The decision to start a business is exciting, but don’t get caught up in the fairy tale. If you want your business to succeed for the long-term, have these three essential elements in place.

1. Enough capital for six months. The time it takes to turn a profit will vary between industries and individual businesses, but the rule of thumb remains the same: have enough cash in the bank to survive for six months or more before you launch. Developing a realistic personal and business budget can help you survive the first few months, and sticking to this budget will be crucial to success.

Develop a list of potential expenses early on so that you have a good idea of what monthly bills plus extraneous expenditures will add up to and how this spending will affect your bottom line. Know that you may not receive a paycheck for months or even years after launch, so a hefty cash reserve will ameliorate the growing pains of starting a business.

2. Marketing and sales strategies for early-adopters. Coming up with an outstanding product or service is great, but your business will likely fail without those crucial first few customers. Develop a marketing plan with an allotted marketing budget that will get your product or service in front of key early-adopting clients. From the start, prepare ways to engage with and nurture clients to develop a loyal base.

Next, build your sales infrastructure: think about sales contracts, proposals, product listings or anything that a client will see when he or she wants to purchase from your company.

3. Endurance. I tell people this all the time: one of the hardest parts about being an entrepreneur is having the stamina to keep up with the daily demands of running your business. A lot of people mistakenly think that it will be a walk in the park.

Sure, there are major benefits such as working for yourself, having a flexible schedule and enjoying the successes of your hard work. But each benefit comes at the cost of putting your own capital and reputation on the line.

Before starting your own business, make sure you can mentally and physically ensure the journey. Be prepared to work long days, do things that are outside of your comfort zone, make personal sacrifices, work hard for what you believe in and dedicate yourself fully to the businesses success. If you aren’t in it 100 percent, the business won’t achieve its full potential.

People do business with people they like. That adage rings will ring as true as ever in 2015. To improve your ROI on marketing, you will need to humanize your communications.

Humanizing your marketing means you think about people instead of the quantity of likes, fans and followers. Someone reading your branded content for 10 seconds is different than someone doing it for 10 minutes.

How much time are people spending on average? Similarly, how many people get to the end of your article? To answer these types of questions, measure success with quality-centric metrics such as reading impact and read ratios. You could also measure live chat engagement.

It also means shifting the focus from purely volume and quantity into one that inherently involves more quality. Here’s how to humanize your marketing for the coming year.

Balance quality and quantity.

Naturally, you need to have an audience to share your content with. You can measure this through traditional metrics, such as the size of your email list or your Facebook audience, but approaching your audience purely as clicks, likes, or views can quickly alienate them. Worse yet, you won’t generate worthwhile results if your content doesn’t have a meaningful impact on your audience.

You should shift your mindset to gaging the reaction your audience is having to your content. This can be done by diving into analytics, reading comments and listening to social conversations your audience is having about what content you’re producing.

There some great publishers and companies doing this that you can look towards for guidance, like Upworthy and Medium, two publishers that churn out a ton of quality content and are now measuring the success of their content with attention minutes.

Publishing higher quality content of interest to your audience increases the likelihood your brand will stay top of mind. For example, Baileigh Industrial, a metalworking and woodworking machinery company, has a visually compelling Instagram account. Ty’ve taken the time to share images that better reflect the topics that matter to their customer base, while also highlighting customer success stories. Their competitors don’t even come close to this level of engagement and therefore, it’s much easier for them to come off as a more relatable, humanized business.

Don’t automate everything.

There are some very useful tools out there to automate aspects of your marketing efforts, like Buffer, Optimizely and HootSuite, but none of them provide the proverbial silver bullet to make your efforts successful. You have to balance your automation efforts with sensibility.

If you try to automate everything, your customer will notice your scripted messaging and the use of templates, which makes it far more likely that you’ll be ignored. At the same time, you won’t be targeting or segmenting your audience appropriately, which defeats the purpose of using some of these tools to save time, remain productive and reach your marketing goals.

Marketing tools like Marketo and Hubspot can help your business target select groups among your audience, understand their needs and pain points and cater your messaging accordingly.

