Starting a new business seems to be a venture full of opportunities. But you know what, a startup comes with a fair share of challenges as well. Especially the marketing challenges.
The most important thing for a startup is establishing its market presence. And that’s what branding and marketing do. To build a strong presence, they need to use good marketing strategies.
But some hurdles come in the way.
Most startups have limited budgets, and they have to tackle the challenges within the limited resources.
In this guide, we will explore four common marketing challenges that a startup can probably face. We will provide actionable strategies that can help you in overcoming these challenges.
1. Limited Budget
Startups often operate on a limited budget in the initial days. Some of them do not have much to invest in big marketing campaigns. But marketing is very much necessary, and the budget should not be a hurdle in its way.
A limited marketing budget can harm startups in many ways:
- It restricts their reach to a wider audience
- A low budget can slow the process of scaling up the business
- Beating the competition will become tougher
- Budget can restrict the access tools that are essential for marketing
But there is no need to worry if your startup is on a limited marketing budget. Having the right strategy can help you overcome this hurdle.
Strategies for Overcoming Budget Issues
As they say, there is a solution where there is a problem.
By following the strategies mentioned below, startups can overcome budget issues.
Start marketing your business from free social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Create business pages on these platforms. Join relevant groups as a business page.
Make highly appealing social media posts regularly and share them in groups with a high number of members.
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Tip: Repurpose trending blog posts into infographics and visuals and share them from your social media pages. |
Before running a paid ad campaign, do a little research on your target audience. Run paid campaigns only on the platforms that have a maximum number of your intended audience.
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Tip: When running an ad campaign, keep the budget to a minimum threshold and the maximum number of days. This will bring regular engagement to your content. |
2. Target Audience Identification
Defining the right target audience is the foremost challenge that startups face. It is common sense that if a startup is not clear about its target audience, how can it manage marketing campaigns?
Common difficulties that startups can face in defining their target market include:
- Lack of market data
- Broad audience focus
- Unclear customer pain points
- Limited resources for research
- Changing market dynamics
- Competitive uncertainty
Strategies for Identifying the Target Audience
To identify the right target audience, startups should first focus on the pain points of the people. Find out how the service/product they are offering can help users.
After getting a clear idea of the user, develop detailed personas based on demographics like age, gender, income, and location. This will make it clearer to identify the ideal audience. Some of such data can be collected from Google Trends just by entering the main keyword. It will show demographic data that will be useful to find the target audience.
After developing the persons, do further research on them. Crawl their social media profile and look at whom they are following, what their interests are, and what other products they like.
Using these metrics, run a test campaign and follow the results. If the results are quite good, it means you are getting more engagement, so stick with it.
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Tip: For B2B, focus on industry type, company size, decision-makers, and their pain points. For B2C, concentrate on consumer needs, lifestyles, and purchasing behaviors. |
Or do more in-depth research by following the strategies below.
- Analyze Competitors’ Audiences
- Utilize Social Media Insights
- Engage in Customer Feedback
- Look at Industry Trends
- Focus on Niche Markets First
3. Brand Awareness
Brand awareness is another common challenge faced by most startups. If a new business fails to establish brand trust among the target audience, it will probably fail.
So, building brand trust is also of utmost importance.
While building brand trust, some common challenges that startups often face include:
- Inconsistent approach
- Rushing the process
- Only focusing on current trends
- Sticking with the same strategy
Strategies for Developing a Strong Brand Identity
When focusing on building a strong brand identity first introduces patience in the whole team.
Set clear goals, develop a catchy logo, and create USPs.
This will be the foundation of making a startup a brand.
After setting the goals, create a unique value proposition. Highlight how the service or product of startups differentiates from competitors and uniquely helps customers.
Build a brand story around these highlights and promote it on social media.
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Tip: Engage with your audience maximum, reply to their questions, and ask them for feedback in messages. This will boost the trust among them. |
Another good approach to brand awareness is evolving the strategy from time to time.
Focusing on the current marketing trends can be beneficial. But startups should also focus on building long-term essence.
4. Content Marketing
Content marketing challenges are a big hurdle to the success of a startup.
As per statistics by Forbes, 90% of marketing now involves content. Plus, 74% of the companies get more leads through content marketing.
Below, we have highlighted some common content marketing challenges that a startup has to face.
- Not having a content calendar and plan
- Creating quality content consistently
- Establishing brand story and maintaining brand voice
- Competing with established brands from day one
Strategies to Counter Content Marketing Challenges
Startups need smart and cost-effective solutions to counter the content marketing challenges. Having a content plan or content calendar is something most of the startups miss or ignore. You need an extra person for content planning and scheduling but it can be done smartly using online services like Buffer, HootSuite etc. Such services help in scheduling and publishing content smartly.
Content creation and bringing quality is a big challenge for startups with limited budgets. Copywriters and content creators charge hefty sums which are often unbearable. For content generation we now have a plethora of online AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini for textual content generation. We can use DALL E, Ideogram or CoPilot for image generation etc.
For content optimization and to maintain brand voice and tone, AI-based paraphrasing tools like Paraphrasing.io can be used to make content more creative, readable and engaging. Such a tool improves the overall quality and tone of the content. You can set the tone as per your target audience to improve engagement.
Competing with established brands from day one is another mistake startups can make. This can bring down their efforts to drive more traffic to their sites/blogs.
A better strategy is to move step by step. Start with low competition and move towards high as time evolves.
Bottom Line
In the above guide, we have highlighted four common marketing challenges that a startup can face. Plus, we have provided strategies to overcome these challenges. We hope that after reading this guide as a startup owner you can eliminate these challenges from your marketing.
