Why you don’t need marketing to increase sales

When startups come to us and say they want to increase sales or revenue, their first inquiry is whether we can do marketing for them. At first, we were puzzled by this request because sales can be low for a lot of reasons. But soon we realized it was a trend. A lot of founders, especially those with a tech background, believe that marketing is the response to any sales-related problem. And if you can’t solve a problem with marketing, you just need better marketing.

From our experience, this is fundamentally wrong.

It is common for founders to assume that if their customers don’t buy their product, they either are out of reach or not convinced enough. Consequently, to sell more they try to leverage as many marketing channels as they can, and invest a lot of money in paid marketing. However, there’s one factor they don’t take into account: the customer.

Marketing is used to:

• Reach the customer in spaces that they frequent — offline sites, media, social media platforms, blogs, messengers, etc.;
• Catch the customer’s attention using the language and argumentation they can relate to;
• Convince the customer to try or buy a product with the right message and message delivery.

Any of these requires some prior knowledge about the customer, such as:

• What spaces do they frequent? What media/blogs do they read? Do they spend enough time online to see a promotional video or an ad?
• What kind of people or companies are they? What are their values? What kind of message can you put together to appeal to them?
• How do they make decisions? Who influences them? Can they be convinced by an ad at all?

If a startup doesn’t know at least the basic things about its customers, its marketing efforts will be misdirected. It can waste a lot of time and money on putting together ads and messages that its customers won’t pay attention to or even see.

Here’s an example. Imagine you invited a friend of yours to a restaurant. Instead of asking them what food they prefer, you bring them to an establishment of your choice, order on their behalf, and then feel disappointed when they refuse to eat. You start asking if your friend would like a bigger plate or more napkins or to eat at another time of the day, but they keep refusing. They won’t agree no matter what you say because they simply don’t like the food. It could be avoided if you just asked in advance what they prefer.

Don’t get us wrong — you do need marketing to bring the product to the market, build a brand, establish sales channels, and get your revenue stream moving. But it’s built upon another fundamental process that enables you to learn the customer: research.

Research is the foundation for any customer-facing action you take. To reach customers at spaces they frequent, you need to ask them what those places are. To formulate a clear marketing message, you need to know how they make decisions and what their values are. To ensure that your message reaches them, you need to know what channels they receive information through. Besides, at the most basic level, research helps you understand whether the customer persona you have in your mind is your actual customer. If you don’t know any of that, any money you invest in your marketing campaigns is essentially wasted.

The best way to research customers is customer development — a methodology that helps you unfold what kind of people or organizations your customers are, what their problems are, and how they envision ideal solutions for them. With custdev, you have a map of the customer’s life, work, and decision-making process. Once you have those, you can set marketing goals and tasks.

Does your startup practice a research-first or marketing-first approach? Drop us a line at unicorn@smartstartlab.com — we always welcome fresh takes on our articles, especially when they disagree with our arguments!