People don’t take advice:
I have come across mostly people who have a “I know it all” attitude. They feel if you use the start-up tag on your chest, you get attention. Attention from the government, your peers and obviously from investors. Cheap thrills. I come across people who can’t even think or come up with an original idea: they call it inspiration but actually they bluntly copy from others. They just want success come what may. Money is the goal, not value. If you advise them to test their idea before starting a swanky office, they hate you. The result? 30% of the start-ups can’t pay salaries or even rents and they perish within 6-10 months. They burn fast. They will never spend their time and energy testing an idea before believing it. Romancing their own idea makes them fail fast. Gut feeling is what they mainly rely on.
They don’t know what they don’t know!
Digital is cheap, so I love it.
When they burn all their money on untested ideas, technology, apps, product building, office space, rent, etc. for 10 months, they are left with no money to market. ATL gulps down an enormous amount of money to launch so they are left with peanuts for digital marketing. I come across so many people from the start-ups who think and believe that digital is cheap and easy. This is the last nail in their coffins. They try their luck on learning digital online, again to save cost.
The online university kills you.
Imagine you are learning swimming online.
After 4 weeks, you are actually swimming either on the floor or on your bed!
Imagine what happens when you actually get hit by waves. Or the feeling of swimming underwater when you can’t see much. The fear, the excitement!
Watching a heart operation 1 lakh times won’t make you a heart surgeon. You will kill the patient because you are not aware of the entire anatomy.
Most startups first try this and avoid hiring skilled people. They die or become bankrupt.
Digital can give me a baby in 9 weeks
Most founders of startups are so silly that they boast about waiting for their sedan or their iPhone X, but they won’t give time to a designer to make a logo. They think it’s a no-brainer. No thought process goes here. As they feel copying from 20 other Google images makes a logo. So why it takes so much time? Sad.
They don’t respect creativity and quality output. They want a healthy baby in 1 week!
God damn! It takes 9 months and 10 days for Gods to make a baby!
Such idiots exist in large groups. I see them every day. I used to hate them, but now I pity them. They die before they start.
Incompetent people
An MBA and an engineering degree will not make your startup road easy. By the time you are out of college, you have forgotten half of it. I see people approach their work with half-baked knowledge. This is extremely dangerous.
Most of the time, they have their egos to take care of and that stops them from accepting the fact that there are more intelligent people who can do digital in a better way. Those skilled people have not learnt digital by practising it hands-on. They have learnt it swimming on the floor. This is the bloody truth!
They hire incompetent people because they themselves are not competent enough to even hire or select a competent digital marketing partner.
90% of them use a traditional lens to hire, drive, build and market digital.
They don’t understand the difference between these:
1. Copywriter and content writer
2. Graphic artist and UX designer
3. Persona building and TG
4. A/B testing and Gut feeling
5. New age blog writer Vs Old school blog writer
6. Minimalistic design Vs Force-fed design
Moral of the story:
Do not hire a nurse to do a surgery. Even with an experience of 30 years inside an operation theater won’t make him/her a doctor. That’s the truth. The faster you understand it, the better.
Remember that outdated knowledge can’t teach you about how to market to the millennials! Most people upgrade their phone, car and gadgets but still hold back when upgrading their knowledge. 90% of them are still proud of their 20 years old MBA or engineering degrees.
Even Philip Kotler had to rewrite his book (Marketing 3.0) to make it relevant and contextual as per today.
Contextual content:
Most of them don’t understand this at all. They end up selling the same content on every digital platform. That’s because they write their content without understanding the user persona. Content is simple yet complex. Actually it’s more of common sense from the users’ perspective. But common sense is so rare nowadays!
Content is generally used in a “spray & pray” format.
You are actually behaving like a trigger-happy person spraying your unplanned content all over and expecting someone will pick up his phone and call you to give you his business.
Nobody understands information architecture (IA) while making their website.
The website content is always inspired by another competitor’s website content. They never do it from the users’ perspective.
Hiring a skilled content team (or a person) that understands content journey that follows the buyers’ journey makes your business grow. The more contextual the content, the better the law of attraction works.
Result: Read my next blog: “How Content Made Me a Millionaire”
Copy cats die fast. Even when they do manage to survive, they are forced to charge less. Nobody pays much for a counterfeit. You know very well that you can’t demand a good price because the cheap perception of a brand pushes the price low. You burn your chances of success.
Don’t sell, educate
Nobody is interested in your product. They just don’t care.
They are only interested in their own concerns.
If you talk, educate and help them solve their concerns, they will give you any attention.
Or else your chances of getting any business get shot down.
How to win? Try this process.
Be found
1. Do create more relevant content based on the buyer’s journey.
2. Be original, always.
3. Do make videos. Lots of them. People now see more, read less.
4. Do understand inbound marketing. You will get attention.
5. Do understand buyer’s journey. You will get their money.
6. Don’t look at the buyers’ pockets. They will hate you.
7. Do understand that the old notions of TG/4P’s don’t work in digital. At all.
8. Do learn and build buyer persona.
9. Do hire competent people.
10. Don’t copy and paste content from others.
11. Do UX/UI. It’s more about science and less about design. Having a solid rationale always works.
12. Do invest in your website. Make it your salesman that can fetch you business.