Yelyzaveta Didenko, a marketing strategist with experience in tech startups and companies like Rakuten Viber, shares her perspective on five common marketing blind spots. Based on her work with early-stage teams, she explains how spotting these issues early can help small businesses avoid costly setbacks on the way to their first $100K.

The Stakes Are High

What your marketing is really all about is generating steady and predictable revenue; it is not at all just about posting to social media or running digital ads. Yelyzaveta believes that if you do not spot invisible strategy holes, it does more than cause you to miss a few opportunities here and there; it leads to the serious waste of your resources and effort.

She resolved similar issues at Viber when they afflicted her team, by spot-checking to find the holes, and she helped her team boost user engagement and retention. For small businesses targeting $100K or $150K, attending to that kind of resolution is potentially transformative.

The “Everyone is My Customer” Syndrome

Yelyzaveta sees this mistake made a lot: trying to not just reach one or two identifiable customer segments but to appeal to lots of them. When she worked at Viber, she found that the campaigns they executed were consistently more effective (sometimes by as much as 40%) when they not only had a near target, but also when they executed the orders given to them.

Didenko is saying they made their campaigns more effective by honing in on specific profile types making up their identifiable audience, and poor conversion rates be darned, unless they were hitting “profitable” with their campaign clicks. The tool she worked on for a founder was an AI-powered marketing solution. The segments they were trying to appeal to were freelance, corporate, and student profiles.

Strategic Content Void

Some business proprietors believe that simply being on social media is enough to draw in potential customers. However, posting in a haphazard manner and being inconsistent on the platforms we term “social” does very little for most businesses and certainly gets them nowhere fast. Yelyzaveta, during her time in the corporate world, became all too aware of what kind of content really worked to drive not just engagement but actual sales too.

If you could reduce down to the essence of what kind of posts made the biggest impact, it would boil down to just a handful of kinds of posts:

1. Posts that caused our audience to think.
2. Posts that caused our audience to become better at their jobs.
3. Posts that informed the audience about the successful application of our product.

Yelyzaveta believes that if you stick with these four guidelines, you have a nearly foolproof method for converting engagement into sales.

The Retention Blindness

Bringing in new customers can be an exhilarating piece of the business operation, but it’s vital to pay attention to the ones who are already there. The Viber app’s user growth certainly got a boost from a steady stream of new users. More often than not, though, when Yelyzaveta worked on aspects of customer retention that pertained to loyalty and engagement, she was working on the same group of people: the ones who had already downloaded Viber and were using it in some capacity.

Unclear Value Proposition

If the content of your messaging is not crystal clear or super convincing, potential customers will not spend any time trying to decipher your meaning. It is all about plain and powerful communication.

A particular case from a work where she once helped a startup pivot from making claims as broad as “The Future of Education” to stating what was much nearer the truth: “Affordable AI Tutoring for Busy Professionals.” This narrower claim made them focus on what they were actually in the business of delivering, and her funders could see that delivering on this promise was going to change the education sector in ways that would make a much more valuable investment.

Isolation in Growth

Growing your business while going it 100% solo can be a slog. You’re all alone, and you’re trying to find audiences that exist independently of you and your business. By forming strategic alliances with partners, collaborators, and co-marketers, you can reach these new audiences, and win them over, in a way that’s both faster and less expensive than trying to do it all on your own. At Viber, Yelyzaveta formed alliances with brands whose audiences might never have come across them but who use messaging apps, and they created tailored, specialized sticker packs that introduced their platform to these new-to-Viber audiences.

What they do, small businesses can do very well. If you collaborate with a partner brand, you can become a purveyor of ideas and a leader of thought in the direction you want to head with your next audience. Your near match is with an audience of a business or individual that also has a potential audience that is very close to yours. You want to do a value collaboration with them and see if something works out.

Taking Action: A Framework for Growth

Overcoming these silent marketing obstacles requires a framework. The first step in the framework is conducting a sincere audit of where you’re putting your time, money, and passion. It’s very easy to lose a battle that you’re pretending you’re winning or that you’re just kind of winning if you have no clear picture of what’s really happening. This makes having a sincere audit with clear metrics as the first step in this framework very understandable. Then too, once you’ve done this, you’ll want to work on what you found in this audit that is not working or could work better.

You can work this out in an afternoon or over a weekend using several spreadsheets, some conversations with yourself and a few team members, and perhaps a fidget spinner or two. Then, Yelyzaveta says, “with that knowledge, you can identify the places where you’re losing revenue, and where messaging might be the problem.”

The Path Forward

There are three essential mind shifts required to get to $100,000 in revenue.

1. Better revenue requires better dimensions.
2. They are better dimensions if they are more appealing.
3. They are better dimensions if they are more niche.

Targeting these makes right-strategy marketing clearer and more reachable. When your content is simply lackluster, addressing it with concentrated force and trying to engage a broad audience with the message won’t help. Failing to have a solid retention strategy in place where people want to come back and use your product or service once again, let alone many times, is a problematic issue that needs addressing.