What are top marketing mistakes startups do?

Hello guys,

Hope you had a great weekends and productive week. Did you think about the reason, why 99,7% of all startups are not successful? Our team examined all our works and found out that there are no difference among startups and entrepreneurship. When you are launching a startup you need apply to it as to your business. Even on the market you will find a lot of ads, noises, and variety of goods. Google Play and/or App Store is the same market. You need to think about the next points:

• how to be different;

• how to attract customers;

• how to receive profit.

Unfortunately, a lot of great apps and games because of lack of experience in marketing can’t reach even 10k of downloads. Here are the main points that startups make and a couple of tips how to evade this:

“Storm-like” marketing

You would like to have a powerful ad and noise for your “apples” so you are putting all your savings into one storm-like campaign. As a conclusion, you can spend a lot of efforts on people who hate “apples”. Without proper strategy and targeting on “apple lovers” you won’t have a success.

Also there are a lot of different ad services. Check all available and find the cheapest. Check how this channel works, then take another, after the third one. In this case, you can save a lot of cash.

Don’t keeping an eye on competitors

When you are launching a new app/product you are nearly sure you don’t have competitors. There are no such apps so you are staying in the bulb. Remember, you always have competitors. Even if 30% of all your features exist in another - they are you competitors. Moreover, if your competitor has a lot of users and you don’t, everything s/he needs to do is just add your “killer-feature” into own app and that’s it, you are done.

So you need examine all your possible competitors before your launch and have a strategy how to fight with them (fight for users).

Lack of Analytics

If you don’t have Google Analytics, Mixpanel, or any other integrated tool. You can forget about any success. You need to see how your customers behave, what they press, what they think, and feel. Only knowing these data you would be able to keep them with you. The other point, where is the sense in spending money on advertisement and promotion if you can’t calculate the ROI.

Wrong place

If you are selling apples there is no sense to have ads in barber shops. Same with apps, if you have a kids-orientated app, there is no sense to publish ads to Linkedin. You need to research where is your targeting audience and use hit that spot.

Lack of research

I know the app owner who created a copy of App-X that already had version 3.4. What is more such app was launched in the country that are far from competitors. Looks promisingly? - It could be...

There was no pre-launch research and there was no market heating. The app design and functionality was based on app owner taste and taste of his friends. The main point is that these people would never use this app but they were sure that people will. So when the app was launched people wasn’t interested in this app even with ads all around the cities.

Don’t think about users

Even if the app have great quality, nice ads, and ultimate design you still can lose all your users too quickly. You need to think how to made users launch an app every day. It can be anything:

• gamification (collect coins and receive gifts);

• free trial period;

• gifts for attracting other users;

• launching the app 5/10/20/30 consecutive days;

etc.

Remember, your app should be addictive. Yes, addictive - like drugs. Users should think about it 20 hours a day. Why not 24? - Let them sleep a little bit.

Lack of strict marketing budget

As well as your general strategy plan, you need to work on detailed marketing plan. You need to know what and when should be launched. For example, the Christmas holidays are coming. You should have a strict plan and budget before even December 1. If you are going to have a Christmas website, the SEO should work till that time. If you are going to provide users with virtual gifts, your testing app should be ready till December 20. If you are going to have email delivery, your texts, pictures, discount codes, e-mail base should be ready till December 20. If you will be late with anything, you can lose everything (or a lot).

Still remember the words of Joseph Conrad: “Only the one who do nothing never make mistakes.”

Stay tuned and happy holidays.