What Marketing Aspects Should a Startup Focus On?

Marketing is essential for businesses, but it is imperative for the startups that are trying to find product-market fit. A startup could have an impressive product, but if the market doesn’t know about it then it has no meaning. Creating awareness through different marketing strategies is a good way for startups to get other people to know about their product and get feedback to find the product market fit quicker.

Everyone can start doing marketing but its important to know what aspects to focus on. In this article, I will try to enlighten you on what you should focus on.

Define Your Target Audience

Before you even do anything, you must find your target audience. If you don’t know who you should sell to then, you are wasting your precious time. You wouldn’t want to target single women to sell parenting book right?.

To find your target audience ask yourself “who would use this product or service?” “what problem am I solving?”. These questions will lead you to your target audience, and you will have a particular type of people whom you could market your product.

Identify Your Competitors

Now you know who to market, and it’s time for you to identify and research your competitors. You should know what makes your competitor unique and what makes people choose them. Don’t try to copycat your competitors but you can inspect their marketing activities to get an idea. While you are researching their products and marketing campaigns, try to see if you can spot something which you can do better.

Don’t be overly obsessed with following your competitors because this will harm your innovation. If you focus all your energy to track what your competitors are up to you will feel like you are trailing behind them and do everything they do to catch up with them. If you do this, you become a copycat and lose your innovativeness

Focus on Creating Brand Awareness

This is the most crucial aspect of marketing that you should focus on. You need to let people know that your brand exists. Best way to do that goes through inbound marketing. If you don’t have a blog yet, then I strongly recommend that you should start now.

Your blog should be around the topics which your target audience is interested. Try to write value-adding content, and this will help you to become an authority in your field. You can start by writing about the questions your target audience is asking. A simple way to find what questions are being asked is to go to Quora and follow the relevant topics and see what is being asked. Try to post your blog posts on relevant websites and groups.

There are things you can do offline as well. If you know your target audience well, you can locate in what kind of places they hang out. Go to these places and socialize, be friends with them and mention your business. Word of mouth is a powerful way of building market awareness.

This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by +415,678 people.

Subscribe to receive our top stories here.