Marketing Can Make Or Break Your Company: Here’s What Founders Should Know Before Investing Big
So you’ve finally done it. You had an idea, you made it a reality, and now you’re ready to bring your baby bird out into the world. As the founder of a new product or service, you’re like a proud new parent — your product can do no wrong. It’s got a great design, the tech works well, and testers love it. The product will speak for itself, right?
Not quite. Sam O’Brien has talked to many early-stage founders over the years, so he knows how far from the truth this assumption can be.
If you want to grow your company beyond word of mouth, you have to invest in marketing and pay close attention to what’s working and what’s not. Sam O’Brien, CMO at Affise, shares his tips.
Avoiding marketing mistakes
Don’t get me wrong, generating buzz through word of mouth is a great marketing channel, and it’s how many start-ups get going, but you can’t manage or control the buzz.
Investing in marketing allows you to not only speed up growth but strategise and analyse your efforts. Switching from word of mouth marketing to full press marketing is a big change, though, and with everything on your plate, it will be hard to put all your focus into the transition.
In this article, I’ll highlight what you should focus on so you can avoid the pitfalls other early-stage companies fall into.
It’s a trap! (sort of)
Let’s start with the Google trap. Every marketer will admit it — they feel the need to spend on Google AdWords. It feels like an instant reward; spend X amount of money and receive Y in business. A great concept, but once somebody has clicked on your advert, the value is gone.
The key is to balance Google AdWords with a solid SEO and content strategy.
SEO, content, and Google Adwords combined gives you a powerhouse suite of marketing tools that brings in customers. To build a brand that customers connect with, you need to sell the idea of your business and product. You need to tell your customer how your product will improve their life through targeted content, images, videos — the kind of stuff Google Adwords can direct you to but not showcase.
Attributions
And now the magic word — attributions.
Attributions are a series of user actions that lead to a desired outcome, like a conversion, and the value you assign to each of these actions.
When it’s early days, you’ll want to show a return on investment for everything you do. You might spend days or weeks identifying the best attribution model, but that won’t allow you to follow activities that might be harder to track.
For example, pre-Covid, you might have generated leads by dropping leaflets on the desks of potential clients. While you could use specific URLs on the leaflets, the value they add would be hard to track. But this method still has value, so you should still try and track it.
Look at data holistically
When you start, look at every lead and deal generated, and divide that by the amount you’ve spent on marketing to date. Hopefully, you see a number that makes you happy. If not, determine what number you want to aim for and make a plan to get there.
Once you’ve collected all your data, try and connect the dots to see where offline and un-trackable marketing efforts may have helped increase the number of direct sales.
Here’s an example: this often happens with Facebook. Running Facebook adverts creates a halo effect — you can see more leads coming in from other channels, even though Facebook looks unprofitable. You can measure this by running adverts in one location for a set amount of time and then stopping them. Your collected data should prove the halo effect.
It’s all about the brand
Now let’s focus on marketing your brand. Branding can be hard to understand. Take Nike; it’s not just the iconic Swoosh logo or their slogan “Just Do It”. When you see Nike or any of its branding, you have an instantaneous feeling of a sportswear brand’s core mission to power athletics for everybody.
Brand is what you stand for and what your company believes in.
It’s the mission your team is on, and it’s at the heart of the problems you’re trying to solve. The hiccup in brand marketing is the focus on Demand Generation metrics. Many early-stage founders forget that building a brand will reduce the costs for DG and make it more efficient.
Like SEO, building a brand is like buying a house instead of renting one — it might cost more upfront, but it will save you money over time.
Mind your own business
No, really. Focusing too much on what competitors are doing or saying is common in business, but doing so can cause you to lose focus on your own business. The problem with comparing yourself to your competitors is over time, you’ll be indistinguishable from them — comparison is the thief of joy and all that.
This is true across all aspects of your business, even marketing. You’ll bid on the same keywords, run the same campaigns, post the same videos highlighting the same features — customers won’t know where you start and they end. So how do you stand out instead of blending in?
My advice is to keep an eye on your competition but focus on your own business.
Find the gaps and focus on what separates you, so customers see what makes your product better.
This will give you an edge in the market and a niche of your own.
If you need inspiration, look at what companies are doing in other industries. If you’re a B2B company, investigate B2C companies’ campaigns and see what changes are happening in their marketing strategies.
A final word
Let’s wrap things up with a nice, easy to follow action plan:
- Before you start spending all your money and time on Google and paid adverts, take some time to understand your brand and what niches your company can own.
- Don’t forget to spend some money “buying the house” — it will pay off in the future.
- Remember to consider all your attribution avenues.
- As for metrics, keep a holistic view for now, with an eye on counting all leads and deals as marketing generated.
- Don’t imitate your competitors — be your own business.
And, of course, when you’re ready to launch a partner marketing program, be sure to let the team at Affise know.
