Partner Article

Startups: Overcome your communications challenges

Bdaily has entrepreneurship in the spotlight in our latest focus week. Dominic Tarn, Founding Partner & CEO of DTCW Communications: A digital media agency for high-growth startups, gives his advice on overcoming communications obstacles.

Launching a new product or service business is never easy. As an entrepreneur you are in a crowded and competitive environment; a community which consists of 400 million fellow entrepreneurs creating and launching 69 million new companies across 54 countries (source: Google Entrepreneurs).

Once you have all the key ingredients in place for your launch - a product or service, team, an idea what to charge, and a route to market - you are now faced with the challenge of winning customers.

No matter how passionate you are, how great you think your startup is, the market could, and most likely will, respond with a resounding, “So what? Why should I care?”

Naturally, you don’t want that to happen. You could end up with a struggling marketing campaign if you don’t put the right pieces of your communications strategy in place from the start.

You need to focus on your message strategy the same way you have focused on your product and team.

Get Your Story Straight.

Chances are you’ve had an interesting journey. There’s a reason you are an entrepreneur, some twist of fate, some motivation driving you. This is a story you need to tell, because at the end of the day people do business with people. Which means they want to hear about you.

What Problem Are You Solving?

Right now, answer that question: what problem am I solving with my new product or service? If you can answer that question in a sentence then you’ve got something. Or rather, you might have something. Defining your message strategy clarifies exactly what you have and why your target customers need it.

A/B Test

You won’t know how your audience will react to your message until you test it on them. It is therefore better to test on small samples in order to get it right on a larger scale. The best way to ensure this is to have multiple versions of your email marketing campaigns, web copy, and elevator pitch. Put together different versions, based around one core strategy, and test it until you have something you are confident resonates well with your target customers.

Clarify. Concisely.

Why is Ernest Hemingway one of the world’s greatest authors? Short sentences. That’s not the only reason, of course. One of the ways Hemingway made literature more accessible is he got to the heart of the matter. Quickly. With short sentences. In the era of text messages and Twitter, our attention spans are shorter than ever. You may be able to talk about all the benefits of your product for hours on end, but guess what: your intended audience doesn’t care, and their attention…

…has already wandered.

Be concise.

Your message will have greater impact.

Know Your Audience

More importantly: be specific with your audience. A product that could do everything for everyone ends up selling to no one. B2B web startups need to drill down on a specific niche sector, understand the relevant pain points, and know exactly how you are making your customers’ lives easier. Your language has to reflect their needs and aspirations.

The bottom line is that without a clear message strategy you risk spending huge amounts of time and money on communications and marketing that won’t be seen, read or understood by the people you want to engage with. Make sure you know yourself, your product, your audience, and their pain points, then focus on crafting content which delivers your solution’s message concisely, with impact.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Dominic Tarn .