less to put into improving or developing other more important areas of your startup.
Additionally, when you focus too much on having the perfect external brand image, you may end up compromising your startup’s core values.
3.Underusing or overusing your website
Although most startups know the importance of having a website even before officially launching their company, many owners make the mistake of underutilizing or relying too much on them.
To get the most from your website, don’t neglect SEO. Use the right, well-researched keywords in your content, titles, descriptions, and title tag. However, make sure all of them are informative and something that your target audience will appreciate and value.
Also, conduct regular A/B testing on the different aspects of your website. By doing so, you will have a clear picture of which areas you need to improve and which ones to maintain.
On the other hand, you also have to avoid cramming your website with too many long posts, particularly product descriptions, and excessive features. If you do, you will end up having a busy site, one that can turn off your visitors and drive them away.
Keep your site simple yet educational and interesting to encourage your audience to discover what your startup is all about and how you can help them.
4. Failing to ask feedback from your customers
Although you have to be careful about putting too much information and features on your website, there is one thing you have to make sure is on it: a feedback form
If you want to grow your startup, you have to acknowledge all your customers’ reviews or comments. You have to make this easy for them to do this so that you can address any shortcomings they experienced when using your product or service immediately.
Adding a feedback section or a questionnaire on your website is the easiest way to enable your customers to send you their reviews or comments, whether positive or negative.
With this simple feature, you don’t have to wait to receive valuable input from your customers. You will make it easy for them to reach out to you, thereby allowing you to collect meaningful information that will help you improve your startup.
5.Selecting the wrong marketing channels
There are several platforms you can use for launching and promoting your startup. However, if you use all of them or only one, you may be jeopardizing the entire effort of your marketing plan.
A marketing plan will help you narrow down your choices to the ones that your target audience is most likely on. This is because creating this map involves producing a buyer persona for your ideal customers, which will allow you to know where you can find them and what their interests are.
By finding the right digital and offline marketing platforms and provide appealing and meaningful content to your target audience, you can be sure your campaign will be effective and yield the results you are looking for.
6.Copying your competitors
Knowing what your competitors are doing is a crucial part of marketing. When you see what strategies they are implementing, and if they are working or not, you can get an idea of how you can carry out your plan.
But you need to be careful about where to toe the line. It is one thing to be inspired by what your competitors are doing and learning from them, but another thing to be replicating their approaches blatantly to gain leverage.
If you duplicate exactly what they are doing, some of your target audience will realize this and you may soon get a reputation for being a copycat. Additionally, if a lot of you have the same marketing ideas, all consumers may become oversaturated and simply lose interest in your product or service.
Lastly, keep in mind that all marketing strategies do not work for every business. If you duplicate something your competitor did, there is no guarantee that it will give you the same results.
The bottom line is, be inspired by your competitors’ marketing strategies and learn from them but make sure you focus on your unique selling points and brand personality to stand out.
If you want to be sure you don’t commit these costly mistakes, you will do well to hire a marketing company that can steer you on the right path.
With their help, you will achieve your marketing goals, which will contribute to your startup’s growth and success.
