Marketing - The Business Driver

Companies irrespective of their size and age need to work on market development. We find, the bigger the company, the larger the marketing and promotion activity they undertake. As a matter of fact, the companies grow big through consistent marketing. Notwithstanding other requirements.

How does small start-up Company with smaller budgets, promote its business?

For such start ups, I have drawn the suggested marketing measures in the picture herein. The steps indicated are not exclusive or compulsive for a business. Right focus could be arrived once the nature of business, company's vision and strategy is known. The approach is to put on high priority all the marketing efforts that wont cost big monies. The marketing measures for Start-ups from Phase-I to Phase-III hardly need any budget. You should have one or two right executives (who understand well your company's product / service range and who takes-up the ownership of his role), in the initial stages.

You will need specific budgets only from Start-ups-Phase-IV onwards where you go for outdoor advertisements like lollipops, mobile media which are inexpensive while providing constant reminder of your products to people. By this time, the efforts under Start-ups-Phase-I to Phase-III will yield you reasonable business.

Similarly, when your marketing efforts under Start-ups-Phase-IV bring in good business, you could take-up measures indicated under Profit-zone stages. Whatever may be the company's journey stage in the marketing matrix, you need to focus on every preceding measures with consistency. This will keep your business very active against any competition levels in the market.

The marketing matrix above is drawn to judiciously manage your business budgets. Say, you are doing well in the business with the measures indicated under 'profit-zone'. Do you really need to go for expensive marketing measures like print media and visual media appearances? Yes, there is never an ending to the business growth. I mean it should not be so. Marketing through print & visual media would place you in the larger business league. This in turn will create confidence levels in the existing customers and prospectives to invest in your products or services. This is an essential factor considering the tough competition in the market. Such expensive measures may increase the production cost, but it will always not effect much on the end-user price considering the mass quantities of production that you undertake to meet the market demands. Such campaign will also achieve you increased support from all the stakeholders as it signifies your growth and firm presence in the market.

The effectiveness of marketing depends on the creativity in communication. Every marketing measure is a communication that you address the present and prospective customers. It could be an e-mail, a flyer, a blog, a hoarding or a TV commercial. It could be a personal visit of your executives to a customer. This obviously indicates that you should develop an effective and creative marketing collateral so that your communication reach the public in the way they should understand you and your product.

I strongly feel that every organization should collaborate with a creative marketing agency who will understand the organisational vision, culture, strategy and customer profile. Only then, they will be able to design right communication that will raise the requirement of your product in the audience.

Further, to gain consistent results out of your marketing efforts, it is indispensable to have impeccable delivery and support mechanism in the organization. If not, all the investments made to generate customer base will go in vain.

And we should remember 'service after sales' is the eternal secret of business success.