1. Become a student of your business. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
Check out my 50 ideas for promoting your business by clicking www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk
4. 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. Click www.exceptionalthinking.co.uk to get my 50 ideas for promoting your business.
5. Do marketing!! 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!!
6. 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.
7. Stretch your comfort zone – 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!!
8. 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!!
9. 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.
10. We’ve created a new e-course called “Survive your first year in business”, where you’ll receive a workbook every month direct to your PC that helps you address issues such as getting more customers, keeping motivated, managing your finances and making the most of your time. As well as this, you’ll receive 12 months of unlimited e-mail support and coaching whenever you need it, all for just £25+VAT per month.
If you would like more information, please email me on course@exceptionalthinking.co.uk or call us on 0845 644 9371.
To learn more about this author, visit Helen Dowling's Website.
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