Trying too many methods at once

We have already recommended you not to invest everything in a single advertising campaign or channel — this is still relevant, as you have to experiment in order to understand which options are the most effective and make a final data-driven choice. But it is also important not to try too many things at once, since you can easily lose focus and the overall efficiency of your effort will decrease. For instance, instead of trying to promote your brand via email, on several social networks, and a couple of third-party platforms, choose one activity and do your best to achieve everyday progress. This could be creating content for the selected social media and building presence there. Otherwise, if you do too many things at once, the quality of your effort will be low.

This applies not only to channels but also to marketing methods: writing articles and social media posts, building partnerships with influencers, recording podcasts and videos, hosting live webinars, attending relevant events, making cold phone calls, and so on. When you are a startup, leveraging multiple methods at once will lead to the loss of focus, so, again, your effort will not bring the desired results, since you will not be able to pay enough attention to all the activities. Instead, consider following these recommendations:

  • Decide on the methods

First of all, decide which marketing methods you will use to introduce your brand to the target audience. It would be wise to start with social media — when used in the right way, they can be a great tool in terms of driving traffic to your website or landing page. Therefore, you may want to start creating content for them and, in this way, attract followers and potential clients. Then, prepare a detailed plan for your activities. For example, if you are going to start with creating content for social networks, decide what exactly you are going to publish there, how often, and so on.

  • Focus on the chosen activities

After you make a decision, focus on the selected activity (or activities — you may still want to try several methods at once, but not too many) and make progress toward it every day. During this stage, do not start working on any new marketing tasks — focus on those ones that you chose, and make sure that your team does the same. If they lose focus, achieving your goals will take more time, and this can be critical for a startup. The faster you attract the attention of your audience and start driving traffic to the website, the better. This means profit for your startup and an opportunity to remain on the market and, after a while, get a better position.

  • Add new activities on time

After you manage to succeed with the selected methods, you can start trying the new ones. For instance, the content you publish on social networks attracted a lot of followers, they regularly comment on your posts and are interested in your page. More and more users subscribe to your account. Obviously, such an achievement does not mean that you can fully switch to other methods. No, you should keep posting new content on the selected channel (or channels) and interact with your followers. However, since you have made such progress, you can add more activities as well. For example, these could be email marketing, cooperation with influencers, and so on. Add new methods gradually, only after you succeed with the already chosen ones. 

Being impatient

As a startup, you need to start making profit as quickly as possible — this is your way to survive and stay on the market. However, being impatient and expecting great results too soon is a mistake. Even if you do everything with impressive effectiveness, you will not achieve the desired results overnight. Reaching your goals requires some time and effort, and if you and your team are impatient, you will lose focus and feel discouraged. 

Instead, you should build your online presence steadily and carefully, while keeping your goals in mind (that is why it is important to keep your objectives detailed and time-bound). Start with preparing a marketing plan, then work on the content to deliver to your target audience. After this, promote your content across the selected marketing channels, and remember to measure the effectiveness on a regular basis. Do your best to define your strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities and threats. In this way, you will be able to improve your plan and marketing strategy, so it will be possible for you to reach your goals easier and, probably, even faster. 

In general, instead of waiting for impressive results to be achieved the next day after you prepare a marketing plan, you should focus on the current tasks and complete them one by one. This will help you to reach your goals and build your online presence in the right way. 

Scaling in the wrong way

First of all, to prevent misunderstanding, let us explain the difference between the terms “growth” and “scaling”. So, for businesses, growth takes place when a company invests new resources (people, technology, money, and so on), and, as a result, its revenue increases. In turn, scaling is managing to increase revenue without significant increase in resources. 

Obviously, startups are more interested in scaling than in growth, as their budgets are often rather tight. At the same time, a lot of startups perform scaling in the wrong way: by hurrying up, investing too much, and so on. As a result, their budgets may suffer, which may lead to failure. The following recommendations will help you to prevent this from happening:

  • Do not hurry

First of all, you should not try to scale your startup as soon as you manage to get to the market. Do not hurry — create a marketing plan, identify your buyer personas, select the marketing channels, start building your online presence, and optimise the processes. You need a basis to scale, so start with the initial steps. Then, if you take them successfully, you can start thinking about scaling.

  • Identify if your business is scalable

Apart from this, it is essential to answer the following question: “Is your business actually scalable?”. You may offer a product that is extremely relevant to your target audience, but this does not mean that you will be able to scale your startup with minimum investments. Therefore, explore your current processes to find out if scaling is possible.

