1.Startup Entrepreneurs have No Clear Digital Marketing Plan
Everyone knows the importance of digital marketing in today’s age. Yet many startup entrepreneurs do not have a clear plan to take advantage of enormous opportunities lying in the digital world. According to SmartInsights.com survey , “50% of businesses surveyed do not have a defined digital plan or strategy, although they are active in digital marketing.”
An effective digital marketing strategy will not only help you in taking right decisions at critical time but also offers you a planned approach in making your startup successful. It also provides you a framework that will propel your brand forward and provides return on investment (ROI).
For creating an effective digital marketing strategy, you need to follow the following steps:
Define your audience
Create buyer personas
Develop brand message
Generate marketing ideas
Choose right platform
Create compelling online properties
Attract prospective leads
Convert
Measure and evaluate
Digital Marketing without a strategy is like driving without a steering wheel.
2. Low Budget
Do you know some startups self-destruct by allocating low budget for digital marketing? There is a common saying that “‘you have to spend money to make money.” The great use of money is to invest carefully on appropriate technology, talent and marketing channels that can pay high dividends in the future.
Sometimes, many startup entrepreneurs spend enormous amount of money on unnecessary tools and application, when there are already free alternative that are more powerful and useful than paid ones.
Take MailChimp for example, which provides up to 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 email credits free of cost. You need to neither sign contract nor fill credit card details. Everything is free forever.
3. Combining Offline and Online Marketing
When traditional marketing is combined with modern marketing, it will allow your startup to deliver consistent message across multiple channels and connect with your target customers with more types of media than ever.
Don’t consider these department as separate entities. They are same – working for the similar goal but on different battlefields.
Take an example of recent branding campaign of Housing.com, whose mission statement was ‘lookup’. They touched almost every channel whether it is online or offline. It was grand and extremely successful campaigns.
Pratik, CMO of Housing.com says, “the whole idea of this initial marketing campaign is to not just sell but build a deeper relationship with our customers,” he continued.
4. Choosing Wrong Team
Since there is already enormous talent gap in digital marketing industry, many startups fails to hire appropriate candidate for their digital marketing department.
According to Bill Aulet, managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, “The wrong team is the single costliest error entrepreneurs make, resulting in not only lost income and time but depleted morale.”
So, startup entrepreneurs should have right mix of digital marketing team, which should not only have appropriate skills and talent but also zeal and passion to work with startups.
For properly attracting and converting your target audience from the day one, you should hire certified professionals that can design customized and effective digital marketing strategy that will help your startup grow without breaking the bank.
5. Focusing on Multiple Social Media Platforms Simultaneously
Many startup entrepreneurs try to focus on several marketing platforms altogether, which will result in poor execution of messaging across channels and often convert them into ghost towns. This will lead to poor brand messaging, brand engagement and brand interaction.
Instead, it is wise to select one or two social media platforms and try to understand its community and audience. Research which platform is appropriate for your startup and where your target audience hang out. For example, professionals spend their time on LinkedIn while Pinterest is jam-packed with women.
Once you select a platform, connect with influencers in your industry. Add value to the industry by spending time and effort as much as possible to become industry expert in your niche.
6. Ignoring Mobile
As a startup entrepreneur, you should always look out for new ways of reaching your target audience. Mobile is the next big thing. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets have already replaced desktop computers. More than 50% of emails are opened on mobile devices.
So, while performing search engine marketing or display advertising, target mobile devices for maximum reach and brand awareness. Even responsive websites have added advantages in SEO because Google and other search engines loves responsive and rank them higher in pages when searches are made on mobile devices.
7. Focusing Too Much on Search Engines
Many SEOs spend enormous amount of time in optimizing website for Google and other search engines. If ever your website is penalized in any algorithm update, all your efforts and money will be wasted. Instead, try to focus on creating valuable and interesting content for people.
If people like it, they will definitely share it with their community. Search engines detect social signals and rank your website higher in search results. You can even plan and optimize for Bing and Yahoo, after all they have 30% share in search engine traffic.
8. Failure to Track and Measure
Many startup entrepreneurs promote their products and services on various platforms and do not set up tracking systems. It will become hard to know which marketing channels are sending you traffic, which converts more and which is most engaging.
Even if they are tracking, they fail to measure their digital marketing efforts. There are tons of tools like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, etc., which provides great amount of detailed metrics. All you need to do is gather actionable insights and reports from raw data and measure the effective of your campaigns. Marketing without analytics is dead end approach or throwing money down the drain.
9. Using Copyright Images
“Copyright law protects any original creation, and grants the holder of the copyright exclusive control over when, how, and by whom their work may be copied, distributed, or exhibited.”
People spend enormous amount of time, money and effort in creating images and you just use them for your commercial purpose. This is not wise. Even image copyright laws can screw you over and copyright infringement penalties are ridiculous.
Instead, use your own photos or subscribe to stock photo network like Shutter Stock or Image Bazaar, which are cheaper than ever and you can use it for any purpose whether it is for print media or website banner.
10. No Videos
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a video is worth a thousand images. Zappos, one of the best ecommerce stores in the world started posting videos on its product pages along with images, which resulted in increased in sales between 6% to 30%.
Social media platforms like YouTube, InstaGram, facebook,linkedin etc. provides incredible opportunity for startup entrepreneurs to promote valuable and relevant videos to their target audience.
Entrepreneurs, who haven’t included video marketing in their digital marketing strategy will surely going to miss out the golden opportunity of growing their brand across borders.
