How to bootstrap a startup with marketing

By Ghadeer Ghloum

KUWAIT: The COVID pandemic and financial crisis affected many people’s financial security, after they lost their jobs or their businesses failed. People came to realize that creating an additional source of income has become necessary. But despite realizing the importance of this issue, problem lies in how to start, when to start and which business will succeed. Therefore, Husaina, copywriter and lead generation expert, told Kuwait Times about the essentials that people need to stick to, to realize their plans.

Husaina began with a statement on building a business that is most likely going to be successful — “crisis builds miracles”. She said that this completely resonates with startups’ budget and funding crises and issues. For a good startup, Husaina highlighted the importance of brand positioning; once startups nail their brand positioning by rightly and diligently understanding their target audience and using that in their brand messaging, they can sell their product faster.

How exactly is brand positioning done

According to Husaina, brand positioning is a marketing approach to identify the place you want to occupy in the minds of your customer and how it separates you from your competitors and rivals. To define your brand positioning, you need to understand and build your audience avatars. A lot of businesses make the mistake of thinking they can target everyone in a certain region or demographic, but that’s not realistic. To truly understand your audience and create a strong brand positioning, you must research.

The key to understanding brand positioning lies in how well you can define and build audience avatars for targeting. To create a brand positioning and understand your audience, you need to dive deep through scientific research and methods. You need to know and study market reports, behavior pattern of your target audience, know and study the exact words (customer vocabulary) they use, and know and study the motivations that will drive sales or trigger their minds.

Seems complicated?

Husaina further simplifies the steps to understand and research the audience. She said the first step is to look up research reports and industry studies. The trick here is to find them on Google by using keywords such as market/product/service. This way, you will find the goldmines and hidden gems that normal searches won’t disclose. The second step is to define your segments. This step dives deep into the target audience. For this step, Husaina advised to not be generic. Curate your target audience according to their behavioral pattern. For example, a generic segment in real estate selling would be home buyers. This way your brand messaging will address everyone and persuade no one.

So how to define segments?

According to Husaina, you can do this by defining them according to their behavior and psychological preferences. For instance, for real estate selling, the ideal avatars can be any of these: Lifestyle upgraders – people seeking better lifestyle comforts. Investors – people seeking return on their investments in property. Working professionals – people seeking to invest for the first time in property. In this way, you can understand different people’s pains/gains, anxieties/fears and goals/aspirations. Now you can target specifically and create strategies that focus on triggering directly their minds.

This was an example of behavioral segmentation. Sometimes, you can also segment by demographics, seasons and patterns – but that works better for media selection and targeting and to some extent in your messaging. Hence, true segmentation should be behavioral. The third step that Husaina listed is to listen to your defined target audience.

How?

Husaina said that you can know them through direct interviewing, social listening, search reviews, feedback, survey and forum threads on media platforms. Using these ways, you can mimic how your customer expresses their pain and gain and use the words in your marketing messages and strategies. She also emphasized that your marketing is not about you but about your customers.

The fourth step according to Husaina is to identify the motivations your brand can trigger. She said that after segmenting your target audience and listening to their conversations, it’s time to define the motivation your brand will trigger while offering your product or services to them. This is the actual part where you position your brand according to the motivation factors that drive sales and revenues.

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