The Copywriter Source

Don’t Have a Disruptive Innovation? That’s Okay!

From startup founders to small-business leaders, everybody believes that they’re the next big entrepreneur, with the next big business that destroys all of the competition and makes people think differently about an industry. They believe themselves to be outliers who had the big idea that nobody else thought about.

The concept of being a disruptive innovator has really caught on in the past couple of decades. We have seen a lot of small startups become huge enterprises. This was especially true after two things:

1. The Smartphone
2. The Great Recession

The businesses that emerged from the ashes of the Great Recession were the ones whose founders saw an opportunity to disruptive several industries with the rise of the Smartphone application. In the years following the recession, we saw the emergence of companies like Uber and Airbnb, or companies that took traditional industries and interfaced them with online software. Airbnb disrputed the hotel industry because they made it to where anybody could turn a residence into a place where people could stay during their travels and business trips.

Hence, with such success, it is no wonder why people want to be the next big startup or business that transforms the way people think about a particular industry.

However, most of the time this is not necessary.

Many businesses start out with the intention of being a disruptor and go nowhere. They begin creating an aesthetic of disruptive innovation before they even have a solid product. Flashy designs, bold and mysterious copywriting headlines that demand attention, and a take-over-the-world image.

According to research, this may not always be a good idea.

It’s okay to not be a disruptive innovation.

Here are some reasons why.

Why It Is Sometimes Not good to Be a Disruptive Innovator

1. Startup Culture

A lot of people who launch startups get caught up in what they call “startup culture”.

They lose sight of the goal, and then the company doesn’t go anywhere.

For instance, a tech startup with a lot of venture capital will spend a lot of money on the company’s image.

Flashy designs, and bold “disruptive” advertising campaigns are placed before a conceptualized product. This can give people the wrong impression about the company. That is, the branding and advertising finesse should be scalable with the evolution of the product lifecycle, and then with the betterment of the next product.

The point is, so many small business today want to copy the techniques of the next big startup that “disrupts” the market and their competitors. They want to be the next story in FastCompany or Inc.

For a small business, you would be much better to invest in a solid marketing team that builds relationships with customers. That means, implementing an advertising strategy that communicates to the customers instead of confusing them.

2. Disruptive Innovation is a Small Minority

Disruptive innovation isn’t bad. It’s a good way for a company to stand out and emphasize things that other business are not.

The point is, so many small business today want to copy the techniques of the next big startup that “disrupts” the market and their competitors. Often times, these startups don’t sell products. They sell ambition, and this can look something like “startup culture”.

We opened up this article talking about how “the research” shows that investing all in an attitude without a solid business plan is the reason why nearly 80% of startups fail.

According to research, startups don’t necessarily go under because they’re not ambitious enough. Rather, they go under because they are playing “company” instead of investing their efforts into more important activities.

Because these companies are mostly enterprises supported with venture capital, they feel the temptation to implement high-velocity, fast-paced, agile advertising strategies before they even declare what they do.

So, if you have a small business, why would you want to imitate the activity of 80% failure? It’s best to do what works best, and that is meeting a need that the customers want.

3. Poor Communication

Disruption is the opposite of good communication.

Have you ever been sitting in a quiet restaurant when all of a sudden a baby starts yelling? Or maybe you hear two people getting into an argument. Perhaps it was one of the cooks in the

Now, there can be a lot of other variables, such as not having a good idea, or a poorly-conceived business.

But, that is all simply name calling until we know some more details. It could be that the company didn’t properly communicate the benefits to its customers and to the market.

Often, this idea is conveyed through the company’s public relations, and even their advertising.

Think about how much money a business spends on advertising to nobody. This is called context collapse. It is when we talk to everybody, and then realize that we’re talking to nobody.

This often happens on social media, when a person has multiple audiences and tries to consolidate them as one audience. This can be very disastrous to businesses when they take this approach, because it is never important for a business to sell to everybody, if they are in the business of selling to somebody.

Is that what you’re doing with social media marketing? Are you advertising to everybody, while advertising to nobody?

Good communication will set up a pathway for success because you will start to set your efforts into matters that are relevant instead of playing “company”.

Be The Best Choice.

All of your competitors have the same attitude.

They all have the same sleek logo, streamlined websites, vague logos and subheadings that are supposed to capture attention through conveying “big ideas”.

It’s easy to get caught up with the excitement of being an entrepreneur, or launching a new company where it seems like you have already won.

Then, the company spends most of its efforts trying to meet SMART objectives and getting the image of a disruptive company, with a sleek company design and logo, important-sounding advertisements, and lack of clarity with the customers and stakeholders on what the company does.

This can be solved through effective copywriting that engages the customers instead of trying to impress the investor mindset. Customer-focused advertisements are always central to success, not peripheral. Especially small businesses who are not running on venture capital. Investors expect scalable growth whereas small business is about establishing a relationship with customers.

And one of the best ways to build better relationships with customers is to understand the customer journey. We have a free PDF to help small business owners understand the customer journey in a quick, and easy 10-page read. Give it a download. It’s free.

