Get marketing right for your start-up to stand the test of time

Winding up or closing a new business after prolonged sales drought can be a heartbreaking experience if not tearful.

It does not matter the amount you spent during start-up. You will feel more drained, devastated and beaten especially if your start-up funds came from a bank loan.

Things can get awry if your business liabilities roll over to chew personal assets. This happens if personal assets are not shielded from business liabilities by a company veil. If you are the faint-hearted lot, the business can go down with your health as well.

One costly mistake young and agile first-time entrepreneurs make is to overlook the importance of a marketing consultant and the usefulness of a marketing management plan.

Marketing management is the efficient allocation of seed capital towards marketing platforms or activities that bring in steady and positive revenue flows to the start-up.

You drain all your start-up funds on business infrastructure and stock leaving little or no finances for hiring a professional marketing consultant. It is wise to recognise that a haphazard marketing campaign will automatically give birth to haphazard revenue flows to your business.

Remember, your overheads are fixed and steady and quite unforgiving. Your business will experience sales droughts in months when your business costs are soaring high hence leading to wastage and eventual close down. You must move out of that rabbit hole in good time because shutting a business will sap your energy and personal self-esteem.

This, however, does not mean it’s all gloom for new entrepreneurs. Help is found in offices run and managed by professional marketing consultants, mentors or business advisors. All you need to do is to just ask for help which will be extended at reasonable fees.

You must appreciate the importance of organising your marketing campaigns into what marketing gurus call a solid marketing management plan.

The plan will lay out to you an orderly format of managing available business resources in a manner that will readily pull business and revenues to your new business like a magnet. The same way light attracts moths at night; the marketing management plan will illuminate your new business and make it known to the outside world.

You must strive to eliminate wastage of resources. That can only happen if you follow the marketing management plan religiously. The plan will help you realise on the spot whether it is you or your marketing team that is slackening on the marketing management exercise. Or rather, you are not sticking to plan.

The rules of the game is being honest and candid. You abandon or neglect them and a sales drought immediately comes knocking on your business doors.

It hit me some years back, while selling insurance that Karma does actually exist in marketing. Our mentors in the insurance industry kept on insisting on how jealous business marketing is. I still remember these words vividly; ‘’you sleep and your sales and earnings will also follow your perfect example and sleep as well.’’

A marketing management plan will also show you what portion of your startup funds to allocate to which marketing activity or platform. Armed with the blueprint, it will be difficult for you or your marketing employees to have hang-ups on what needs to be done and at what time of the marketing day, week, month or year.

The plan generates for you an elaborate marketing activity calendar that instills a sense of direction in you and your marketing juniors.

Spending plan

It also sheds light on the importance of each marketing activity or platform outlined in it and how much is needed to make it work. With it, you will make informed decisions while preparing budget approvals for monthly or weekly marketing campaigns.

If you badly want your business to survive its fifth birthday, you must set aside 30 per cent of your start-up capital for marketing. If you are an existing and seasoned business owner, 30 per cent of your surplus funds ought to go into marketing monthly.

With the help of the marketing management plan, you or your marketing manager will be able to wisely use the allocation and quickly know what funds go into which activity. If you are not yet endowed with surplus funds and operating on fumes, borrow a soft loan equivalent to 30 per cent of your current gloss sales. Ignore the overheads section.

You could impress upon your credit manager to treat your case as urgent but, again, bankers can only lend against an elaborate spending plan. A marketing management plan will boost your case positively and will help you get faster approval of your loan request.

If your overheads surpass your gross sales for three months in a row you had better close shop in good time. Deficits are not a good story to entrepreneurs and you might end up exhausting funds or assets meant for personal use.

A major reason for recording deficits persistently is that you could be in the wrong business, you do not understand it or you are engaging in a product or service that consumers do not really need or want.

The author is a marketing consultant.