Marketing is one of the trickiest things to do when you are a startup. Marketing is an imprecise marriage of art and science and the rules of the marketing game are always changing with the winds of fashionability. What was marketing gold a year ago, may be just embarrassing and uncouth today. Understanding the complexities and limitations of your startups marketing strategy can seem like a daunting task but there are ways to simplify it.
Simplifying your marketing is all about learning to put yourself into the right frame of thought. For you, your product is your baby. You’ve worked on it, you’re proud of it, you love it, if you could, you would get a bumper sticker that says ‘my product is an honor student.’ That’s alright, you worked hard on your product and you deserve to be proud of it, you just need to remember that not everybody else feels that way. People will never have the same type of appreciation for your product that you do and it is impossible to make anybody like your product.
You cannot create demand. Learn this line. Repeat it to yourself until it becomes part of who you are. No matter how much of a marketing genius you are, no matter how vast your marketing budget, you cannot make demand out of thin air. Smart marketing, especially at the startup level is about finding the love connection between clients and things they want but do not know they want yet. They still want these things deep down in the core of their soul, but they don’t know it yet.
This is why the most crucial question when you start your business is, “Who wants what we are selling?” Your answer doesn’t have to come to you immediately, there are profitable little niches and market segments out there that get overlooked all the time, but you need to be able to find the answer to it. If you cannot find an answer after spending some time looking around, then there probably isn’t an audience for your product. If there isn’t an audience for your product, then no amount of marketing magic will help you.