Marketing
for startups

6 mistakes that
beginner can make

Only 8% of startups launched worldwide manage to survive. Businesses shut down for many reasons:

• bad products,
  
• incompetent team,
  
• cost issues,
  
• competitors,
  
• and many others.

The CB Insights' study revealed that 14% of organizations fail due to poor marketing strategies.
Does brand promotion play a crucial role in any startup development?

Some startups don't hire a marketing agency, preferring to conduct promotion activities by themselves. The Zmest team has gathered the most frequent blunders made by beginners.

Startups waste their time, expend energy, and spend money on creation of the unpopular product. Staking on innovations, businesses should make sure that customers will be interested in cutting-edge solutions. It's much better to check it before the launch. When the company is ready to release any product or service, consumers should be prepared to welcome them. The digital marketing agency will easily solve this task.

#1: No marketing at all

Founders are focused on the product development forgetting that companies should explain their idea to potential clients. The thinking "we'll create and clients will come" doesn't work anymore. Special promotion tools, such as SMM, web analytics, referral system, media relations, content, e-mail, influencers, event marketing, and others will help startups to grow target community, raise brand awareness, increase sales, and make a profit.

#2: Promoting the product only when it's ready

Startups avoid launching the unfinished product and prefer to bring it to perfection. It would be more useful to allow customers to test it, get feedback, and then upgrade the product according to the public demands. Do marketing research, discover audience expectations, and give people what they want. Choose the suitable marketing channel: influencers, bloggers, mass media, e-mails, and make everyone desire your product.

#3: Focusing on product improvement instead of its promotion

It's strange how many startups launch their projects without any marketing plan. Why? Because businesses don't understand that they need to apply any tactics to promote products or have no experience in this field. Or they're just self-assured that their project will rocket without any planning. The comprehensive marketing plan allows businesses to assess risks, set marketing and advertising goals, describe company's current marketing position, develop a strategy, define key performance indicators, as well as determine target market and customer needs.

#4: No planning

Startups usually don't try to study and apply available marketing information and advertising tools that can help them to draw up a well-defined strategy and promote their project. There are a lot of free guides and sources explaining how to make a user research, competitor research, choose a suitable marketing channel, prepare a plan, as well as calculate promotion costs.

#5: Failure to study public data

Striving to spend less money, many startups promote products and services using their own resources. This decision quite often becomes fatal for the project. The above-mentioned CB Insights' study shows that about 23% of companies failed because they chose incompetent teams. The Zmest experts constantly help companies to correct these failures and even to save the business. For example, the media buying agency will put you on pages of top media of various countries while the сontent marketing agency will properly bring your ideas to both public and investors to make them implement these ideas.

#6: Failure to apply to professional digital marketing agency

Photo by José Alejandro Cuffia on Unsplash

So, founders of failed startups named poor marketing among the main reasons for their failure. With digital marketing, startups receive a huge chance to let potential customers see advantages and benefits of their exciting products, start talking about them, and make a purchase. Applying to the professional digital marketing agency will allow beginners to avoid common mistakes and obtain success because competent specialists know everything about community management, media relations, brand development, content advertising, and other strong instruments.