When early stage companies are finding their footing and trying to attract customers, they tend to get ambushed by shiny object syndrome (SOS), particularly when it involves marketing. Well-established companies can also fall victim to SOS. But startups are especially vulnerable to jumping from one buzzy tactic to another.
“Shiny object syndrome is the phenomenon of being distracted by new and exciting opportunities. For entrepreneurs, this can mean new business ideas, or products or services that aren’t part of their current business plan,” says Forbes.
If you fall into the SOS trap, one month you might launch an all-out blogging blitz that’s supposed to cause customers to flock to your company. Two weeks later, you believe the marketing magic might come from video content. In the next quarter, you might turn to media and pay-per-click to generate inbound sales leads. This is a recipe for chaos.
“There are constantly going to be new tactics, new methods, and new technologies that will distract you from the strategy that drives results now,” says content marketing and SEO agency Grow & Convert says. “You don’t need to be the first one to try them out or pivot your whole strategy around them.”
Companies suffering from SOS have no chance to effectively evaluate, let alone gain expertise in, the marketing moves they’re executing. Plus, there’s no system in place to capture and analyze long-term data about what works and what doesn’t.
The remedy for SOS is creating a marketing system based on answering key questions and collecting data to zero in on the best marketing moves.
Avoiding Shiny Object Syndrome by Knowing Your Buyers
Successful marketing starts with knowing who your customers are, what problems they face, and what your company can do to make their pain go away. This generally means coming up with buyer personas. To help develop these personas, ask the following questions.
What Does Your Company Do?
You must succinctly define why your business exists.
“This can include highlighting the problems you seek to address, or how you can offer products or services that improve upon what’s already on the market,” according to InnovatorsLINK, a platform for entrepreneurs. “Your unique value proposition helps differentiate your company from competitors, identifying qualities such as faster speed, better convenience, or cheaper price.”
Which Products or Services Create Unique Value?
What makes your offerings stand out? Why would someone buy your products or services instead of ones from your competitors? For instance, does your productivity software integrate with more software programs than your competitors’ productivity software does?
Why Do You Do it?
It might not seem apparent at first, but the motivation to create your offering will likely match the needs of your ideal customers.
“Is your stated purpose relevant to a set of customers or users with the potential to buy your products or services? Is it clear whose lives or businesses you are improving in some way, large or small?” says professional services firm PwC.
Who Do You Do it For?
The wrong answer here is “anyone who will buy it.” Try to please everyone, and you’ll please no one. Get specific on the industry, demographics, and motivations of the customers who want what you’re offering.
The “anyone who will buy it” mindset focuses on quantity over quality. This can tarnish your brand and lead to customer dissatisfaction. Being as targeted as possible helps bring in the right customers, and can improve brand reputation and customer satisfaction.
Why Are Your Offerings Good?
It’s important to remember the “benefits, not features” concept here. Come up with ways your company can improve a customer’s work or life. For example, a retailer doesn’t care about the inner workings of your point-of-sale software, but they do want to know how it’ll simplify sales. marketing to the wrong audience.
What Can You Prove to Your Customers?
How can your customer see you’ve made good on your promise? You want to be solving problems and make a positive difference for your customers. But you also want to depend on data, testimonials, and online reviews to demonstrate that your offering does what you claim it does.
“Online reviews have substantial value for businesses,” according to Harvard Business Review. The publication says 98% of customers read reviews before they shop, “making it one of the most important sources of information about products and services … .”
Drilling deep to nail down your brand promise helps you truly know your customers. You’ll also learn important things about your company that might’ve been overlooked in the rush to create your product or service. Aligning people or companies that are buying what you’re selling will prevent wasting time and money on marketing to the wrong audience.
How to Promote Your Business
Once you’ve identified the customer targets, it’s time to assemble the right assets to reach and engage them — and help dodge SOS. There’s no one-size-fits-all answer for which B2B marketing content works best. But the most universal are case studies, white papers, testimonials, reviews, videos, blog posts, and social media content.
But not just any content will work. Inconsistencies in tone and messaging, or even color schemes that aren’t uniform across all your materials, will harm your image. Hiring an outside consultant to conduct a brand audit of your logos, taglines, digital properties, and overall tone can reduce or eliminate inconsistencies. Once the audit is finished, come up with a plan to unify your company’s image.
Keep in mind that not everything will be perfect at the outset (and won’t ever be perfect, actually). Promotion of your business involves trial and error. But creating a consistent plan coupled with a system to measure results will enable you to execute the plan, monitor performance, and make adjustments along the way.
The Bottom Line
For startup founders under pressure to deliver results, it’s understandable — but not excusable — that SOS becomes the default marketing method. But the results speak for themselves. Building a practical strategy based on knowing your customers and delivering the messages they want to see and hear gives your startup a great chance to accelerate growth in an intentional, successful, scalable way.