Top 3 marketing mistakes - and how to avoid them

Over the last 5+ years at Bloom we have worked with more than 100 startups and scale ups, across diverse B2B and B2C industries, helping them to set themselves up for sustained growth. Having noticed a few key themes crop up again and again, we’ve compiled the most common startup marketing pitfalls, and how to avoid them.

In this blog post you'll discover the tools, tactics, and frameworks you and your team can use to navigate your way through the top marketing traps. The volume of ideas is high, so you could think of this session as a practical guide to what is out there, rather than a detailed how-to. We will look at:

• What’s in it for them: Understanding and building your messaging around the benefits customers gain vs the product you are selling;

• Easy to mind: Being top of mind when your customer is in market (spoiler: this may not be right now). Balancing the long and the short;

• Easy to find: Focusing your resources to achieve your strategic goals.

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Firstly, a word of warning: if you're looking for a miracle tactic, you’re in the wrong place! We're not going to tell you that by combining ChatGPT and TikTok during a particular phase of the moon in the metaverse you will get all the sales you desire.

Instead, we’re here because the fact is that there are 3 stages of thinking that will help set you up for success - long before you get to any miracle tactics.

Of course as a startup, you don’t have the luxury of months of abstract strategy work, but if you skip strategy entirely, you will pay for it in higher acquisition costs, and a constant need for high performance marketing spend.

So, let's dive into the first startup marketing trap:

1. “If you build it they will come”

It’s surprisingly common for us to come up against the belief that surely people only need to hear about your product once, in passing, to want it.

This may prove true for a small handful of early adopters (don’t we all love them?), but it isn’t true for the rest of your addressable market, who are busy going about their lives, worrying about all the daily trials we all have, and not paying much attention to a startup product launch. In fact, according to Startups Magazine, just over 800,000 businesses launched in 2021 alone. Many of those will need to begin by addressing the first two obstacles: Product-Market Fit (PMF*), and Awareness.

*Learn more about PMF and other pesky marketing acronyms here.

Product-Market Fit

Broadly speaking, product-market fit is the extent to which your product or service meets the needs of your target market. But actually one of the really useful side-effects of spending some time looking at this, is that it forces you into listening to, and thinking about your product, from the point of view of the customer - and noticing how this changes over time. A practical example of a company that lost out from not noticing a shift in their PMF would be Skype vs Zoom at the start of the pandemic...

Understand that you are not the customer. You know the product too well. You forgive its flaws. You know what you’re trying to say, you know where the button is, you care more, and have more patience, than any customer ever will. Meanwhile, the customer wants to know... What's in it for me?

The 40% rule is a popular metric for understanding product-market fit survey results. It states that if at least 40% of customers say they would be “very disappointed” if they no longer have access to your product or service or consider it a “must-have” (wouldn’t use an alternative), you’ve created a product that fits into the market.

Excerpt from Rahul Vohra's breakdown of his product-market fit exercise for Superhuman, published on First Round Capital

Tools to find your product-market fit

1. Listen to the customer

What problems do they need solving? Why does this matter to them? Yes, big comprehensive market research pieces are expensive, but you can get a surprising amount from a handful of qualitative interviews, and an inexpensive but well-crafted survey. These could be Zoom calls, or seeing how they use your product in their home or business. Listen to how they talk about why they chose it, how they use it, and what words they use to describe it. Learn from this. Make your marketing messaging echo these messages.

2. What job are they hiring you to do?

Sometimes marketers can get stuck into personas here. Whilst personas can be useful, they are often created out of fluff, especially when you don’t have a real dataset to base them on. The "Jobs to be Done" framework (or 'JTBD') is helpful when personas aren't quite cutting it.

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So let’s assume you have established some confidence in your PMF and are now looking for more customers. Enter our next job: awareness.

Once we’ve dismissed the myth that “if you build it they will come” we realise that "they" can only "come" if they know...

That we exist.

As we dig into the awareness part of the funnel, we break this down into smaller, manageable chunks;

- Problem awareness

- Product awareness

- Solution awareness

Measured by prompted and unprompted awareness.

Unprompted awareness shows you are easy to mind - whether you call it brand awareness, or sometimes mental availability.