To start, try better segmenting your email list to begin to see results. Automating a few different templates, each with a unique message to a few segments of your audience. This way you’re able to both automate your messaging without overdoing it and coming off as too robotic to your customer base.

Be honest about your intentions.

Lastly, be honest and open with your customers and admit when you mess up. Studio Neat, one of the first companies with a Kickstarter campaign that raised more than $100,000, follows this mantra by consistently updating their customers on their campaigns and blog when there are delays in production or expected problems with shipping.

Blogs like Farnam Street and Ramit Sethi’s I Will Teach You To Be Rich frequently tell their readers to unsubscribe if they’re not interested in receiving their emails, because they don’t want an audience that isn’t engaged or isn’t actively participating in the community.

Microsoft, on the other hand, asks their customers multiple times to opt-in to their promotional emails during check out, even if you’ve already said no. This isn’t an ideal experience for their customers and potential subscribers, instead it comes off as being too focused on growing an email list for the sake of growing it.

Today’s consumers have become much more intelligent with their buying habits, less loyal to the companies they frequent, therefore it’s important to be honest about your intentions and cater to the needs of your audience or you’re more likely to lose their interest.

With so many different ways to measure the impact of our marketing efforts, it’s easy to start perceiving customers as statistics like clicks and open rates, instead of people. In 2015, we should strive to humanize our messaging and marketing as a way of both delighting our audience and differentiating from the competition.

In the world of business marketing, the strategic focus has slowly shifted from seeking potential clients to making them want to come to you.

In other words, you as a business owner can finally forgo the drudgery of always having to jump through hoops to gain a client and instead focus on making your customers want to come to you.

To learn how to utilize this marketing strategy, read the helpful tips listed below:

1. Don’t target everyone.

Admittedly, it does seem counterproductive to minimize your potential client base when attempting to grow your business.However, often catering to a niche client base will help you succeed in your efforts to grow your business, not the reverse.

After all, you can’t please everyone and people love specific personalized solutions for their problems.. By selecting a niche group within your broad business arena, you can market more specifically and offer products or services for specific needs.

A good example is Richard Simmons. He is known as exercise expert who focuses on a niche market: overweight people who would otherwise avoid working out. In so doing, Simmons has become a huge success.

2. Make your marketing entertaining. 

While you want prospects to attain information about your business, product or service after watching the ad, you also want your marketing campaign to be memorable, funny and worth sharing. Otherwise, it will likely be forgotten.

3. Provide free resources.

If you as a business owner and solve a client’s problem for free, you will have succeeded where 99.9 percent of others have failed.

By offering a tip or helping a client pro bono, you are building repoire with them which could lead to business down the line. This can help gain credibility, trust and create an image of yourself as an expert in your field.

4. Use authority positioning.

Authority positioning means that you are seen as an expert in your chosen field. To communicate your trustworthiness to your clients, try the following strategies:

Align yourself with other experts. Whether through speaking at the same seminar as other experts in your field or simply using their logo on your website (with their permission of course), when you align yourself with other experts in your field, you garner immediate trust.

Appear in relevant media. Another way to prove your authority is to be quoted in articles, appear on TV or become a guest on a radio shows and podcasts.  To stand out, create three different pitches that tie into general interest news, so you can sent to producers. The key is writing them, so the producer doesn’t have to do any research or work. Give them everything they need for a five- to 10-minute segment.

Share what you know through various means. Whenever you have an opinion, can offer advice or build yourself up as a thought leader share alot and often. A great example of this point is Dave Ramsey. He shares what he knows about financial independence with Christian values on his radio show every day. He also uses seminars, books and his website, to build brand trust and recognition.

5. Create a strong digital profile.

Having a polished digital profile is an important step in getting prospects to come to you.

Why is this so important?

• Potential business connections and clients will sometimes search for your name in advance of meetings, so you want to have an impressive profile available for them to peruse.
• Your digital profile is a reflection of who you are, what you are passionate about and what you do well. In addition, since you should also include a photo in your profile, it shows your appearance.
• Your online profile allows you to brand yourself and showcase your talents, and in many ways, has taken the place of a traditional resume.
• A digital profile that is well maintained gives you the ability to create a professional network, which will help you build trust and authority in your field.

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