Three Startup Marketing Strategies That Will Destroy Your Company

Running your own company for the first time is an exciting period in your life. But with all the success stories around of other entrepreneurs making millions, it’s particularly disappointing when your own venture fails.

The reason why this happens is often, that a startup quickly runs out of money without generating the interest necessary to keep the head above water. These are the 3 startup marketing strategies that should never form part of a digital marketing strategy:

#1: Spray and Pray

The spray and pray strategy embraces the idea that more is always better. You are going for quantity over quality. Rather than thinking about your conversion rate, you will simply make more calls and connect with more people until someone decides to buy something. It’s the approach many people use to get a job these days.

The idea that you should work hard in order to get results is perfectly valid. The problem is that many people aren’t working smart. The spray and pray strategy is rarely used by perfect entrepreneurs for two reasons.

First of all, targeting by quantity means you’re hitting a huge audience, and none of it is targeted. You don’t actually know whether someone needs what you have to offer before contacting them. This broad approach is also creating a barrier because if you’re connecting with cold prospects they already don’t trust you. And most of them are just going to hang up.

An alternative to spray and pay is to call a lot of people to do customer research first. If you want to outrank your competitors, you must know your niche and only target that niche. It will increase your conversion rates and lead to less wasted time.

#2: Relying on Word of Mouth

You know that word of mouth marketing is the most powerful form of marketing there is. You already know that people are going to love it and the moment they start talking about it the world is going to be yours. The problem is that nobody really cares.

It’s rare for word of mouth marketing to just happen. You need to have the right foundations in place first. It’s one of the big online marketing basics. Building a community that spreads the word takes work. You have to create brand ambassadors by yourself.

Word of mouth marketing only tends to happen when you are already successful because you have a great product. You already have a community in place. Actually building that community is the tricky part.

#3: Relying on Facebook Ads and Paid Traffic

In the first quarter of 2016, Facebook and Alphabet (Google) captured 85% of all new ad dollars being spent in digital, said Brian Nowak, a Morgan Stanley analyst in a recent piece in the ‘New York Times’.

Still, Facebook ads are a great way to spend a lot of money in a short space of time. For a long time, there was a lot of success to be gained from them, but as competition has increased and the costs have gone up it’s increasingly tricky to turn a profit.

But that doesn’t mean Facebook ads are completely useless. They just take a lot more work than people think. Companies having success with them are doing so because they have a dedicated team. They spend all day tweaking the audience and trying to make a breakthrough.

The simple interface is deceptive. It makes it seem like it’s easy to get up and running when nothing could be further from the truth.

Facebook ads can work, but as a startup marketing strategy paid traffic isn’t the best option for you. If you want a strategy to grow your business, the only guaranteed method you have is to optimize your social media channels and stay in touch with your limited base of loyal customers.

So when should you start working with Facebook ads? The answer is when you start growing. These days Facebook is a paid platform that really should only be used when you have reached a relatively stable base. That way you can experiment and lose money without it compromising your company. And even then you should outsource Facebook ads if you really have no idea what you are doing.

Conclusion: Test prior to committing to it

The goal of outlining these 3 strategies was to introduce you to some of the big mistakes that companies are making on a regular basis.

When choosing the right market strategy, go out of your way to test that strategy prior to committing to it. By doing this you are going to make sure that you avoid throwing money at a lost cause. If you want to acquire trust, build customer relationships, and generate sales, you’d better invest your time and money on an optimized digital marketing strategy. 

(via Huffpost/Tech Cocktail)

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