Start-Up Challenges for Marketers

Who are you competing against? If you’re a marketer, your competition isn’t just other companies, it’s everything going on in the lives of your customers. As marketing author Jay Baer says: You’re not competing for attention only against other similar products. You’re competing against your customers’ friends and family and viral videos and cute puppies. To win attention these days you must ask a different question: “How can we help?” 

Baer addresses this question in Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is About Help Not Hype. He gives sound advice: The concept of “Youtility” means helping people solve problems. As he says: The difference between helping and selling is just two letters, and if you’re wondering how to make your products seem more exciting online, you’re asking the wrong question. 

Think About Problems Before Products 

We cannot compete for attention – but we can win by helping people achieve what they want to achieve. This process doesn’t begin with marketing communications – it starts by really understanding our customers’ problems, and creating the right products and services to fit the audience we are targeting.

The process I’ll talk about here is more natural if your customer’s need is somewhat complex, rather than a simple need that can be solved with a simple impulse purchase.

For example, if the customer’s decision cycle is quite long, and they need a lot of information to make a decision, you have an opportunity to analyze and help with their decision process, and to reduce the time and effort required. 

Start With Start-Up Thinking 

This may seem counterintuitive if you work for a corporation, but start-up thinking is relevant to more than just start-ups. Here’s a reason to care: corporations that cannot get close to customers and rapidly develop must-have products, will find their markets nibbled away by those that can.

Thinkers such as Steve Blank, Marc Andreessen, Eric Ries, and Sean Ellis have contributed significant thinking to how companies can achieve a better fit with the market. I’ve paraphrased the basic process below:

Step 1: Identify and Help With a Must-Solve Problem

That means identifying with customers a problem that they really want solved, and you develop a compelling way to solve it.

Step 2: Work to Become a Must-Have

To paraphrase Sean Ellis, if you run a customer development process and 40 percent of the people you talk with say they’d be very disappointed if you did not offer your product, then your product is a must-have.

Step 3: Scale to Market

Once you have a must-have product, you’re truly ready to go to market. 

The Challenge for Marketers 

If you are like most marketers, your role only really begins at step three. That’s a bit problematic, because in these times, the chances of success are low if your company doesn’t get the earlier steps right. On the other hand, if you’ve already verified during the above customer development process (steps one and two) that your product is a must-have, your marketing job in step three becomes much easier. It’s essentially half done.

Making your product or service a must-have in today’s economy is about getting close to the customer and asking them the big questions about what they most need help with, so that you can develop must-have products that really help.

The businesses that will really succeed in the future will be the ones that can rapidly learn about the changing needs of customers and create new products quickly.

It’s a process that will come more easily to some sectors than others, but if there is money to be made in your industry, chances are someone is planning to disrupt it. Increasingly, it’s an evolve-or-die decision. Enjoy the journey.

Image via Shutterstock.