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Helen Dowling provides help, advice and support to small businesses on their marketing and helps people start up in business
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Working for a better small business community
Start-up
For people who have just started trading
Marketing your Small Business
 | There are tons of marketing definitions out there – all of which say something different. My definition of marketing is to make people who are interested in your products and services aware of what you do with the intention to build a relationship with them and ultimately get them to buy from you. What do I mean by this? Well, firstly you don’t want to tell just anybody about what you do – you want to let people who are interested know what you do. Before they’ll buy from you, chances are they’ll want to build up a relationship with you and get to know you. We buy from people we like, know and trust so the more they know you, the more likely they’ll be to buy from you. |
Study your customer, competitors and the industry trends. Make it one of your goals to become an ‘expert’ in your business, so much so that you know how your customers think. The more you know, the easier you will find it to get customers and give them compelling messages that convince them to buy your product or service. Sit down with a friend or business contact and get them to put themselves in your customer’s shoes. Try to come up with ten new ways to market and promote your business. It’s really difficult to come up with these ideas yourself as sometimes you can get too close to your business, but someone else can often give you fresh ideas. Remember that not everything you do to market your business will get you clients. Some things you do will be better for building your reputation or getting awareness of your business (PR for instance is very good at getting people to recognise your business is out there) than getting you clients. You need to have a good mixture of marketing activities designed to build your reputation, get awareness of your business and actually get your customers in order to market your business. If you hate a particular aspect of marketing your business, don’t do it! For instance, if you hate cold calling, why push yourself to do it? There are loads of methods that you might like doing more AND don’t cost a great deal to do. Most small business owners don’t like marketing. It’s another activity that eats into their time. And on top of that, it’s not much fun. Ideally though, you should be spending 2 half days a week on marketing (at the very least), so choose something from my list of 50 ideas and do it!! Decide what is a marketing activity for you – marketing for me is any activity where I spend time getting new or looking after existing customers (bar working on their projects). So, marketing could be emailing 5 customers a week to see how they’re getting on; writing a proposal; going to a networking event; seeing a potential new customer etc. Why is defining what marketing is important? Well, once you start doing this, you will realise that you are doing some marketing…then it becomes easier to do more. Write down what activities you’re comfortable with and also write down which ones you’re not comfortable with. Then choose one activity you don’t really like doing every month and get on with it! Most of us are very good at following up if we need to. For example, if I said to you “Here is a potential customer” you would probably contact them. But, how many of us follow up without a real reason? Try this exercise – next time you go to a networking event, get the list of attendees (usually available when you sign in) and then contact all those you haven’t met by email asking if they would mind spending 15 minutes on the phone with you so you can find out a bit more about each other. This is excellent for building relationships and may even get you clients too!! Remember marketing is like riding a bike. Most people start off by peddling really hard (doing lots of marketing) and when they get busy and don’t market their business, they can coast for a while. But, if they don’t start to market their business again soon, their bike will stop and believe me, it’s hard work to start peddling again. So, you need to keep marketing all the time. The more people get to see you at networking events or speaking at events, the more they’ll get to know you. We do business with people we know, like and trust so the more you do, the more you’ll get known Conclusion If you go out there with the intention of making people aware of you, educating them and making yourself into an expert and finally turning them into business, you should be fine. Do marketing, get yourself out there and have fun. Link to this page: Related: TAGS: Marketing, Top 10 Marketing Tips, Marketing Planning, Marketing Ideas, Networking
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