For example, if we were to ask: "Which accounting system best suits startups?" one might hope Xero, Tide, or Sage would be mentioned. Whereas prompted awareness would see the question revised. to something like "Is Xero a good accounting system for startups?"

Your ultimate aim is to achieve unprompted solution awareness within a certain % of your target audience, and in order to to do that...

2. What got you here won't get you there

What fuels your first phases of growth will likely plateau. For many startup and scale-up brands, this manifests as an over-reliance on performance marketing that no longer delivers the value and volume it once did. As a marketing team, you may find yourself spending more and more time coming up with creatives and content solely to feed the algorithm - rather than focusing on what is really moving the needle for your business.

Having performance marketing be your only (or main) channel is like an orchestra with only violins. Virtuoso it might be, but you would miss the brand beat of the percussion, the trusted reach of the PR brass section, the organic appeal of the woodwinds...

OK, stretching the metaphor way too far, but the point is this - channels work in tandem in a multiplier effect, and being open to accepting that not all your marketing results in directly measurable ROI allows you to market more effectively.

Another way of thinking about this is the long AND the short.

The Long and The Short Of It by Les Binet & Peter Field

This is the idea that short term or sales activation needs to be balance with long-term or "lasting" brand-building. The above chart from research by Les Binet & Peter Field illustrates this plateau that many startups will experience, as they graduate from the early stages of chasing traction and growth at almost any cost, and how brand + performance deliver value.

For very early-stage startups, you might also think about early performance marketing as helpful in testing and finding your traction channels, and identifying what positioning and messaging works for your early adopters.

But why does brand matter?

Because if confers all these benefits to your brand.

Note you need both. It’s not an either or (although recent studies have suggested that if you have to pick one, brand can do some of the job of sales activation, but the reverse isn’t true).

3. “Everything, everywhere, all at once”

Good strategy is the art of sacrifice.

As with this Oscar winning film, trying to do, or be, everything, everywhere, all at once, can cause a meltdown so severe that it threatens the existence of the multiverse.

(Or at least the existence of effective marketing).

With a limited budget, your biggest enemy is distraction. And marketing is full of shiny shiny tactics.

Whether it’s multiple products, cramming 6 key messages into every ad, or the creation of sub-brands, understand that strategy is sacrifice. Decide what not to do - what you say no (or not now) to, is as important as what you say yes to.

How, in practice, do you bring this discipline into a startup or scale-up?

Some tools that might be useful to you in this:

North Star Metric

Coined by Matt Lerner, a North Star Metric is single metric that captures the core value you deliver to customers. It replaces everyone’s siloes with a common target, and one that captures how customers would behave if they loved your product.

For Facebook, it's daily active users (DAUs); for Spotify, it's minutes spent listening; for AirBnB, it's nights booked, and; for Uber, it's rides per week.

This clarifying attitude should also translate into campaign execution.

Once you have set clear marketing objectives for a campaign, and identified who you are targeting with that campaign - tie everything to it across channels. So your ad creative, your landing pages, your content... all ladders up to the same objectives, the same key messages. Which leads us nicely on to the next disciplinary tool:

Message House

This is where you shape the key messages for your brand (not specific marketing copy, but key messages). Every piece of content and collateral should in some way land one of these core brand messages. Each small hit making you easy to mind.

Example of the message house framework in use for Su, a traveltech scale-up and proud Bloom client

Take those messages into your content and ad campaigns, into your emails, your social media, your websites, your landing pages.

Another useful and practical framework for anchoring tactical executions (in this case content) to your strategy, is:

The Hero Hub Hygiene Framework

Originally devised by Google for YouTube marketers, this framework is useful for all content planning;

• Hygiene is your workhorse content, very functional, often a first point of contact - it’s what people might find in a google search.

• Hub should be around brand awareness and engagement - more topical, more shareable, more creative. It sticks around for people to discover, so needs to have longevity and be inspiring and informative in a way that is relevant for your brand.

• Hero content is big and splashy, often a one-off campaign. Gets you talked about. Is memorable. Multi channel - paid, owned, and earned.

These frameworks help you understand what to say no (or not now) to - the shiny objects that don’t help.

But just remember...

What’s in it for me?

Watch the webinar replay below:

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