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11 Reasons Why Your Startup Marketing Plan Didn’t Convert
You’ve got a great idea. But it’s not just an idea. It’s the idea. The idea that will make you the next Steve Jobs — at least, you think so.
There are a lot of reasons why a great idea can result in a failed startup. But the most common culprit?
Problems with your startup marketing plan.
Here are 11 reasons why your marketing plan didn’t convert and what you can do to fix it.
1. Not Creating (or Sticking to) a Marketing Plan One of the biggest mistakes you can make as a startup?
Not creating a marketing plan.
If anything, your marketing plan is just as important as your business plan. It tells you what your marketing team wants to accomplish, how they’re going to accomplish it, and their time frame for doing so.
A sin of equal weight is creating a marketing plan and failing to stick to it.
It’s like taking medicine. You won’t see the positive results if you only take your pills for the first day. You have to take the full round (or follow through on your marketing plan for a full cycle) in order to get measurable, realistic results.
2. Choosing the Wrong Market It’s not enough just to have a plan, though. You also have to choose the right market to target.
Many startup founders want to believe that the whole world will love their product. But in reality, every product has a target audience. And if you’re marketing to the wrong people, you won’t make any sales.
For a big business, that’s an embarrassing misstep. For a startup, that’s the difference between being in business next year or not.
3. You’re Not Writing for Your Audience Related to finding the right audience is writing marketing for that target audience.
Take your website, for example. It’s your first chance to make an impression on your customers and show them that they’ve found someone who will serve them well.
Who is your customer? What language do you need to use to appeal to them?
Hint: if your audience is sporty millennial women and you’re pitching forty-something businessmen, your pitch will fail.
4. Taking Strategies from the Competition It’s one thing to be obsessed with (and learn from) your competitors. It’s another thing entirely to steal their marketing strategies.
Yes, your competitors address the same target audience. And yes, you can learn something by taking a critical look at their marketing strategies.
However, if you get all of your marketing ideas by copying theirs, your customers will catch on pretty quickly. If your marketing material is a copycat, your customers will assume your products are also copycats. And why would they buy copycats when they could go to your competitors for the original?
5. Not Learning Your Customers’ Buy Cycle Even if you find the perfect customer for your business, it won’t do you any good if you don’t catch them in the right part of their buying cycle.
The customer’s buying cycle is a patterned process that each customer takes on the way to making a purchase. It goes like this:
This is an important lesson to internalize, because even if you “lost” a conversion by catching someone too early, you may not have actually lost them. They may come back at a later date when they are ready to make a purchase.
6. You’re Not Showing Benefits Startups all need to learn a valuable lesson: when a customer comes to you, they’re not looking to buy something. Not really. They want you to make their lives better.
If you can’t show your customer why their lives will be better for purchasing your product, then they’re going to take their business elsewhere.
The key here is to take the customer’s mind off the price tag as soon as you can. That’s their biggest barrier to purchase. Highlight the outcome — what positive result will they get out of purchasing your product?
From there, you can focus on other elements of the customer experience, like offering good support, responding to feedback, and constructing a solid customer community that continues to draw customers back.
7. You Don’t Have Benchmarks for Success Even if you have a marketing plan and you catch the right customers at the right moment in their purchasing cycle, there’s still one problem.
How will you know if your strategy is working if you don’t know how to measure its success?
This is a mistake many fledgling businesses make. They assume that if customers come, the plan was successful, or that they’ll have a good sense of how well the plan is working by eyeballing it, or by measuring it against the metrics of other startups.
Here’s the thing: success looks different for every startup. If you measure your success based on someone else’s benchmarks, you’re going to get a faulty reading.
Whatever your idea of success is, define it early and define it concretely. Is it $50,000 in revenue? Is it 50,000 social media followers who have converted to active customers?
Put a name on your success. Put a number on it if you can.
Say what you want and when you want it. Email it to everyone. Paint it on your wall.
Do whatever you have to do to make sure the whole startup knows exactly what you’re gunning for and how their performance will be measured.
Not only does this help you measure the success of your conversions, but it can also help you measure the performance of your employees.
8. You Don’t Have Core Metrics Either If you don’t have benchmarks of success, you probably don’t have core metrics either. And that’s a critical mistake that will cost your startup big.
The idea is to have a few highly valuable metrics based on customer actions taken during the acquisition funnel, like the conversion rate of calls to sign up within a month, time spent on your site, amount of content shared, etc.
Many marketing software systems make it easy for startups to track these metrics. If you’re collecting info on that, ABM Marketing is a good place to start.
9. Building the Perfect Website Before Launch Your brand needs a distinctive identity. Something that sets you apart from the crowd and makes customers remember you for all the right reasons.
However, many startups hit the same stumbling block when building their brand identity: trying to create a perfect website before launching.
There’s no such thing as a perfect website. And even if there was, a perfect website won’t do you any good without traffic.
After all, your website is a marketing tool. If it doesn’t bring in customers, then it’s not a successful marketing tool.
Spend less time focusing on the elusive perfect design and instead focus on finding the ideal customer experience. The best way to do this is with A/B testing to see where users are spending the most time on your site, where they’re getting frustrated, and what works best for them.
10. Putting Inexperienced People in Charge When you’re a startup, all hands are on deck. Everyone wears multiple hats. You all work together to get the job done, and that’s part of the fun.
But in your marketing strategy, this can seriously hurt you. Especially if you put inexperienced marketers in charge.
Marketing is a constantly evolving landscape — especially digital marketing. You need marketers that are on top of the latest trends and know how to adapt to sudden shifts.
For example: what if Google releases a system update that seriously impacts your site performance? What will your team do?
If your team is made up of inexperienced marketers, it may not even occur to them to check whether Google released an update, never mind knowing what to do about it.
11. Failing to Build an Audience for Your Product Finally, many startups fail to build an audience for their product.
This might seem pretty basic. An audience is your customer base, why wouldn’t you take the time to build one?
Most startups run into this problem because they failed to validate their product idea before they went to market. Basically, you didn’t check whether people are actually interested in your product before you tried to sell it to them.
Some startups can get away with winging it. Most can’t. Start by validating customer interest in basic ways, like starting an email list to see how many subscribers convert.
That will give you a good idea of whether or not to proceed.
Need More Startup Marketing Plan Tips? Your startup marketing plan is the key to your success (after that big idea, of course). If you treat it with the care that you give your big idea, you’ll have a much better chance of results.
For more ideas on how to run a smarter business, check out our blog for more helpful posts, like this post on whether SEO is worth it for small businesses.
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