We had a quick chat with another speaker from LOGIN Startup Fair's Conference menu – Martijn Scheijbeler, the Marketing Director at The Next Web, an influential online publisher and conference organizer. Martijn will introduce a tool that analyzes news at major tech websites and helps to discover what information is of interest to the tech media.

We wanted, however, to discuss mobile marketing and startup branding today. Martijn is straightforward – he says he sees too many companies branding themselves as "the Uber for X", and that is bad news if that is their sole branding position. Let's hear a bit more from Martijn and see him at the LOGIN Startup Fair conference that is completely free for the general audience to attend!

Hello Martijn, good to have you here. So how will mobile search influence the future of company branding? 

As mobile traffic is quickly increasing for most sites it soon will take over desktop for almost any site (it probably already is for a lot of them). For company branding it won’t help anymore to just put ‘mobile-first’ in your strategy. Companies/Startups have to get used to the fact that they need to look at mobile at all times, instead of focusing on it first. It’s going to make marketing sometimes more difficult as in the end you’ll have less screen space to get your message across. With search increasing on mobile, companies will have to focus more on getting to the top of the results then ever for the terms that are relevant as the fight for pixels on mobile devices will increase.

How can we prepare for the upcoming shift in mobile marketing strategy? 

While it’s still the case, years ago almost any company was discussing what to do with mobile, create a mobile site versus a mobile app. Most of them went with creating apps. 
What’s still fascinating is that mobile users install around 90 apps on average on their phones but only use, on a regular basis, around 15 –  most of them are focused around daily tasks (weather, calendar, mail, contacts, messaging). 
So having a breakthrough moment with your mobile app is going to make it way harder for companies to focus on improving their brand through mobile marketing as they’ll need a very unique angle to make it interesting for users.
That’s why doing mobile marketing is harder these days. The way startups can prepare for this is either integrating themselves in the 10-15 apps that people use on a daily basis and/ or making sure that they have such an advantage that they can become a regular app in people’s life, become essential. Otherwise it might be wise to stay away from mobile app development.

How would you advise startups to brand themselves?  

The competitive advantage for most startups will be around what makes them different from the rest. These days I see too many companies brand themselves as “the uber for x”. If that is your branding position, then not only your elevator pitch could use some refining but also your product or service doesn’t bring anything new to the table. 
It’s getting harder and harder to find a great angle or brand position for new startups so focusing more and more on what makes you different and helps your buyers in their daily lives is going to help with that. Did you see Uber promoting itself as the Airbnb of taxis? I bet you didn’t.

What specific competitive branding advantage should CEE and Baltic startups use in their advantage? 

Usually I don’t think there are huge differences for just Baltic startups. You already have an advantage as the education level is much higher than in some other regions of both Europe and the world. The best advice that is still valid in my opinion is that the focus should really be on the growth as long as you’ve proved that your business model + product is valid. Once you make that happen there will be so many more opportunities to explore, other markets, but mostly to really start growing based on creating a brand that will have a long lasting impact.

See ant meet Martijn at the LOGIN Startup Fair. Don’t forget it’s completely free to attend – you don’t even need LOGIN conference tickets to see Mindaugas, a bunch of other speakers, 50+ startups, the Hardware District and much more!

LOGIN Startup Fair is a part of the EC initiative of Single Marker Forum. LOGIN Startup Fair conference is powered by DNB bank.