Mark Evans Tech | 3/679 | Thoughts on Startups, Entrepreneurs and Marketing

Learn how we work with startups and entrepreneurs to create marketing strategies and tactical execution

April 9, 2013 BY Mark Evans Posted in Startups | 4 Comments

Listening to Your Startup Customers is Dangerous

Customers are wonderful, particularly if they pay for your products. But listening them can be dangerous.

Dangerous? Huh?

Sure, they provide valuable feedback, advice and criticism but the stuff customers tell you can be distracting, unfocused, self-serving and a waste of time.

The problem is the disconnect between what your product and what customers want. You make a product that has particular benefits and features; customers use the product to meet a need or solve a problem…but they usually want it to do even more.

In fact, the biggest challenge is customers are never truly satisfied or completely happy. No matter how good the product, pricing or customer service, customers believe it would be even better if it did something better or differently.

It means that when they tell you about your product, they want to talk about the existing product but, as important, they love to talk about what they would like to see.

The challenge for startups is knowing when to nod politely, while being able to ignore what they say. In many cases, their enthusiasm and interest is appreciated but it offers no value because it’s not aligned with your vision or road map.

Startups get themselves in trouble when they listen to what a customer tells them, and then reload on product development because the suggestions seem relatively minor, and it’s a way to make a customer happy.

The problem is trying to make your customers happy to a losing proposition. You can’t please everyone, and you can’t meet the needs of all your customers, otherwise you’ll end up with pig of a product that is bloated with features.

At the end of the day, happiness comes from making a product with a specific vision and mission. It doesn’t have to be all things to all people. But it will be successful if it meets the needs of different customers in different ways to provide value and utility.

So how should startups handle what customers say?

The best approach is active, enthusiastic and engaged listening. Truth be told, customers like to tell you what they think. It makes them feel better about using your product because there is engagement.

All the feedback, however, should go into a big pot where it should it should sit for a while before seeing the light of day. At some point, the pot should be sifted through to see if there is any value. Most of it will be useful but some of it will jump out because it fits with how the product should or could evolve.

This can be a difficult process because too much feedback can be overwhelming. In time, however, startups can develop finely tuned tools that make it easier to identify the “safe” information, while ignoring the dangerous or useful stuff.

April 5, 2013 BY Mark Evans Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Startups | 1 Comment

Are Marketing and Sales the Same Thing for Startups?

It used to be that marketing and sales were two separate creatures.

In one corner, marketing focused on building brand awareness among target audiences. In another corner, sales was about driving leads and deals. Like church and state, the two worlds rarely converged.

For startups, however, this model can’t be embraced because, frankly, it doesn’t work. When you’re operating with limited or modest resources, having marketing and sales operate independently with their own distinct mandates is a recipe for disaster.

Instead, marketing and sales need to be mashed together or, at least, structured to be cohesive and coordinated groups that support and nurture each other. In many respects, marketers need to be salespeople, while salespeople have to be marketers.

With a fluid structure in place, a startup’s goals (customers, sales, profits) can be positioned as the common good, regardless of someone’s role or title.

This struck me as a key takeaway from a conference I attended earlier this week hosted by Klass Capital and PwC. There were two panels: one about marketing (which I was on) and a second on sales that featured Paul Jackson (Method CRM), Kirk Simpson (Wave Accounting), Don Mal (Vena Solutions) and Jason Atkins (360 Incentives)

All four CEOs head up venture-backed startups that are aggressively working to establish their brands and products within competitive markets. As they drive forward, it is easy to see how marketing and sales are working in parallel strategically and tactically.

In some respects, it’s like a 1 + 1 = 3 proposition where math not only works, but it has to work.

As marketers, it is sometimes easy to get tangled up in brand building, which involves a many moving parts. You begin to think that given all the hard marketing work being done, customers should be enthusiastically knocking on the door to buy your product.

As a result, it is easy to forget the sales process is oozing with marketing at each stage within the funnel. As a customer goes from awareness to exploration to consideration to purchase, marketing needs to help drive the process forward.

Given this reality, marketing and sales have to be working side by side to optimize what each other is doing. Just as marketing supports sales, sales drives marketing by working to ramp up the brand’s awareness and stature.

For startups looking to drive growth, the best move may be to have your marketing and sales people work together to determine the best ways to collectively be successful.

What do you think? Is this the way to go for startups?

If you’re looking for strategic and marketing help, my company, ME Consulting, works startups and fast-growing companies looking to jump-start their efforts.

