| |
| |
|
Marketing Information |
|
|
|
What's Next? A Guide to Marketing Your New Business
Coming up with an idea, seizing the opportunity, and setting up a business was the relatively easy part. Now you are ready for the challenge of finding your customers, or at least make it easy for your customers to find you. Here are some tips for marketing your new and growing business. Know & Understand your Customers Find out or decide who your customers will be. Then find out as much as possible about them. Consider the needs of customers, and make sure your business or product fulfils those needs. Look at factors such as where they live, their age, their gender, how much they earn, their interests and pastimes. Detailed knowledge of your customers will help you to be more precise in your marketing. Reach your Customers There are many different types of media out there. Choose and use a media that you know will reach your target audience, and is preferred by them. Consider approaching newspapers and magazines if you feel you have a good story, ideally involving a reference to your business, a planned event, or a special offer. Convey a message that will be of value to the reader and editor - this will promote interest in you and your business/product at the same time. Avoid blatant advertising. If you are limited to, or looking to target local audiences in a specific geographical area, consider producing flyers and placing adverts in shop windows. Television and radio advertising are the more expensive methods, and are designed to reach audiences on a mass scale. However, the returns are normally very small in comparison to the expense. Highlight your Benefits Most customers will focus on the value and convenience of choosing your product or service, before they will consider the actual features of that product or service. Therefore, it is important for your marketing campaign to concentrate on selling the benefits, before the features. Features are best marketed when linked directly to a great benefit. For example, a small business selling their own brand of home computers would make a greater first impact by focusing less on features such as 2.3Ghz processors, 1GB RAM, 100GB Hard Disk, and 128MB Graphics cards, and focus more on the benefits of 'faster performance', 'ideal for multitasking', 'plenty of storage' and 'great for games and photo editing'. Use the Internet Of all the available mediums, the Internet puts businesses on the most equal footing. Your image and appearance on the Internet represents your business - this can be understated and straight-to-the-point, or it can be flashy and highly interactive. It is best that it matches your style of business, but you are not restricted if you wish to invest in making a big splash. The Internet should be used to support your other forms of marketing, unless your business is specifically suited to the online market. If you are able to create a website for your business, do so as soon as possible. If you cannot do this yourself, pay for someone to create one for you, as it will be a worthy investment if used correctly. Use other methods, such as joining newsgroups or forums related to your business or product, sign up to business networking communities, give free advice and answer questions. It will attract others to your offering (as everyone wants something for free), while building trust in you and confidence in your product and expertise. Avoid using these for blatant advertising, unless the forum specifies that this is acceptable. Otherwise, you may be asked to leave and your reputation could be damaged in that field. Be Consistent Unless you have a product or service that everyone needs and no one else offers, your marketing efforts will need to be ongoing. Your audience needs to hear about you and your offering over and over again before they are ready to acknowledge and accept you. Therefore, be consistent with your marketing methods. Avoid deviating dramatically between mediums, as this can confuse customers, or cause you to lose others who only focus on one of your selected mediums. Make sure you know how much, and how often you can spend, when working out your marketing budget. Don't plough money into campaigns that you cannot afford to maintain. For example, an expensive, one-page spread in a glossy magazine will look nice and catch the eye, but unless you can afford to do this every week or month, the readers will quickly forget you. Choose a method that you can afford to repeat as often as is necessary to get yourself noticed (i.e.: flyers, local adverts, attending networking events). Otherwise, you may find that your marketing budget is used up before you've made an impact. Measure & Review your Campaigns Make sure you are able to measure the outcomes of your efforts. Items for measurement could be sales, number of enquiries, number of new clients, level of customer spend per occasion, for example. If you choose to run a campaign in a publication, consider adding a reference number to the piece, requiring the customer to quote this reference when contacting you. If using contact forms on a website, request the customer advise you on how they heard about you. For each marketing campaign you undertake, use your chosen measurement tools to assess the effectiveness of that campaign. This will help you to refine your future efforts to get the best results. Even when you think you have perfected your campaigns, continue to review on a regular basis to accommodate any changes in the market and its buying behaviour. Marketing is important to every business, and when used appropriately for your chosen customers, the returns can be very rewarding. Consider these tips when putting together the basis of your marketing plan. Michelle Payne-Gale, owner of Essence Business & Admin Support Services, specialises in virtual administration, marketing, research & creative support for start-ups and growing businesses. Additional articles are available at: http//http://www.essence-services.co.uk
