The Biggest Problem With Startups & How You Can Fix It: A Copywriter’s Perspective
In today’s world, startups have become an increasing reality that tends to change the way companies are funded, developed, and integrated, both in the business & customer world. It’s not just about survival of the fittest in the startup world, but also about how founders strategize, plan, and implement each step.
Let’s start with a few of the biggest problems.
#1 Fierce competition. The business world is not for the faint of heart. Startups are not battling just the corporate businesses, but also other startups in the same industry. And if your brand resides exclusively online, the competition is even bigger. This means that you’ll need to implement a very efficient or aggressive strategy that can gain you recognition or at least enough visibility in the customer world.
#2 High expectations vs. inefficient management. All startups start with a strong belief that their product or service will make a difference. And setting high expectations for your business isn’t bad at all unless the decisions you make along the way are not supporting your development in a realistic way. In this regard, setting lower expectations and implementing action steps that will generate results above your expectations is the way to go.
#3 The right people can make all the difference. Hiring the right professionals into the right positions ensures that each part of your business rests in the hands of people who know exactly what they’re doing and where they’re going. Moreover, you’ll need on your team people who match your values, company culture, and way of working.
How can a creative team solve some of these challenges?
Well, that’s quite easy to say, just not as easy to do: with the best way to tell your brand’s story. A creative team can give the right direction to your business, once you’ve set up the operational part, have a strong strategy & Product Value Proposition in place, and the budgets to start communicating to future customers. In my experience with startups up to this point, I’ve identified 2 challenges:
#1 Having an insufficient budget to support campaigns that can gain awareness or engagement. And most then often, this happens because the founders have invested the biggest part of their budget in setting up and starting the business, but didn’t take into consideration enough that the right campaign can put you on the map in the consumers’ world. Especially in today’s business environment, where you either need to communicate aggressively or are very different from your competition.
#2 Thinking that your product or service is good enough to sell on its own, without many advertising efforts. But the thing is, when you have such a good product in place, it’s more important than ever to make sure that it reaches the right audience through sustained communication efforts. In my experience as a creative, I’ve seen a lot of amazing services or products fade away in the marketing world because they weren’t backed up by a strong or effective marketing strategy. Having a talented team of creatives on your payroll will ensure that what your startup offers will be “translated” into a creative, insightful, and appealing story for the world. The right creative campaign can pinpoint into place your image as a brand right from the start, especially since we know that not many founders have the luxury of just trying out different approaches to find the right one.
So here’s some advice I would give to any startup founder, as a copywriter: dare to communicate your business in a creative way that your competition hasn’t thought of (yet). Don’t just go for the classical advertising approaches, go with the wild cards - the unconventional tactics, mediums, and ideas. Choose unique angles to present yourself and what you do. Don’t be afraid to engage your audience in your storytelling, as in today’s world, storytelling is everything. People will not buy what you sell if your story doesn’t inspire, move or provoke them to think things differently.
But with the right story, with the right ideas & efforts, your brand storytelling will go around the world wide web in a heartbeat, and not just because you’ve paid the airspace for it, but because people will share it as something they identify with.
By Ioana Hurjui