Start-ups often look to marketing to help with branding as well as securing leads and building customer pipeline. Here are 5 myths to avoid as they add to your cost of sales instead of providing benefits to the organisation.
Start-ups, regardless of early or late stage, and many SMEs tend to think of marketing as a catch-all solution. These organisations hope that it can help with branding, lead generation, building pipeline and customer relations.
However, some organisations spread their efforts too wide and dilute the outcomes achieved, or invest too much on securing low-quality leads. Others expect that marketing can replace the sales or product functions by designating marketing as the hub without creating or aligning systems and processes that can help close the deal with customers.
There is also the need to set expectations about what marketing can realistically do. These expectations must include assessments based on budget, time, people resources and product roadmaps. Executing for its own sake is a sure-fire way to burn through resources for a start-up.
Here are several principles that start-ups and SMEs can use when it comes to marketing.
1. Goal-setting: Set realistic and measurable goals and objectives prior to doing any marketing
2. Specificity: The more specific the situations that marketing is applied to, the better the results as long as the situations are aligned with the goals
3. Parameters: Be clear and realistic about any factors that might impact the outcomes that marketing is targeting. This could be time, people, or budget-based. It can also be product, customer or scenario-based. For example, a delay in shipping of parts, can ultimately result in a delay of the customer launch.
We walk-through 5 myths that start-ups and SMEs can look to avoid when it comes to marketing.
#1 Marketing is a key force that drives sales or marketing must ‘lead’ sales
Some organisations assume that marketing has to start executing in order to ‘soften’ the ground so that the sales ‘force’ can move in on the customers to start selling. There is this idea that creating brand awareness is critical to closing the deal. Therefore, sales cannot begin if the marketing team does not do ‘something’.
Start-ups and SMEs should consider goal setting as well as creating outcomes that the sales and marketing functions can own separately. The objectives and scope to support the outcomes can be divided between the functions. However, all actions done ladder up to helping the organisation secure more paying customers.
Marketing can support with creating sales materials, or content that will help support a pitch or script, and even a product launch to raise awareness or help with discovery. None of these actions require the sales team to wait for an output to start talking to customers.
#2 Marketing should sell
Yes, every role and function in an organisation should understand how the work they do, ultimately helps to move the company forward – whether in terms of revenue, cost-savings, or expansion. However, misunderstanding the role that functions play in either revenue generation or support will only lead to frustration.
Marketing can help with sales by identifying audience segments and profiles, to test the product’s features against an audience, and to point sales in the direction of the customers most likely to make a purchase. During this process, they can nurture customers by providing information, content, answering questions but at the group level – typically through a mass medium vehicle such as a FAQ on the website, or populating the querybase of a chatbot or through a blog post.
#3 Marketing is 100 percent responsible for the brand
Marketing is the champion of the brand, and looks to actively build and protect it. What this means is the marketing team will take proactive steps to position the brand in the relevant channels and to the target audience. Internally, they will advise and guide team members on how best to use the brand aligned with goals and objectives.
However, it does not mean the marketing team should also be the post-sales team, implementation team, customer relations team, and customer account management team.
Positive customer experiences adds to the strength of the brand. There are many team members that the customer will meet throughout their journey with a start-up or SME. The marketing team can help provide guidance, and make decisions but the daily execution and customer experience building belongs to everyone in the company.
#4 [Insert marketing tactic] can help us bring in revenue
Many start-ups and SMEs have limited resources, and tend to look for execution that is low cost-high potential impact when deciding on what marketing to do.
It is a common fallacy that marketing can be both cheap and high quality. For example, many organisations like to distribute press releases to the media. There are assumptions that the media are waiting eagerly for a particular company’s update, that the media will publish any and all press releases they receive, and that the information is of value to the media’s readers. These organisations become frustrated when the media is not receptive to the press release.
However, even if the output is a media article, so what? How would the media article benefit the organisation’s revenue or expansion goals? Customers will not magically contact the organisation – to be sold to – because of a media article. This is an example of the lack of goal setting, and being specific about the use of an output or outcome.
Marketing with limited resources can be advantageous to the organisation, especially when it requires the team to focus on working with assets they can control and reaching out to customers in small batches to learn or test the approach.
#5 Marketing has to ensure that my brand is everywhere
What is the purpose of everywhere?
Are your customers likewise also everywhere, and ready to consume your ‘everywhere’ marketing?
Some organisations like to adopt a ‘spray and pray’ approach, hoping to work with the law of averages and therefore secure customers. As long as they have a large enough base of potentials to work with at the start.
This is untrue, both the concept and the law of averages when applied in this manner. It will not work for digital marketing, or for social media, or for events, or for any marketing channel.
Being everywhere adds on to the cost of sales, burns through the budget and uses up more time from the team, therefore adding on opportunity cost to the equation.
The point of marketing to a target audience – from the customer’s perspective – is to provide them with value. It can be value derived from discovery, or becoming more aware, or being educated about a concept. If the customer agrees that the value is something they want, where the price is at the right proportion to the value, they will pay for it.
If a start-up or SME can identify a niche, either a niche area to dominate or a niche audience to test positioning against, that would be a far better use of resources.
We are Brand Utility is a business consultancy. We work with brands in the corporate, professional services, retail, travel and technology spaces.
Our principal founder is a registered management consultant, certified and recognised by the Institute of Management Consultants Singapore.
We offer strategy and tactics to support growth outcomes - revenue, scale, regional expansion and market entry – for our clients.
Areas of support include:
· Strategic communications: Approach to market, brand concept and map, positioning, messaging, story and narrative, thought leadership
· Marketing: Campaign/programme planning, story-based marketing execution, digital marketing, community amplification, content planning and production, go-to-market execution
· Lead generation: Digital advertising, social media advertising, social commerce, e-commerce
· Integration of marketing with business operations: We plan and execute as a seconded marketing and/or PR lead for your brand
Discover more about our services at our website or book an exploratory consultation through this link.
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