  • Automate and outsource

When scaling your startup, do your best to automate and outsource all the possible processes and tasks. This will help your team to save time, as they will be able to focus on more important tasks thanks to automation. And if you outsource certain tasks, you will save your budget. For instance, hiring a freelancer is a much cheaper solution than hiring a new employee who will work in your office. To decide on the tasks that can be automated or outsourced, review the list of your current activities and pay special attention to those ones that are repetitive. 

  • Do not recruit too many people

When scaling your business, you may want to hire more experts. This may be the right step, but you should not hurry with it. Start with identifying the skills that you need and then discuss with your team if any of the members can perform the required tasks. It may be essential for them to improve their skills, but, for instance, attending training is still much cheaper than hiring another team member. Apart from this, avoid recruiting too many people at once. If you still need to hire someone, start small, then analyse the results to understand if more experts have to be hired.

The same applies to resources — do not invest too much money or subscribe to multiple paid tools at once. Progress slowly but steadily, and measure the performance continuously.

  • Search for opportunities

Finally, do your best to identify opportunities that will help you to scale your startup without substantial investments. For instance, this could be collecting email addresses of your target audience and sending them newsletters to drive them to your website or setting up retargeting ads. Doing this will not require significant investments, while sending a newsletter to 20 people will take almost the same time as sending it to 100 customers. As for collecting email addresses and using them for marketing, we will provide more recommendations in one of the next sections of the article.

Creating generic content

Your startup has to attract the attention of the target audience, so it is crucial for you to promote your content in the right way and on the right channels. However, the content itself is even more important. If you create something generic, even the most effective marketing methods will not help to drive visitors to your website or accounts on social media. Therefore, you should focus on the quality of the content that you create: it must bring value to your audience, be relevant and special. It is much better to create only one great article per week than, for example, four generic ones. The following recommendations will help you:

  • Look for opportunities

To create relevant content, you should first of all discover what topics are interesting to your target audience. Follow the industry news and monitor the trends, go through industry-related platforms and forums, and so on. If possible, explore the interactions you have already had with your existing and potential customers. If there are any questions that are asked frequently, you can prepare a material answering them in full. In general, you should look for content opportunities. Before starting working on the material, look for similar articles or posts on the Internet. Obviously, identifying a completely unique topic is a rather challenging process, but if there are a lot of materials covering the same subject, you can still try to make your content special. Check out the available content and create something different from it, so that it will bring even more value to your target audience. Even if the topic itself is generic, you can describe your specific point of view, so your material will become special.

Remember, that any content piece that you create (especially when you are a startup) must bring value to your existing and potential clients. If it is irrelevant and makes no sense to your audience, it is better not to create it at all. 

  • Share personal stories

To make your content more engaging, consider sharing personal stories from time to time. For instance, this can be a story about how you came up with the idea of your startup, why you decided to do this, and so on. Share some details to make your company more relatable and “human”, so that it would be easier for the audience to get interested and start trusting your brand. 

Keep in mind that you do not have to share personal stories in every content piece — do this only from time to time. Otherwise, your followers and website visitors may get tired of such content.

  • Work on your headlines

Headlines are one of the most important parts of content — they should make people interested and motivate them to read the entire piece of content. Therefore, work on them carefully and try to come up with unique headlines. Apart from this, do not make the headlines too long, and include relevant keywords, so that it would be easier for the audience to find your content on the Internet (for example, your articles). Another thing that you can do is to apply A/B testing to the headlines to learn more about your audience’s preferences. In this way, it will be easier for you to create more effective headlines in the future.

Please note that the introduction also deserves your attention, as it has the same mission — to make people interested. If the introduction is boring and does not explain what value the audience will get after reading the material, your content is not likely to be successful. Again, include relevant keywords, but make sure that they fit the content properly. Besides, do not use too many keywords. If your content is overloaded with them, it will look unnatural and be hard to read.

  • Use visuals

Using images, videos and other visuals is essential to make your content more special and well-structured. Besides, adding visuals to social media posts is a way to make them more notable. Do your best to create your own materials, with your brand colours and fonts — using the stock ones will not make your content better. You may also want to design infographics. This is a popular type of content, and sometimes it is even more effective than, for instance, blog posts. To increase brand awareness and recognition, use your brand colours and fonts, and add your logo. 

In terms of structure, divide your copy into paragraphs, use headings and subheadings, as well as tables and bulleted or numbered lists when necessary.

Ignoring analytics

Ignoring analytics is one of the most crucial mistakes that a company of any size can make. However, for startups measuring the performance is even more essential, as in this way it is possible to select the right marketing channels, identify strengths and weaknesses, understand the effectiveness of your effort, and so on. Without analytics, you will move forward blindly, so, as a result, your startup may fail. Therefore, you should monitor the metrics relevant to your goals — they will allow you to figure out if you are actually achieving your objectives. Other metrics may still deserve your attention, but keep in mind that not all them will bring value. For instance, your goal is to increase sales by 30% within two months, and you use social networks as your main marketing channels. One of your recent posts resulted in 500 new followers, but only 10 of them purchased your product. Thus, the increased number of followers may look impressive, but this metric has no value in terms of your objective. So be careful when choosing what metrics to track and focus on. 