Tagged klass capital, Marketing, sales |

April 2, 2013 BY Mark Evans Posted in Startups | 2 Comments

How is Your Startup Unique or Different?

In a competitive landscape, one of the most important consideration is standing out from the crowd.

For startups, this is crucial because the barriers to entry are relatively low, while new or innovative ideas can quickly be replicated by agile rivals.

It means startups must identify how they are unique and different to position the brand and carve out a competitive edge, even if that edge is minor. If this can’t be achieved, the danger is a startup comes across as just a me-too product.

The problem is being unique or different is not easy. There is so much competition that startups need to be creative, flexible and bold. It is a challenge to make happen but there can be significant rewards for making it happen.

So how do startups discover what makes these different or unique?

It begins with diving into competitive landscape to really look at how rivals have positioned themselves. Who rises above the crowd, and how do they do it? What are the things that every rival claims – e.g user-friendly, intuitive, efficient. etc.? To get a better grasp of where everyone sits, it might even help to create a graph that places companies in different buckets (e.g. free, freemium, premium, SMB, etc.)

By doing a competitive analysis, a startup can identify the best opportunities to stake a claim on how it different or unique.

A good example of a startup that successfully managed to establish its uniqueness is 500px, which plays in the ultra-competitive photo-sharing market. So how does a startup find a place where it can be seen as different?

For 500px, the magic happened when it positioned itself as the place where photographers could display their most beautiful photographs. 500px is not a place to show your good photographs, but only what you consider to be the best.

By positioning the brand in this way, 500px managed to create a unique place for itself. In the process, it attracted well-known and high-quality photographers who liked the idea of having a place for their best shots. This, in turn, generated significant buzz, which attracted many more photographers who wanted to be part of the community.

One of the most important lessons from looking at 500px is a startup doesn’t have to be significantly different or unique; it just needs to have a slant, angle or approach that isn’t like everyone else. In many ways, 500px has the same features as other photo-sharing services but its ability to stand out has created the impression it is truly unique.

It is not an easy task to be unique or different but it is a competitive necessity if a startup wants to avoid on other marketing techniques such as relying low prices or spending a lot of money on advertising.

So spend the time and energy to focus on how you’re unique and different. Do your homework, do a lot of research, talk to potential and existing customers, bounce ideas off people who don’t a vested interest in your startup, brainstorm and experiment. At some point along the way, you may hit the jackpot when what makes you unique or different bubbles to the surface.

Tagged Marketing, startups, value propositions |

March 29, 2013 BY Mark Evans Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Startups | 2 Comments

Five Reasons Startups Are Afraid of Marketing

Earlier this week, I did a post that asked: Where are Canada’s startup marketers? It spawned a flurry of insightful comments, suggestions and thoughts on the startup marketing landscape and what needs to be done to develop more talent.

Among the comments, two jumped out because they nailed key issues:

Stuart MacDonald: “The broader issue is that 99% of startups don’t know what marketing *is* so they don’t value it.”

Francis Moran: “I do agree that the biggest problem with startup marketing is that too many startups don’t understand how marketing is mission critical.”

To run with this theme, here are five reasons why startups are afraid of marketing:

1. They don’t understand it. As Stuart and Francis make abundantly clear, most startups don’t understand marketing. It’s not part of their skill-set, experience or DNA. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know. This makes it difficult to understand the role and value of marketing. It has nothing to do with knowledge or expertise but, rather, a grasp on a different, but important, topic.

2. It costs money. Let’s face it, marketing costs money to make happen – whether you’re doing it in-house, through freelancers or via consultants. When given the choice between hiring a salesperson, who generates revenue, and a marketing person, who eats revenue, it is easy to understand why it’s easier for startups to pick the former. The key thing startups need to understand is marketing works when the amount of new business coming in outweighs the amount being spent on marketing. Of course, it is impossible to see how this would work if you don’t do any marketing.

3. They don’t see it as a priority. To many startups, the most important priorities are product development and sales, followed by hiring talent and raising money. Somewhere down the line, comes marketing. In many cases, the need for marketing only arises after a point of pain emerges such as a Website that doesn’t convert, rivals getting more media/blog coverage, messaging that potential customers don’t understand, or the need for more marketing collateral.

4. It’s hard to measure success. It’s not really, particularly digitally, but there is a perception that marketing campaigns are sent into the ether in the hope they will generate some kind of return such as Website visits, in-bound emails, telephone calls, leads and sales. Again, it goes back to not understanding how marketing works and why it needs to be done.

