3 Marketing Mistakes You MUST Avoid - Marketing Tips and Tricks for Startups

Today I'm going to share three marketing mistakes that you must avoid. One of the first startups that I ever created and raised over $10 million for was Kissmetrics. And guess what? It didn't do well financially, especially in the early stages. We burned over $4 million before we even saw our first dollar in revenue.

Marketing Mistake #1: Don't spend too much time building out your product without marketing it. If you're going to create a product or a service, go out there and test the market. There's nothing wrong with spending a few hundred dollars or a few thousand dollars or even just picking up the phone and talking to people about your idea. Don't go out there and spend a ton of time and energy building something without marketing it first to see if there's interest.

Marketing Mistake #2: Don't market to everyone. I don't care if you think everyone in the world would love your product, that's not the case. Pick one audience. Pick the audience that you want to market too and focus on that market alone. Pick a niche, go after it, market only to them, and later on, you can expand and market to more people, but you need to first dominate one niche.

Marketing Mistake #3: Spending too much time building a brand and not focusing on acquiring customers. If you're a new startup or a new company why would you focus on building a brand when you don't yet have any customers? Go out there and acquire the customers. Test Facebook ads, test Google Adwords, test SEO, test Content Marketing, and podcast advertising. Do it all, it's like spaghetti, throw it on the wall, see what sticks and if there's a good response, keep doing more of it. That's the whole purpose of marketing.

If you don't have any customers, acquire the customers first, once you do, you'll be able to build your brand over time. What most people don't tell you about branding is, when you acquire more and more customers, and people use your product or service, you're building a brand.

Don't think about a brand as just a logo. A logo is not brand building, and the best brand building is word of mouth from happy customers. If people love what you're doing, they're much more likely to keep telling other people about your product or service, and that's what builds a brand.

Amazon didn't do a ton of TV advertising back in the day. Yet they're a multi-billion dollar company. Same with Google. How did they build this huge brand? Word of mouth. And guess what, no one's talking about Yahoo these days.

You build your brand by acquiring users, getting them to use your product or service and providing a fantastic experience. The key is to knock their socks their off. If you knock their socks off and delight them, you'll create a fantastic brand over time.