In my personal growth journey, I have different “startup” experience, whether it is a five people small startup business, a startup team within a startup company, my own business, or building a startup brand within an enterprise corporate. From my experience, I can tell some marketing mistakes are often made when you try to build a completely new brand but you can actually avoid them for achieving greater success.
Mistake No.1: Put all Marketing Effort in Driving Conversions but Neglect Brand Building
I know it sounds obvious, everyone knows the importance of brand building. However, it is often easier said than done, particularly when you are building a completely new brand because all you want to is get the first batch of sales, achieve high ROI. Which means, you will put all of your efforts in conversion generation with an aim to break even the business quickly. I totally understand this is the goal for everyone who step into the entrepreneurial journey.
However, I can tell you from my experience that it takes time to build customers’ trust on your brand and getting people noticed before you start seeing a consistent sales growth. It may take at least 6 to 12 months, depending on the effort that you consistently put on brand building. You may argue that may not true as there is still brand building in those conversion driven campaigns. Of course, people will still notice your brand from your marketing messages, however, the message is different. Instead of explaining what your brand mission is and telling a brand story, putting the WHY statements, you try to push the customers directly down to the bottom of funnel with one single shot. The conversion rate will not be good because they know nothing about your brand.
Therefore, beside driving conversions, make sure to put consistent effort in building your brand awareness as soon as you launch to market, it can be through display or social advertising, doing partnership with other brands, launching a referral program, creating shareable brand story or UGC content on social. For advertising, put at least 30 to 40% of your marketing budget on brand building in the right channel.
Remember, Brand awareness is just as important as driving conversion
Mistake No. 2: No Customer Validation
Before starting a new brand, you probably will go through a market research process to understand customer pain points. However, doing market research without customer validation, will probably lead to false assumptions. Customer validation is a process to gather real feedback from your target customers to ensure there is a demand on market, and so what we call a product-market fit to offer real value to your customers.
Oftentimes, as marketers or business owners, we want to launch to the market quickly to test the response and believe that you can learn and fine tune the strategy as you launch to market. However, lunching without customer validation will take you much longer and higher business cost in adjusting the strategy. Good opportunities may be missed if you just make too much assumptions without enough hypothesis testing.
Therefore, before launch to market, you should talk with your ideal target customers (ICP) as much as possible, the more the better, and that is part of customer validation. It can done in a quantitative research method through a survey asking open-ended questions, or through interviews with 1 to 1 conversation or a focus group for prototype testing.
In the customer validation process, you should aim to validate the assumption you made on customer pain points or challenges, their ideal service or product, motivations, or even to get initial feedback of your product prototype. Remember, validate all the assumptions you have made and so you can minimize the chance in wasting marketing budget on campaigns that won’t resonate with your target audience.
Mistake No. 3: Too Much Customer Personas
This is another common mistake I would have avoided. Very often as marketers, we want to be inclusive in our marketing message and try to target a broad customer segment with the aim to increase conversion rate. I have seen brands having 4 to 5 customer personas or even more when just starting a new business. As a new brand, the problem is you will end up with too much marketing message, and actually it dilutes your brand message and brand positioning to target too many personas.
Instead, when promoting a new brand, try to limit the customer personas, because the more persona you have, the more marketing efforts you will need to target them as a customer segment. Aim at no more than 3 personas when you are just starting out. As you launch to market, you will get a better understanding of your customer behavior and the market, and you can expand the customer persona depending on the market factors that you see.
Think about your ideal customer profile, and start drafting the persona from there. Remember, your customer persona should represent 90% of target customers who are going to buy from your brand.
Mistake No.4: Complicate the Marketing Communications
As marketers, we are so tempted to create complicated marketing messages in our ads, tagline, slogans, and put lots of efforts in creating fancy graphic designs, slick looking pages to make the new brand looks unique and to out stand on market. However, have you ever think that actually will only complicate the marketing communication process and make it more difficult for your prospective customers to understand what your band is offering.
In fact, you should simplify the marketing message. Aim to convey your brand mission or what’s your brand is offering in just one simple sentence and repeat that again and again across all channels. To build branding quickly, you need to reinforce your customers memory with simple message whenever you can.
Remember, don’t let your customers think. At anytime, it should take zero effort for your customers to understand your marketing message. Try to ask a person who havent seen your marketing copy, if they understand? If no, then something you need to fix
Mistake No. 5: Putting Customer Service in Low Priority
Think customer service is not related to marketing? It’s completely wrong. In fact, it’s the opposite, because customer service is what drives customer retention which is at the very bottom part of your marketing funnel. I have seen marketers putting efforts in promoting the new brand, driving traffic to their website but put a low priority on customer service quality. That’s a huge mistake. No matter it’s a service or product brand, or whatever industries, your first batch of customers will be your brand champion at the early stage.
In fact, you should put a 200% effort on building customer service as the way you put on marketing, particularly when you just started a new brand. Make sure there’s enough resources or workflow to support your new customers if they have questions or need help. You can consider an AI chatbot, opening a dedicated communication channel like WhatsApp or service hotline, facebook messenger, email depending on your customer preference.
So how much is enough? In short you should always aim to exceed the customer expectation and be willing to deliver a little bit more out of your service scope.
Remember, don’t underestimate that word of mouth power. If you consistently put effort in building excellent customer service, it will make a huge difference and lower customer acquisition cost in the long run.
Wrapping It Up
Building a completely new brand is a huge investment in the early stage before the business breaks even, whether it’s in terms of dollar spending, time or manpower resources. Ultimately, it’s always the best practice to plan ahead and make sure you know as much information as possible about your target audience and have a clear plan to build a stronger branding in the long run.
