Entrepreneurship without marketing is like food without salt. It’s like: You have all the required ingredients except for the one that accentuates the flavours of all others. Here’s a look at the three key benefits of marketing for start-ups .
By Imrana Khan
The life of an entrepreneur isn’t easy. The word ‘entrepreneur’ itself is an indication of multiple, massive responsibilities, including developing a product/service, raising capital, defining go-to-market strategies, selling, networking, marketing, and what not. Each of these responsibilities has a direct impact on the start-up and its future.However, in most cases, the commonly ignored function in a start-up is ‘marketing’. The question, thus, is: Is marketing important? The answer is ‘yes’. Let’s look at what it can do for you.
Getting People Excited About Your Products
Entrepreneurship is not just about registering a company. There’s a lot that goes into establishing a start-up and growing it. The first and foremost is making people excited about your products or services. The most Effective marketing helps new businesses identify the ‘unique selling propositions’ which helps the start-ups gain new business. For example, established in 2006, the online classified start-up OLX started its campaigns ‘OLX pe bech de’ to allow people to sell anything and everything that they do not need or want using OLX. As a result, in 2014 alone, OLX had 11 billion page views. The company has now changed its campaign to address another pain point of its customers, selling and buying ‘near you’. Let’s see how good this new campaign would turn out for the organisation. Having said that, it definitely reflects that the company believes in the power of marketing. And, why not!
Building Trust Along The Way
It’s not only about the product or service; it’s also about how good you are at building trust amongst the potential buyers and the influencers. Entrepreneurs with good networking skills always get the initial projects based on their image and trust. And, marketing helps you build your image offline as well as online. What do you write on Twitter? Or, how do you make a pitch or present yourself? What does your LinkedIn profile reflects about you? How many connections / followers do you have? Or, what’s your blog all about? All of it has a great impact on raising capitals and securing initial projects, which are always critical for start-ups. Invest in marketing yourself well.
Going Digital To Save Marketing Cost
Depending on who your target audiences are, it’s always great to invest in the right digital and social media channels. However, it requires you to be highly creative. For example, at times selling a fashion product via a website is not as much effective as promoting it through a fashion blogger. These days, domain-specific bloggers are highly influential in the digital world. Moreover, digital channels are not as expensive as conducting an event for instance or spending on outdoor advertising. Thus, if planned well, marketing is not always a cost centre. It can help you save costs—which is important for start-ups.
Yes, It’s Crucial
In all the answer to the question that I asked above is that marketing for start-ups is as crucial as it’s for established and growing organizations, The only difference is that in the case of start-ups, the objective of marketing revolves around getting people excited about the products or services, building trust and reputation in the marketing, and utilizing marketing to save costs. While these are the prime benefits and usages of marketing for start-ups, entrepreneurs can find creative ways to do marketing for their benefits.
About The Author
Imrana Khan is an independent brand and marketing consultant. With over 12 years of experience in marketing and communications, Imrana helps individuals and organizations realise their dreams of building sustainable brands and achieving revenue growth through business marketing. She holds a masters degree in Innovation, Creativity & Entrepreneurship from the Newcastle University as a Chevening Scholar. You can connect with Imrana at @heedandhook (Facebook and Instragram) and @tweetsbyimrana (Twitter).
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