February 18, 2022
The Startup Marketing Agency You Need
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If you are launching a new business, the odds are against you. More than two-thirds of startups fail to deliver any return to their owners – or investors. The good news is that working with a startup marketing agency can tilt the odds in your favor. Continue reading to learn how JM&Co. architects the success of your startup or just book a free consultation with Josh Meah for a personalized strategy session.
Marketing a startup can be completely different from marketing an established business. You may have a great idea, but turning that idea into a product and then sustaining that product is another story. As Thomas Edison once said, ‘the value of an idea lies in the using of it’.
Most startups are great ideas, yet most of them fail. And we are not talking about half-baked, ill-conceived products, but startups which were launched following modern concepts such as lean development and market testing.
2 Reasons Why Startups Fail
In his book Why Startups Fail, Harvard Professor Tom Eisenmann has identified two patterns that can doom startups. These are “false starts'' and “poor bedfellows”.
A False Start: A false start happens when entrepreneurs jump the gun and roll out the MVP (minimum viable product) without spending enough time researching customer needs. They start on the wrong foot and end up pushing products for which there is no market.
Bad Bedfellows: Bad bedfellows can include your employees, strategic partners, investors, competitors, regulators, and of course, your startup marketing agency. All of these stakeholders play a role in a startup’s success or failure.
A startup marketing agency is a marketing company that specializes in helping new businesses gain quick market traction and achieve optimal growth. The work of a startup marketing agency can start months or years before the product launch. It can involve market research, product development, marketing strategy, public relations, and paid and organic media campaigns.
Startups are oftentimes limited on resources, including time, money and talent. They may also not have the luxury of past experience or historical data that they can use to plan and optimize their future campaigns. In other words, startups have little margin for error – they can make critical mistakes that can jeopardize their survival. That’s why working with a startup marketing agency becomes crucial.
With experience in launching and growing startups in multiple industries, JoshMeah&Co. can help you at every step, from idea validation and testing to market research, from MVP development to user testing, and from launching the product via multiple channels to growing the sales through optimized campaigns.
No amount of marketing can save a product that people don't need. That is the first thing a startup marketing agency should understand. At JoshMeah&Co.mpany, we offer 360-degree startup consulting to help you align your people, product, and processes with customer expectations and market realities. We plan, run and measure integrated marketing campaigns while providing valuable inputs to help you address critical areas in your value delivery chain.
Startup marketing is a four-stage process comprising strategic market analysis, marketing-mix planning, implementation, and evaluation and control.
The overarching goal of any business, including yours, is to meet customer needs profitably. We therefore start by defining which particular needs your product or service can satisfy, and who has those needs.
For example, an ecommerce startup that sells apparel is satisfying clothing needs. But people can have different clothing needs based on their gender, age, income, geographical location, lifestyle, and personality. The startup agency helps define the subsegments or niches that exist in your wider target audience, so you may align your offers and messaging with the exact needs of your customers.
Here are some of the things we do at this stage:
Market Selection: Which particular market segments you can target more profitably.
Market Positioning: Creating and communicating a message that clearly distinguishes your brand from competitors.
Keyword Selection: Which keywords best relate with your value propositions and customer intent.
Goal Selection: What are your goals in terms of customer acquisition and sales?
Account-Based Marketing: In-depth customer need analysis for businesses that deal with high-value clients and need to customize their products or services for each client.
We then work out the right combination of product, price, place, and promotion that fulfills the strategic goals.
Product: Product is the first marketing-mix element. To be acceptable to customers, the product must fulfill their needs in a better way than the competing products.
Price: The price is determined by measuring the performance level or quality of a product and estimating how much the market is willing to pay for that quality.
Place: Your startup marketing agency works with you to select the best channels for distribution. For some businesses, it may be advisable to work with wholesalers and distributors, while others may be able to skip channel costs by marketing directly to consumers, via the internet. JoshMeah&Co. specializes in D2C marketing, so you can cut out intermediaries.
Promotion: The fourth P of the marketing-mix consists of a range of promotional tactics including word-of-mouth publicity, paid advertising, influencer marketing, sales promotion, and public relations.
Once the product, price, and place have been finalized through research, we focus on the fourth P – Promotion. As a full-service digital marketing agency, we prepare an omnichannel plan to communicate your product, service, or offer to the target audience. Some of the activities that we perform in this phase include:
Channel Selection: Select the best marketing channels considering your audience, budgets, and goals.
Creative Strategy: How the brand messaging will be made more targeted and effective.
Content Strategy: Decide the types, topics, and frequency of content that will be needed.
Paid Promotions: Decide the timings, channels, and goals of paid campaigns.
Brand Alignment: Align your brand perception with the channels you select. They should have the same image as your product.
Customer Alignment: The channels you select should have the same audience as your product.
Budget Alignment: Weigh the potential benefits of using a channel against its cost. You cannot use a channel if its cost is beyond your budget, no matter how beneficial it may be.
Finally, we are ready to go live. We roll out the startup marketing plan according to the strategy and make sure your product’s pre-launch and launch phases proceed as envisioned. After the launch we move into the growth phase and implement some of the following tactics to increase adoption and sales.
Marketing costs money. When it does not work, you lose both money and opportunity. That’s why we track the results of each campaign in real time and keep optimizing the budget allocation, targeting, messaging, and other elements to ensure you get the highest return on your investment.
Decide onb the KPIs and Metrics: The KPIs that you will use to measure the performance of your startup marketing campaigns. Some of the KPIs we track include:
Before we can track these and other KPIs, however, we need to set up Google Analytics and conversion tracking on your website. Social media networks and email management software provide their own insights that we also track and include in the report that we present to you.
Startups need careful nurturing in their initial stages. Working with JoshMeah&Co. makes sure you take the right start and set up your new business for continuous growth. We build growth into the core of your product, in a way that users are compelled to share their experience and generate word-of-mouth publicity.
Contact us today to schedule a free strategy session with Josh, during which he will listen to your ideas and explain to you how our startup marketing agency can help increase the chances of your success.
The art is building the right growth campaign. The science is in the results.
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