Marketing for startups is a hot topic in the media, blogs, meetups, conferences, and elsewhere. Despite this, founders may still struggle to understand how to approach marketing for startups correctly.
In conversations with Southeast Asian entrepreneurs from various industries, I’ve noticed a few recurring common marketing misconceptions. Over the last four years, my team and I have worked with over 300 startups and even more founders, giving us good insight into trends and perceptions that permeate that community.
Though each market is different entrepreneurs and founders tend to be cut from a similar cloth, meaning they have common characteristics no matter which country they are from. This is clearly shown in the fact that founders from Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia or any other market in the region have the same misconceptions about how marketing works for them.
The 5 common marketing misconceptions are:
- Advertising is marketing; there’s a lack of understanding about the nuances of PR, content marketing, digital marketing and more, so founders lump everything under one major umbrella without understanding what they really need
- Good products mean good sales; having a great product is amazing, but how do people find out about it? Marketing, PR, advertising and more are necessary to build demand and grow your customer base.
- Technical founders don’t understand what we do; this is a generalization, but I found it to be true for the most part. Technical founders don’t want to understand how to market the product, but rather focus on the tech stack or innovation. This can be challenging as constant education is required.
- Startups only focus on product marketing; marketing your product is critical, but you also need to build a brand if you want to build long-term equity amongst your customer base.
- Hype beats branding; I get it, we all want that viral stunt that gets us an influx of users. However, that doesn’t build a brand so creating hype is fine, but let’s make sure we’re also building a brand at the same time.
This is a summary of my thoughts and I do recommend reading the full post on Tech Collective where I expanded on my thoughts around this topic.
If you would like to find out more about startup marketing or how to do PR in Singapore, drop us a message at hello(@)syncpr.co and we’ll be able to help.
The original post was published by Tech Collective Southeast Asia under the title “5 common misconceptions about marketing that most Southeast Asian startups have“