As for other recommendations, here they are:

  • Track all the channels

You are likely to use several channels for marketing and, if so, you should track them all even if they are of the same type. For instance, you use Facebook and Instagram. Both of them are social networks. You monitor only Facebook and assume that your performance on Instagram is the same or at least not significantly different. This is the wrong approach — you should monitor all the channels that you use. Otherwise, if one of them shows low performance, you will not notice this on time. In turn, if all the channels are tracked, you will see the whole picture and be able to adapt your strategy and effort.

The same applies to the content pieces that you create and share with your target audience — analyse each of them to be able to make your future content more effective.

  • Measure continuously

To keep an eye on the situation, you should analyse the performance of your strategy on a regular basis. Since your company is a startup, you may even want to do this every day. In turn, if you go through the analytical data only from time to time, you will not be able to detect issues promptly. Such an approach can lead to failure, as fixing a problem, for instance, one month after it occurs will not help. 

It would also be useful to prepare reports and share them with your team and investors, if relevant. Do this on a regular basis (think about the most appropriate schedule) and visualise the data to make it easier to understand. 

  • Choose tools carefully

Nowadays, there are numerous tools for marketing analytics. However, since your company is a startup, you do not have to go for paid options immediately. Yes, some of them may offer more features and be more convenient to use, but there are a lot of free options that you can start with. These include Google Analytics, analytical features of social networks (they are also free to use, you only need a business account), and so on. If necessary, do research to find more tools and identify solutions that will meet your needs perfectly. At the same time remember that if you use several tools, they may call the same metrics in different ways. If so, standardise such metrics in your reports, so that they will have the same names.

Apart from this, as soon as you detect an opportunity or a threat thanks to analytics, do not hesitate to take action and improve your strategy. Start taking measures as soon as possible, otherwise, it may be hard for your startup to survive.

Copying the competitors

Researching competitors is important for companies of any size, however, for startups this is just crucial. By learning more about your rivals, you can discover their competitive advantages and potential weaknesses, identify the social networks that you can use for building your online presence, and so on. However, researching competitors and collecting data about them does not mean that you should copy their strategies and methods in full. This is a mistake — if your startup does the same as its rivals, it will not be able to stand out from the crowd. This may ensure its survival for a while, but then, if you keep copying the competitors, your startup may simply fail because most customers will still prefer the brands they are already familiar with.

Instead of copying, you should look for opportunities. Research the competitors and analyse their strengths, weaknesses, tactics, channels, and so on. Then, with this information in mind, think about how you can make your startup more attractive than its rivals. Ask your team to help and write down all the ideas. Later you will be able to go through the list and to decide what to focus on first and foremost. Here are several examples for you to provide a more detailed explanation of what you can do.

For instance, most of your competitors rely on search engine optimisation, and none of them is present on YouTube, even though this platform is popular among your target audience (videos are also one of the most engaging types of content). Therefore, instead of focusing only on SEO too, you can start recording videos and sharing them on YouTube and other channels. If your brand “dominates” on YouTube, this can become your startup’s advantage, as you will be using a channel and creating content that your rivals neglect. Obviously, you can still pay attention to SEO as well, but do not follow your competitors strictly — do not rely only on this approach. As for videos, keep them branded: use your logo, brand colours and fonts. Avoid using stock visuals. This will help to improve brand awareness and recognition. Apart from this, keep your videos short — users are not likely to watch long files from the brand they do not know yet. Another thing to keep in mind is that the videos should bring value to the audience.

Let’s review one more example. Imagine the following situation: you figure out that your most successful competitors communicate with their customers only via email and phone, and on social networks. Besides, they do not provide 24/7 support service. Considering this, you can use the same communication options, but also add live chat to your website and start delivering support round the clock. For a startup, providing live help 24/7 can be too expensive, as you may need to hire more people. However, for a start, you can create a chatbot that will help visitors to find the information they need during those hours when your team is away. To make the communication process even more convenient for your customers, you can also deliver support via the most popular messengers. 

In any case, do not copy your rivals in full — look for opportunities to overcome them. Careful research will help you to make data-driven decisions. Besides, do not forget to inform your audience about your advantages. For instance, if you add a chatbot to your website, you can create a banner telling the visitors something like this: “Need help at night? Our chatbot is here for you”. 


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