We’re not saying that these companies make false claims, but that they need to be more candid in where the company’s product is at the moment.

That means eliminating anything vague, such as jargon, or bold attention-grabbing words and visuals that have cryptic meanings.

Solutions

• Use plain language. Don’t use small words where a bigger one will do. Always know that not everybody understands industry jargon.

• Embrace the journey. Don’t show your customers where you want to be. Show them where you are at now, keeping them up do date on the developments of the software or product. This can be done by producing effective content, like a company blog, that keeps stakeholders and potential customers in anticipation for the development of the product or service.

That means that if your company offers something really valuable and unique to your customers, but they’re not buying, they’re not going to take the time to figure it out themselves. You have to tell them what your product or service does, and you have to tell them over and over again.

This is why I don’t recommend smaller companies confuse their customers with vague, self-important, or audacious copy.

Huge companies already have a customer base, established brand awareness, and a foundation of trust with its customers and stakeholders. Startups do not have the privilege to launch ads with generic content and vague ideas.

If you launched your own insurance company and implement an ad strategy similar to Liberty Mutual, or Geico, then you’re going to confuse your potential customers. Liberty Mutual and Geico have successful ad strategies because they are big companies. They have to take their advertising to that level to stand out.

Building Customer Relationships

Well, maybe your small business is not a disruptor. That’s okay, because the most important thing is providing value to the customers, and an ounce of building solid relationships with the customer is worth a pound of disruptive innovation.

While differentiation is always good for any business, disruptive innovations are just that — disruptive.

Here are five key points to take from the importance of building customer relationships.

1. When Everyone Disrupts, Nobody Disrupts

Stick to the basics. It can be difficult enough to know what to write in your advertisements, than to allow the scope to redirect to something ineffective, like launching marketing tactics better suited for bigger companies. Don’t be a big fish in a small pond. Be a gold fish in a small pond.

Remember, monsters eat their customers, try to intimidate competitors without a valid reason, ignore their customers, disregard feedback, and do what they want to do. Not monsters don’t do these things.

2. Don’t Ignore Customers

Another thing that monsters do is ignore customers. They feel that their vision and mission is so strong, that they do not need to listen to the customers. This is a mistake. When Apple first launched the Mac, they used to ask their customers to call them or write them about what they thought. This isn’t so they can get customer information to advertise to them. That’s the modern approach to data. Rather, it’s because customer feedback is the best qualitative information you can get. This “audience listening”, as they call it today, is important for getting out bugs and improving products.

Solutions

• Feedback. Now, a good way to do that, is to produce small content or a call to action that invites your first customers to give you feedback. Setting up a web page that has a form that makes it clear that you want them to fill it out for feedback and not to put them on a list, is foremost important.
• Audience Listening. Look at what they’re saying about your product on social media. Are they saying anything at all? Is it good or bad? If they are saying criticisms, then take that data and then create content that acknowledges that you’re listening and that you’re going to fix the malfunctions. When new versions are released, you can create content, or small acknowledgements on the packaging that the bugs are fixed.

3. Opt Out of Vague and Confusing Advertising

Another thing that startups fail do not do right is using advertising that contains a lot of jargon. This is especially true with tech and healthcare startups. They use vague, important-sounding words to make the product sound fancy. I can’t stress how much the copywriting experts tell companies not to do this, but they always have, and still are. Even copywriters do this because they believe it makes the company sound important. You’re not selling self-importance, but value.

Solutions

• Be honest about how familiar people are with your company. Big, bold lettering, and a confusing visual may work for big companies like Apple and Lipton Tea. In the early days, Lipton Tea put a lot of words on their ads to get people familiar with what the Lipton brisk feeling is about. These days, they do not have to do that because they own almost half of the tea market in the United States, according to Statista. Likewise, if you look at Apple ads from the 1970s and 1980s, they have a lot of copy. They don’t need to do that these days, because people know what Apple is about.

4. Don’t Advertise to Everyone

Startups often make mistakes of advertising to everyone and ignoring segmentation. There’s not any sense in showing up in territory where the customers are not. You show up where the customers are, and that means social media ads that are targeted to a region or demographic, or using a platform that has something to do with your target customers.

Save time and money. For instance, you wouldn’t use a platform like TikTok or Lemon8 to make content promoting the latest silicon chips, because there are small odds that your customers, clients, and stakeholders are going to be using those platforms. This saves time for social media marketing efforts for places that don’t have your interests.

Targeted content. Create content that is written with a specific person in mind, because you can’t give solutions to people who don’t have the problem to begin with.

5. The Customer Journey

Knowing the framework from the customer’s perspective is best. That’s why it’s important to familiarize yourself with this valuable framework, and then you can successfully form a strategy that increases conversions and advocacy from customers based on what they are interested in rather than pushy tactics.

Download the free customer journey eBook if you want to get an idea about this framework. It also includes a short checklist of things that the small business owner should do.