5. Marketers are strange creatures. Marketers talk differently, they use strange words (KPIs, anyone?), they’re slick, always trying to sell you something or get you to do something, and they’re into creative concepts and brainstorming sessions. In other words, marketers are different, in many ways, from developers or, for that matter, salespeople. Yes, we can be a bit slick and we like to talk fast but we have good intentions and a focus on helping startups succeed.

Bonus: Another challenge for startups is not knowing who they should exactly hire to do marketing. What skills and experience should that person have? How do they measure this person’s performance? How do they decide between different candidates?

The key message here is marketing has a definite role to play within a startup, along with programming, sales, HR, customer service, etc. It needs to be part of the mix for a startup to have a shot at success.

March 26, 2013 BY Mark Evans Posted in Advertising/Marketing, Startups | 43 Comments

Where Are Canada’s Startup Marketers?

At the risk of ruffling a few feathers, here’s a question: where are Canada’s startup marketers?

We’re teeming with developers but there appears to be a dearth of startup marketers who can help to nurture and grow viable businesses. As much as many startups may look at marketing as a necessary evil, marketing is a key ingredient for success. Without enough marketing talent, many startups may never realize their potential.

My thesis is based on a growing number of conversations with startups entrepreneurs who are finding it challenging, if not impossible, to find good marketing people.

One entrepreneur told me: “We have a big job and a big opportunity. Where’s the marketing talent?”. Another company is considering recruiting someone from the U.S. to fill a senior marketing position.

So, why the lack of marketing talent?

Does it have to do with the fact most startups are not created by marketing people? Is it the nascent nature of the startup community, which means there aren’t many marketers with solid startup experience? Or is there simply a lack of marketing talent overall in Canada?

Whatever the reason, it shouldn’t overshadow the reality that startups need good marketers, along with top-notch programmers, salespeople, designers, community managers and business developers.

Marketing helps to take your product to the next level, letting it and the brand establish a presence and connect with target audiences. Marketing lets you tell compelling stories in a way that is different or better than the competition.

One the realities for startup marketers is they need to be multi-faceted. They can’t just be good at one thing such as communications or lead generation. Instead, they need to be good, or at least competent, at many things. This could range from writing and SEO to AdWords, social media, strategic alliances and product marketing.

Finding someone with these skills can be a challenge because marketers tend to be specialized. They’re really good at a particular practice but they’re not “five tools” players to steal a baseball term. When you work for a startup, however, being able to multi-task is important, particularly within the world of lean.

One of the best insights into the role the startup marketer was provided recently by Marcelo Calbucci, who nailed it with this paragraph in a Geekwire column:

“You have to know (nearly) it all. You don’t have to be good at everything, but you have to have enough exposure and experience at all levels of the marketing “stack” to be able to make good calls on how to spend your time, money and other startups resources in order to maximize the value you bring to the table. It’s not enough to be a brilliant marketing strategist and not know how to execute those strategies. It’s not enough to have a bag full of tactical tricks if you can’t create cohesion for the company positioning. It’s not enough to be a master of Social Media and have no idea how SEO works.”

A couple of weeks ago, Neil Bhapkar, Uberflip’s director of marketing, wade into the conversation with a lengthy blog post, “The Truth About Startup Marketing” that outlined the different things he had done during his digital marketing career, and how he brings many things to the table to drive Uberflip’s marketing.

“I don’t spend my days thinking about our overall marketing strategy, but rather I spend my days executing, leading, and generally trying new things within the framework of our overall marketing strategy.”

To become a startup marketer, you need a mix of different experiences AND/OR you need to have an appetite to be a generalist rather than a specialist. Within a startup, the marketing needs and priorities evolve and change, sometimes abruptly. It means a startup marketer has to be flexible, agile and able to take on challenges as they emerge.

While it may not be possible to formally train startup marketers, the way to create them is to provide people with hands-on startup experience where they can learn, experiment and gain experience.

Given marketing is still plays a secondary role for many Canadian startups, it could take time to nurture lots of startup marketers but there’s no doubt we need more of them for the ecosystem to thrive.

Tagged Marketing, startup marketers, startups |

inbox

Listening to Your Startup Customers is Dangerous

This Week in Canadian Startups (April 7, 2013)

Are Marketing and Sales the Same Thing for Startups?

How is Your Startup Unique or Different?

Five Reasons Startups Are Afraid of Marketing

Where Are Canada’s Startup Marketers?