At the early stage, any startup faces plenty of different issues. Today we wanna focus on them and discuss how you can avoid being trapped and stagnated just because you are not a marketing professional and you haven’t run hundreds of campaigns in your life.

Sometimes it might feel that you don’t know where to start from, and you keep on brainstorming and looking for perfection, however, this decision should be made easily. Just relax, take your time, and think of what you want your brand to look like? How do you see its future? We recommend making some notes, drawing a sketch and a scheme of what your brand image will consist of, it will help you see the whole picture in overall, let you visualise and allocate your brand’s priorities on the market.

When it comes to the beginning, it is very important to layout a foundation for further progression as a brand, and not just gain customers and attract leads, which is one of the TOP mistakes most people make. You have to be there, associated with your industry and the signals you are transmitting to the audience.

Therefore, before even starting, you should have a clear portrait of your audience, including their tastes and routines. Most of the startups fail because they underestimate its importance, they haven’t conducted a full marketing analysis and do not have a clearly written business plan.

Here we recommend you trying a “Back to uni” technique. Imagine yourself being a social researcher, who needs to write a thesis on the particular social group lifestyles and choices, and then see how well your brand fits it? Where do they need your solution? What particular time of the day/week/month will they require your service/product? Knowing your target audience will help you sell it directly to them!

The other professional issue any passionate startupper is facing is the budget limit and it always drives their decisions. It’s a hard task to allocate it correctly, since you will need to consider advertisements, social media, PR and other marketing tools that are costly.

First things first, focus on the core and least consuming stuff and test them. The primary and most essential is to have a rocking user-friendly website, 75% of your sales will depend on it. Then you can start integrating into the media with your vibrant ideas, as well as expertise and developing your social media profiles, only after that you can pick up on advertisement.

Keep in mind that these days implementing direct sales is a tricky game. People are tired of receiving commercial offers and pitches, they need information that can benefit from. Most of your focus should be on providing tips, free consultations, real stories, making your potential customers believe that your ideas are worthy and that your solution can make their lives better.

In the next steps, as a startup founder, you may eventually realize that you don’t have enough time to do the marketing campaign on your own and require external resources that should fit to help you. Here is a whole bunch of things you will encounter as a premature startupper.

Finding the right specialist is a pain. First of all, experienced marketers are expensive. Most of them have a waiting list and prices are high, and also prefer working with big brands and big budgets. You can hire a freelancer, pay and get nothing at the end, as the quality cannot be guaranteed.

Secondly, most of them don’t offer complex solutions and can only offer you to do a particular task. You will spend months looking for a graphic designer, accounts manager, copywriter, editor, translator, PR & specialist and at the end spend a year trying to combine people from different backgrounds. As a result, you might lose more than you gain.

Here is a piece of advice we can give you: when you finally decide to outsource for a freelancer or an agency, you should definitely think towards hiring people like you are.

By this, we mean those who know your particular market, those who have an experience of establishing a brand from scratch, those who’ve been through a lot and those who are passionate about new ideas and projects. These people should be dedicated to the startup environment and microculture. People who've worked with big corporations and global companies are excellent professionals, but they lack one important thing - they wouldn’t know how to give your brand a unique, recognisable name, and to pass this message to the audience.

To summarise the discussion on startup marketing, you have to always think about the growth opportunities for your business. As much as new fashion comes into play, people keep changing their values and forming their attitudes that impact decision-making. Remember, when a year ago most fashion brands decided to redesign their logos and do rebranding? Once you are in the flow you are in, if not you are out. You have to always catch on trends on the market, adapt to them and test new methods. Chaining the direction is hard, but can bring you much more outcome that you expected. It will let you prolong the life course of your startup.