Marketing in Startups
Welcome to the Marketing in Startups session.
As an entrepreneur, you will have to wear too many hats during your journey. And marketing is definitely one of the most important one as it will be a crucial element for your business to define what you are doing, create a perception towards your company and attract new users and clients. So in this course, we will take a look at marketing in general, talk about the brand story, setting the marketing strategy and the marketing funnel, defining the KPIs to track them and discuss about growth hacking tactics. Let’s start!
What is Marketing?
According to American Marketing Association, marketing is the activity, set of institutions and processes for creating, communicating,delivering and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners and society at large.
As a simple explanation, marketing is the challenge to take a small part in customers/user’s heavily clustered mind about your brand. And it is not an easy challenge as even you are watching this video, your mind is highly occupied with many brands already.
Let’s take a look at some assumptions in startups towards marketing and let me play the role of Devil’s Advocate and leave you with some questions.
“Wow, I built a product” Is it really solving a problem?
“I need to show it to my buddies and friends” Will these people be really objective?
“Wait a sec. I need to start some marketing as well. I have a ready product.” Will you start marketing for the sake that you have a product?
“In fact the product will market itself but a little marketing push will not kill anyone” What is the basis to say that everyone will use your product and it will sky-rocket?
I compare this approach to Kevin Costner’s famous movie dating back to 1989 – Field of Dreams. There is no such approach in marketing as ‘If you build it, they will come’. Sad but true. The reality is always different than imagined.
No worries. By the end of this curriculum, you will have a common sense approach towards marketing. In the next session, we will discuss about the brand story.