I’ve been a marketing advisor to early-stage startups at UC Berkeley’s Skydeck incubator for a few months now, and I wanted to share some common mistakes that I’ve seen repeatedly that hurt these young startups’ marketing efforts — and sometimes even make it hard for me to help them. Recognize these pitfalls and apply the fixes below, and you’ll save yourself a lot of time and get traction faster!
Mistake 1: Featuring your technology first (and nothing else)
I get it: your tech makes you unique. It excites you, your investors, your fellow founders. And doesn’t it feel good to say “We’re the first AI-Enabled [thing that everybody uses]?”
But underlying technology is meaningless to customers. Consider your car: do you care about its engine displacement in cubic centimeters? Similarly, most technologies and their specs are irrelevant mumbo jumbo to prospects. What really matters is the value and benefits that technology brings to them. So what’s the fix?
Fix 1: Tout your product as faster/cheaper/more reliable/better for the user
Remember you’re not selling a technology; you are selling a product or service, and you need to emphasize its real-world benefits and practical advantages for users. Highlight how your product or service solves a problem better, saves time, reduces costs, or improves outcomes. Craft headlines and marketing materials that clearly communicate these benefits to your target audience. Technology may be a “proof point,” but that’s all it is. You must clearly show your superiority to competing solutions out there.
Mistake 2: Designing a website for your investors
Many startups design their website to impress investors rather than to attract and engage potential customers. (See above — if you are promoting your product as “AI-Enabled,” you are writing for investors, not for prospective customers.) This is unnecessary: investors are smart people who can see if you are clearly addressing your customer base and provide a unique value proposition. They don’t need to be buttered up on your website.
Fix 2: Build your website for your prospective customers
From the home page headline on down, your website content should talk to and resonate with your target customers. Clearly articulate your product or service offerings, address customer pain points, and provide solutions that demonstrate the value you offer. Demonstrating this customer focus and empathy is the best way to impress investors. You can use other pages to describe your team, your mission/motivation, your unique technology, and other investor-relevant information — but not the home page. That’s for your customer.
Mistake 3: Coding your own website
Many startup founders are smart, technical, independently-minded, and cheap. So they build their own website from scratch. This DIY approach is a mistake: it consumes valuable time and resources and often leaves you with a site that is janky-looking and poorly set up for search engine optimization and expansion.
Fix 3: Use a standard website builder with a template
To build your website, just use Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, or any common platform with attractive templates and easy drag-and-drop design tools. You’ll look more polished, can easily add common pages without coding, and you will help me (or any other consultant) fix your SEO in a matter of minutes. Save your energy for building your business, not reinventing the website wheel.
Mistake 4: Building web pages with no call to action (CTA)
I see many startup websites with no clear “call to action” (CTA). Say I’m interested in your product: How do I reach you? How do I learn more? In a quest to be stealth and hide the fact that you only have two co-founders at the company, many startup website don’t even have any contact information. This is a major missed opportunity to convert paid and organic traffic into new leads or sales.
Fix 4: Put a CTA on every single page
My motto is that every webpage should be a landing page. That is, because people may come to your site from any direction, and the majority of people will only read ONE PAGE of your website, every single page should have a clear call to action: contact us, request a demo, sign up for our newsletter — whatever! A prominent and concise CTA can encourage response and will give every interaction the potential to be advantageous to your business.
Mistake 5: Spending on marketing because it’s what big companies do
Startups often feel pressure to start spending on marketing because it makes them feel mature and “real.” But paid marketing can be very expensive, and it’s a waste of money if you don’t have a website that resonates with prospective customers and can quickly convert them into leads or sales. Before you start spending serious money on Google Ads or Facebook Ads, you need to take care of the basics!
Fix 5: Focus on free/low-cost marketing first—and always fix tracking before spending on digital
First, before investing anything in marketing, figure out your key messaging and value props. If you don’t know these, interview potential customers and do extensive competitive analysis to figure them out. This market research will give you insights into customer needs, preferences, and pain points, which will inform your marketing strategy and content. And write it down! (See my simple marketing plan template for an example.)
Once this is done, you can invest in low-cost tactics like a clear website, basic SEO, and making sales through cold outreach on LinkedIn, which will help you further refine your messaging and conversion experience. You might even do some cheap, simple remarketing to stay in front of prospects.
Finally, before you embark on any serious digital marketing, make sure that ALL your conversion experiences (contact us forms, lead forms, white paper downloads, sales inquiries, or whatever) are trackable and quantifiable, will clear source tracking. Fixing this basic website “plumbing” enables you to clearly quantify and value results, whether they be contacts, leads, or sales. Marketing that can’t be tracked is marketing that is wasted, because you won’t know whether what you did worked, or whether you should do it again. (Here’s more advice on B2B marketing in particular.)
Wrapping up
Avoid the mistakes above and you’ll save time, save money, and make it easier for marketers to help you now and in the future. Plus you’ll get “traction” (indications of interest, leads, and actual sales) faster.
Need help? Contact me. And if you’re in Skydeck, or I just like your business, I’m happy to provide free advice.