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
|
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Promote your Business and Products through Submitting Articles to Top Web Sites Articles submitted to online publishers bring your site new visitors and increase your ezine subscribers. You can also get these benefits by submitting your articles to top Web sites that not only promote your products, but also your services. One-A-Day Marketing Vitamins Is your business growing, or are you on a plateau in need of a boost to move up? I know that I always tell you it is best to have a positioning statement and a plan. But sometimes, you just need something to get you off square one. The Top Ten Ways to Get Beyond Networking And Generate Cash-Building Exposure Gain the exposure you need to succeed with these ten tips:1. Present yourself as a specialist and/or an authority in your field. Be a Smarter Marketer - Learn the L-A-W for Trade Shows People attend trade shows because they are in a specific industry and want to learn more. They want to know what's new and how you will help them. The Seven Vital Steps You Must Know To Ensure Direct Mail Success 1. Your Most Valuable AssetA mailing list of valued customers is the single most important asset you have. Why Market Research Will Help Your Business Do Crucial Market Research For Free, On Your OwnIs market research only for big corporations with deep pockets? No-actually, any business can put simple market research into place, and get about 80% of the benefit of the big, complex, expensive methods-without paying a penny.In my own one-person business, I've used informal market research to:Determine where ad dollars were effective, and where they were wasted. Be Prepared for Marketing For most businesses, making a sale is all important. However, despite the amount of effort and attention given to getting sales, there is often no attention given to developing and effectively implementing a systematic marketing process. Image is Key to Your Marketing Success In virtually any business first impressions are lasting impressions. Most people have heard this statement for years, and yet some people completely ignore the first impression they are conveying to potential customers or clients. These Four Things Will Make Your Direct Marketing Successful Direct marketing is built on four things. The other way to look at it is that when you think direct marketing is not working only one of four things can be wrong. Creating a Marketing Plan for Your Website Have you created a marketing plan for your Website? If not, it is time to think about developing one. An Internet marketing plan helps you make the right day-to-day and long term decisions. Business Postcard Marketing: 35 Ways to Use It Postcards are an effective way for many business owners and marketing managers to attract new customers and increase sales from existing ones. Postcards are inexpensive to produce and mail. 4 Alternative Ways To Gain Lifetime Customers You will always have more people that turn down your offer than actually buy. They might not have bought because of your price, payment options, or any other possible reason. Provacative Research Works If you want to double your business, then you need to get inside your client's head through proprietary research and provocative results.By conducting proprietary research, you obtain special information that prospective clients can't find elsewhere. How Important is Your Marketing? Bob called last week from Phoenix, Arizona with some stunning news about his web site. He first contacted me in the fall of 2003. Is Your Company A Member Of The Community? One particularly hot south Texas day, I was making a routine sales call to a family Mexican restaurant. Angela, with whom I had an appointment, is a real "hands on" lady. Marketing Tips 101 - Where Can I Get Clients From? The following tips have come from a wide variety of sources; some from other successful businesses we know, some from our Home-Based and Small Business Support Group meetings and some we've developed by trial and error. Some of the ways to get clients are: contact previous employers; mailing lists; cold call your target market; attend group meetings and seminars for your target market (conventions for doctors, lawyers; computer seminars); attend local Chamber of Commerce meetings; join groups related to your target market; if your target market uses a specific system, for example accountants use the SafeGuard system, contact them and tell them that you are available to teach them how to use the system or you can do it for them. Target Marketing: The Bell Curve Finally, Something You Learned In Math Class Makes Sense In Real Life.Okay, here's the day you've been waiting for since 9th grade: today's the day you're going to find out what some of that funky stuff you learned in math class has to do with anything. John Kerry, Amazing Direct-Marketer! If you want to uncover a little secret about how John Kerry and the Democratic party is "building their e-mail list", with literally thousands of qualified leads.. Forward Thinkers Stay Ahead of the Curve What is it like from a marketing perspective to be yesterday's news? We rely on what is tried and true in marketing because it is usually safe, tried, and tested. It saves us time, as well, since we don't have to put on our creativity cap to craft an innovative strategy. Arts Marketing : Suggestions for Students and Beginners Many artists create art but when it comes to marketing and selling their work, well, that is another story. It may seem daunting at first but artists can do marketing easily if they just think logically and commit time to the effort.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2006 |
