You’ve likely heard a lot of success stories from us, but it hasn’t all been sunshine and rainbows. Let’s talk about why our marketing strategy failed epically and how you can prevent it from happening to you.
Our team wants to tell you our story of our first marketing strategy and why it failed in a truly spectacular fashion.
Hopefully, learning from our marketing mistakes and blunders will keep this from happening to you.
If you don’t know our full story, then we should also mention that we did end up succeeding as a startup. We took our company, Solomoto, from 0 to over 180,000 active account members.
But, let’s be clear here. It definitely didn’t start that way...
First, let’s define what we mean by “failed.”
Most people who start their own businesses or startups claim to want “to make money and become financially free” as their #1 or #2 reason. We definitely agree with that reason. We also started Solomoto because we wanted to…
- Work when we wanted to
- Be in control of our income
- Solve an issue that was important to us
- Become 100% free to design our lives how we saw fit
- Quit our jobs
So, we are defining failure, in this case, as not making money or accomplishing these things because we did not accomplish our goals.
If those are not your reasons for starting a business, then this post may not resonate with you. We understand that a business can be passed down from family members or that you are obligated to maintain the business success.
That’s why we wanted to clear up how we defined “failure.”
The truth is, looking back, our first marketing strategy wasn’t actually a terrible idea!
The reason our strategy tanked was mostly due to our terrible execution, poor communication, and lack of follow through.
Basically, we would come up with some blog content and share it to our Facebook page, put some keywords in our headlines, and call it a day.
It seemed like that was all we needed to do.
Everything was great except for a tiny problem:
Nobody was reading our blog, engaging with us on social media, or visited our website. Nobody cared about it.
Other than that, we were doing great!
Let’s look at the five reasons why this strategy failed and break this down from our perspective as now-successful marketing strategists.
1. We were selfish.
All of the content that we created was centered around what WE wanted to create.
It was all about us and Solomoto.
This is actually quite common in the business world.
Business owners are often more concerned with making sure people know they should buy their company’s products than establishing a relationship with their audience and interacting with them in meaningful, real ways.
We wanted to only interact with customers, not people. All of our blog and social media posts were bad sales pitches.
It was selfish in nature.
The difference with Solomoto’s new strategy is that it focuses on the needs and wants of our audience. It actually has very little to do with the content that we as a team want to create and everything to do with the type of content we know our audience likes and responds to.
Also, notice how we say audience instead of customers. Even that small change in wording will help shift your perspective from business to human.
The biggest thing we found out with Solomoto is that people want to be heard and appreciated. People want to be treated special and be shown that other people, even corporate businesses, care about them.
The key is to focus on what your audience wants, needs, and responds to (not what you or your business wants to create) ESPECIALLY when you want your business to succeed.
2. We made all the wrong moves in all the wrong places.
Yeah, we fudged up big time here.
We spent 7+ days trying to come up with our company’s Facebook profile photo.
7 &^$(%*^ DAYS!
Don’t do that.
A profile photo should be of your company’s logo and take you 1 minute to publish. Take 1 minute and then move on.
If you don’t have a logo at that point, let it go, write your company name in a nice font using Canva, use that as a temporary logo, and focus on something else until you make one.
We spent entirely too much time on:
- Our Facebook profile photo
- Our company’s mission statement
- Other less important, asinine things
And entirely too little time:
- Understanding our audience
- Creating original content
- Creating content people actually wanted
- Creating relationships with our audience
Now we understand what matters and what doesn’t when it comes to marketing.
Honestly, this is why people buy subscriptions in droves at Solomoto.
It’s not that we are geniuses. It’s because our platform can save you a TON of time that you would otherwise waste on learning and trying things that don’t matter (or work).
3. We tried to sell our product without traffic.
Think of it as having your own lemonade stand, perfectly positioned, in the Sahara Desert.
You can have the freshest, most lemony-lemonade of all time, but you’re in the damn desert...you ain’t making any sales, partner.
We spent over a year creating the first version of our platform that NOBODY purchased.
We were sitting there in the desert like, “Where’s that money, though??”
In order to make money, you have to have two things:
- High-Quality Traffic
- Proper Monetization
By proper monetization, we mean not just writing a bad sales pitch or slapping up a link to some rando affiliate product, hoping someone will buy.
It’s the combination of these that will lead you to success as a business.
4. We didn’t collect emails.
Despite everyone on the internet telling us we HAD to collect emails, we thought:
- We don’t like emails
- Therefore nobody likes emails
- Let’s not do it.
Many new business owners are probably somewhere in that camp as well.
While MUCH has changed in the world of marketing over the years, this has not.
There is no single way to better turn a prospect into a fan into a customer than through email marketing.
Collecting emails FROM DAY 1 is one of the most important parts of becoming a successful business.
It may not be fun and you may not even like email, but it’s Capital-T true.
We use and recommend MailChimp for all of our email marketing for Solomoto because it’s great for small to medium businesses and startups. Oh, and it’s awesome.
5. We didn’t have any GOOD guidance.
The only guidance we got were from marketers teaching marketing, email marketers teaching about emails, and business owners making money by teaching people how to make money.
We bought their courses…
Took their lessons…
Went to their conferences…
And more often than not, left empty-handed and more confused than when we started.
We just didn’t realize it at the time, but advice from these people needs to be taken with a big, fat grain of salt.
Here’s why:
Growing your business that’s in a niche like setting, is very different from one that teaches people how to make money online.
The truth is that it’s much easier to sell when you’re teaching people how to make an income.
While this absolutely does not mean you should start out teaching people how to make money online - it’s dishonest at best and a flat out lie at worst if you haven’t actually made money online yet…
It DOES mean you should be paying close attention to who you are taking advice from.
We would have made money A LOT faster had we started with the knowledge we provide in our platform or in these articles.
BUT other than our CEO failing at his first startup, we didn’t have the level of personal experience to blog about making an income through your own business.
Bottom line: Be wary. Be skeptical.
Even of us.
We’re no saint, guys. Our entire company is a marketing platform that we sell. While we think this platform is the best for small to medium businesses, it’s easy to look at someone who has the success that we do and think “This company must have all the answers.”
We don’t.
While we do our best, we have flaws as well.
Just saying.
Let’s wrap this thing up. Here are the 5 reasons our first strategy failed:
1. We were selfish.
If you want to succeed, your content and marketing strategy has to be centered around solving other people’s problems, not always your business’.
2. We made all the wrong moves in all the wrong places.
Forget about your logo and mission statement and focus more on providing value and connecting with your audience.
3. We tried to monetize our business without traffic.
You need both great traffic and a great product to make money.
4. We didn’t collect emails.
Collect them from DAY 1!
5. We didn’t have any GOOD guidance.
Be wary of trusting an article just because it’s got a bunch of likes or is at the top of your Google search. Find guidance from people whom you feel that you can trust and who will shoot you straight.
Often, they are the people willing to tell you what’s uncomfortable instead of what’s awesome.
Best of luck,
The Solomoto Team
P.S. What are the biggest struggles you are having with your current marketing strategy right now? Share them with us in *the comments below* or get in touch with one of our team members over Facebook or Twitter, and we will do our best to help!
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/SolomotoGlobal
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