Abstract:

This paper aims to share the experiences of guiding young entrepreneurs and startups for their entrepreneurial marketing initiatives at a leading business incubator in the Middle East. The ideal target audience for this paper includes young entrepreneurs eager to launch their startups and preferably attending business incubation or acceleration programs. This paper starts with the characteristics of entrepreneurial marketing and offers differentiation with convention marketing concepts. Then, focus groups were held with incubation center staff and entrepreneurship mentors affiliated with business incubation centers. Finally, it provides various entrepreneurial marketing lessons for young entrepreneurs. These best practices were extracted from the literature and validated by the focus groups. These best practices are presented here as lessons and include; marketing orientation, product, pricing, promotion, and place (distribution) actions.