Although in the life of a startup the day is always too short and the budget is too small, you should not make a common mistake and ignore communication. The belief that a good product will defend itself can be put between fairy tales – especially today, in the era of universal access to information. In practice, creating a well-written communication strategy is as important for the success of the product as it suits the needs of the market. This type of strategy should be approached as a specific form of investment: once prepared, it saves time and energy when planning subsequent promotional activities, at the same time makes them consistent and thus more effectively increase sales.
If we have already decided that we want to take up the challenge and prepare a communication strategy for our startup, it is good to approach it as a kind of audit. When creating target groups and personas that will be the recipients of our communication, it may turn out that the original “sales” assumptions need to be slightly modified. Why? For example, because of the specificity of reaching this type of people – perhaps they are not active on the Internet and the cost of reaching them offline is too high? Or maybe it turned out that another group would be easier to “manage”? Often, in this type of cases, it happens that the strategy can strongly change the initial plans of the entrepreneur. And yet it is better to change something at the beginning than to drift for many months losing money on it?
The start of the project is a good time to strongly mark your presence on the market. How could this best be achieved? For example, through a well-tailored social campaign or effective Public Relations activities. However, it will be difficult to achieve this without still having established basic directions of communication, target groups, key messages, strategic goals, etc. Unfortunately, without preparing a communication strategy, startups very often waste the opportunity associated with the launch of the product, which negatively affects their development. By the way, if you are interested in what other moments it is worth trying to prepare messages for the media, take a look at our other text.
Marketing and communication, however, does not end with the launch. It is a daily effort that must be constantly remembered. Visibility, good positioning on the Internet, which we achieve through content marketing or public relations activities, are not given to us once and for all, but require constant commitment. Therefore, one of the first steps to achieve communication success is to prepare a long-term communication plan as part of the marketing strategy, combined, for example, with a schedule for the next 12 months. Thanks to this, the current execution will be much easier, and communication will be evenly distributed throughout the year, and thus more effective.
However, if you still think that you do not need a communication strategy, or on the contrary, we have convinced you, but you need help in preparing it – write to us. We’d love to talk about how we could help you get your startup buzz.