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Startups Fail Because Of Bad Marketing, Not Bad Ideas

We often read statistics like 50 percent of companies fail within five years, and 90 percent within ten. If you’re a budding entrepreneur, it’s enough to take the wind out of your sails. But the question is, what is causing so many startups to go out of business? Is it all because founders are naive about what the market wants? Or it is just that they’re not very good at marketing?

In this article, we’re going to argue it’s the latter. Marketing is, in many ways, more challenging to get right than a product. Building a product is mostly a technical exercise: so long as you have the right people with the right skills, you can build just about anything you want. History is littered with firms creating incredible products, way ahead of their time, and delivering them to market in just a couple of years. The problem is that even though those products were impressive, companies didn’t always get their marketing right, and that led to flops.

The failure of marketing isn’t just a problem at small businesses. Even the largest companies in the world, like Google, have seen more than their fair share of failures. Google Glass, for instance, was supposed to replace the smartphone. But because Google didn’t understand how to market the product, it was shelved just a few months after launch.

Marketing Requires Panache

Marketing isn’t a purely technical and predictable skill. In fact, it’s barely technical at all, even with the complexity of today’s digital marketing. What marketing is, at root, is a way of stepping into a customer’s shoes and explaining the problem that you can solve in a language they understand, both cognitive and emotionally. To pull off a world-beating marketing campaign, you need to have some pretty substantial emotional intelligence.

Today the options for marketing campaigns are stupendous. You can buy a retractable banner design, upload photos of your services on Instagram, or send out flyers in the mail. Knowing which of these methods is likely to appeal to your target audience is part and parcel of being a successful founder.

Marketing Is The Emotional Equivalent Of Being An Agony Aunt

Founders, though, need to concentrate on the emotional appeal of what they’re doing. Emotionality is something that all of the most successful startup entrepreneurs understand. These people know the pain points of their customers and then position themselves as the emotional equivalent of an agony aunt. Apple, for instance, knows the pain you experience when you try to do editing on a Windows PC, and it’s waiting in the wings with its delightfully fast Mac products. It’s about listening to your customer’s needs and then executing a marketing campaign that speaks to them in a way that makes your customers feel as if you “just get them.”

Granted, this isn’t an easy task, but it is something that you can do. It doesn’t require a large team of in-house marketing gurus or a giant budget: just an idea that works. It’s something which depends, fundamentally, on your creativity – and, fortunately, not much else. How will you improve your marketing?

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