Start-Up Marketing (Guest Post – two in a series)

My good friend Jeff Berman has agreed to contribute a series on marketing for startups to the Scratchpaper community. This is the second in the series  (table of contents here).  Stay tuned for more.

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How to Botch Marketing #1

My previous post was all about how Early Adopters are great, but the real market is with the Early Majority, who are about 10 times as numerous.

This is the first of 12 ways to botch your marketing with your most important audience.

Are You Ready For This?

#1: Go Before You’re Ready.

While the Early Adopters who first bought your product were willing to put up with some hiccups and glitches, people in the Early Majority won’t. They are looking for something that works. They’re impatient and unforgiving. Once you screw it up for them, they will not be back.

Good Advertising Makes Bad Products Fail Faster

It doesn’t have to be perfect, but if what you’re selling frustrates the people who buy it, marketing is the last thing you want.

So before you go out to sell to the people who will help you make your real money, make sure what you have to offer will perform for them. Remember they’re less technical technical than your initial buyers. They’re looking for a plug-and-play solution, and they don’t want to help you figure it out. So do that before you put yourself in front of them.

Jeff Berman is the founder and principal of Berman Creative, a creative agency focusing on brand strategy and marketing solutions for early-stage and redirected companies. You can reach Jeff at www.bermancreative.com. We’re grateful for his contribution. 

Comments, questions or reactions to this post? Leave a note below and I will respond to your questions.

If you enjoyed this post, you might enjoy: Ten Rules For Navigating in The Age of Outrage, That Vision Thing, Delusional Economics,  Loch Ness, Unicorns & The First-Mover Advantage, Does This Slide Deck Make Me Look Fat?,  The Long Road to Instant Success, Getting Off The Ground; Early Formation Economics, What I Look For In An Entrepreneur, The Overture, Do The Right Thing, Instagram’s Turn for a Face-Palm, Zynga’s Bad Kharma, Bank of America Still Sucks, Netflix: 3 Lessons From the Pricing Fiasco, Bank of America Still Sucks, Walking into a Buzzsaw (Amazon’s Brazenly Arrogant Retail Promotion), Something From Nothing – Bringing the Store to the Customer.

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