Being an entrepreneur means having an entire hat collection.

🎩 You’re the President, COO, and CEO
🧢 You manage the sales process and network like crazy to build your leads
👒 You fulfill orders and manage marketing and communications
🪖You’re the customer service agent and complaint department

That’s why it’s so important to understand what missteps you may taking, and how you can leverage your strengths and skills to build success while staying focused on what you do best.

Here are three marketing and communications mistakes made by well-intentioned entrepreneurs and founders who are wearing an ill-fitting marcomms hat.

1. Being all things to all people.

When you’re launching a product or a business, you want to be successful. Duh. So you try to convince prospects that your solution is the one they should invest in.

But here’s the thing – your product or service isn’t for everyone – and sales shouldn’t be about convincing. It should be about offering a solution to a pain point.

If you get clear – really clear – on what you’re offering, the benefits of that offering, how it can solve a particular source of pain for a particular audience, you’re going to have a better close rate.

The pond that you’re fishing in will get smaller, but odds of catching some fish are in your favor.

I’ve worked with a lot of clients – across nonprofit, consumer, tech sectors – who have made this mistake.

During the onboarding process, I’ll ask them who their user is and who their prospective clients are.

“It will work for everyone. This widget/organization/service can change the lives of everyone … if they only knew about it.”

So we start digging. And, often, when asked, “Does your offering do X,” the founder will say something like, “It’s not really built for that, but we can do A, B, and C to accommodate for that scenario.”

Wrong answer.

Your product or service is what it is. Yes, you can iterate and make it better, but fundamentally, it should solve a single issue (or single set of issues) for a particular type of user/customer.

2. Doing too much, too soon.

Build a website. Get on social media. Create a podcast. Determine your logo and tagline. Start blogging. Start advertising. Write a newsletter.

All of these things are great and make total sense when you’ve been able to catch your breath and create a holistic marketing and communications strategy. Or when you’ve had some good success and can outsource all of the work at one time to a capable agency or can hire internally.

But when you’re just starting out and feeling pressured to “market” your business, many entrepreneurs do a little bit from Column A, a bit from Columns B & C, randomly, without any overarching strategy or plan. This approach gets stuff done, but it’s likely not the right stuff – and you’re not sure what’s working and what’s just noise.

Rather than a mixed bag of everything, start small. Pick one tactic and build a strategy for that tactic.

A lot of people will suggest starting with a website.

I’d say, again, it depends where you are in your entrepreneurial journey.

Websites can act as your 24-7 business card, but they come with a lot of upkeep. You’ve gotta keep content fresh, you want to make sure you’re collecting email addresses, there’s gotta be something for the visitor to engage with in order to hand over their contact info.

If you don’t have the technical and creative chops to do it yourself, hiring someone to build and maintain a site can get pricey, especially if you rely on them for consistent updates to content.

When done well, a website can give you instant credibility, but the opposite is also true.

Think about your own shopping experiences. If you go to a company’s website and it looks like it was built in the 1990s, has a confusing layout, broken links, or just looks bad, your confidence in the product (and the company as a whole) probably takes a nose dive, right?

Like I said, each tactic needs a well-thought-out strategy first.

For the single entrepreneur that’s just getting started, I like social media as a first step. And by “social media,” I mean pick one – or tops, two – platforms that you can commit to. Again, strategy first; execution second.

Commit to it for at least three months to see what kind of traction you’re getting. What’s working? What’s not? What’s the call to action?

Once you’ve gotten some traction and are seeing results, you can be nimble and tweak your strategy to include another piece of the marketing to-do list – or enlist help to continue supporting what’s working and level up your game.

3. Trying to sound smart.

The point of any communication tactic is to be understood.

I know that entrepreneurs are excited about the features and capabilities of their product or service and want to use all the industry jargon that comes along with it. And yes, in some cases – like when engineers are selling to engineers – that jargon comes in handy.

However, for most people, you’re selling to someone outside of your industry circle, so you have to make the information accessible.

The desire to sound smart is more about your ego than anything else.

If you’re able to distill how your service, product or offering can make someone’s life better – in the simplest of terms – you’re winning.

I loved working in higher ed because most of the professors I worked with understood this concept. While students in their classrooms had to learn all of the Latin, biology and medical terms for various specialties, the professors were adept at making the most complex of systems and concepts simple, straightforward and understandable.

This translated into everything we communicated outside of the school to the larger community.

Rather than talk about the specific biological processes involved in a disease or condition, we talked about what the patient was experiencing and how we could help alleviate their symptoms.

Simply put: the audience didn’t need to know how the sausage was made. They just needed to know they could be helped – and that we were the ones who could help them.

Now that you’ve taken notes, done some reflection and have a better understanding of what missteps you make be taking, let’s chat. I’m happy to help you course-correct or get started.

Kelly 🤘

kelly@serranovacommunications.com