Building a business can be fraught with difficulties. To attain significant success, one can either do it themselves or outsource the role to a startup marketing agency.
When you consider all of the future possibilities that your startup’s business strategy provides, your heart bursts with joy. However, once you begin marketing your gleaming new firm, reality sets in.
Nobody really prepares you for the difficult road ahead as a new business. They never tell you that the marketplace is a slush pile where a plethora of enterprises, products, and services compete for your attention.
While it may seem unnecessary, hiring a startup marketing agency to help define your value, who your unique buyer’s persona is, and how best to engage them especially at the infancy stages, can be an absolute make, or break.
Lessons To Consider
1. Identify Your Market (the tighter, the better)
Here is a reality check: No matter how great you think your product is, only a small section of the population will be interested in it, in most cases. This is your “niche.” This means that if you try to sell your startup to everyone, you are wasting both your time and money. This is nearly impossible unless your ad budget to build brand awareness is nearly infinite (we’re guessing it’s not).
Practically speaking, it’s almost impossible to brand a business without context — the Who, and even more importantly, the Why behind why this thing even exists.
The best way to make an impact is to focus on a niche based on the product or service that you are offering, and who it resonates with.
Here are some factors to consider when choosing your market, and identifying your unique buyer’s persona:
- Value proposition – A good value proposition should give you an edge over your competitors. It is what potential clients use to evaluate you. The question is, is it unique enough to set your brand apart?
- Competition – If you want to be a big player in the field, you should start your marketing plan with your competition in mind. Every business wants to be at the intersection of what clients want. Capturing demand more, especially in a saturated market, needs several sleepless nights of hard work.
- Market Size – Many startups face the challenge of not being able to size their potential market effectively. It is essential to know the approximate number of potential customers in your target area.
- Market Wealth – Can your target market afford to buy your product?
There are audiences that you can’t predict when starting out, which is why you should keep an open ear to get an up-to-date picture of the different audiences that your brand attracts, and the community you want to build around it.
2. Differentiate Your Brand
Another reality check: No matter how unique your startup is, there’s a good chance someone else is already doing it. If your brand/product doesn’t stand out from the rest, sales and building traction will be difficult to come by.
Sometimes what makes you stand out in a crowded space has nothing to do with the product or brand itself. It could be how well your messaging and core brand values are being communicated, in order to build powerful brand engagement from the start. Can your unique persona see themselves in the lifestyle your brand is portraying, and the problems it solves for them? The most important thing here is to be different.
Here are some other strategies you can capitalize on to help set you apart from competitors:
- Create a unique voice and tone for your brand – Your stellar business idea won’t go far without a voice. There is something about brand voice and tone that allows you to connect more intimately with your customers. During the early stages of a business, customers recognize how they are addressed and spoken to, impacting their view of your brand.
- Create unique content to drive brand awareness – A solid brand identity gives you the power to create unique content. Most startups commit business suicide by pushing their logos into every post they make. Your logo is an essential aspect of brand identity, but it doesn’t tell your brand story. The real question is, how are you working towards making your Instagram posts capture who you are? Are you regularly updating your website with original blog posts? Creating new content and keeping up with consistency might feel like it’s too big of a task, but how else do you expect to keep your brand sticky?
3. Keep Your Promises
One of the most common mistakes made by businesses is jumping into marketing with an unclear business concept. Make every effort to keep your promises to your customers. That is the essence of authenticity!
It may not always be simple to uphold brand promises but do it anyway, because it’s one of the “secret sauce” parts of a well-established company, whether it’s a startup or not!
So Why Is It Important to Consider Hiring a Startup Marketing Agency?
Most startup business owners resort to freelance sites to draft up a couple of marketing concepts for them. Or worse, do it by themselves. This is your first mistake.
Here is why you need to hire a startup marketing agency:
1. Achieve Your Goals Faster
Taking care of a company’s marketing needs, especially for startups, is a full-time job. Using marketing specialists to save time and focus on your capabilities is a terrific approach to save time and focus on your strengths.
In order to achieve your business goals, a professional, marketing team with expertise working with startups will assist you in building and implementing great customer traction strategies.
2. Get New Business Insights
Whatever your line of business, chances are you are doing it for the first time. You are probably still trying to figure out everything in your business plan. Bringing a digital marketing agency on board will be expanding your team to a new set of talents and skills.
Marketing experts can give you new insights into how you should deal with things, as well as unbiased advice on your marketing strategy.
3. You Will Be Able to Track Your Audience
Management thinker Peter Drucker is often quoted as saying that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” The greatest drawback for most startups is not being able to track who or what fraction of your target audience saw your ad. A startup marketing agency will help you analyze the data, and make sense of it alongside current marketing trends & analytical metrics. This will help you gear your business towards achieving more of your goals, or KPIs.
Now, you decide
To summarize, product development is just as vital as marketing and brand building. Contrary to popular belief, planning who your product/service is for, how it will better their lives, and why it exists should come first. Then how to get it to the market is more important than figuring out how you’ll get it to market.
You might have the most innovative product in the market, but if you fail to lay a strong foundation for your brand and communicate why it can change lives (seriously!), chances are, the business won’t do well as you might expect.
Developing a strong brand and marketing plan is absolutely critical for startups to realize early success. And one of the best, and most efficient ways to do that is to engage a startup marketing agency that knows the terrain and can lead the way.
