Archive for Marketing & Sales
Small Business Marketing Without Emptying Your Wallet
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One of the main reasons that a big business can outperform a small business is big marketing budgets. When it comes down to the bottom line, small businesses often have less overhead and can provide products and services at the same price points as larger competitors and even sometimes at a lower cost.
However, getting this information out in the open can be costly, and many small businesses don’t have a large budget for advertizing. How can you get your message out there, letting people know who you are and what you can offer without emptying your wallet
You should start small. While it seems antiquated in this age of technology and online resources, one of the best ways to let people know you are there is through direct mail. The rates charged by the United States Postal Service for bulk mailing of postcards is still reasonable, and you can get tri-color postcards printed quite inexpensively at your local office supply store. Try starting with between 250 and 500 postcards in the zip code where your business is located and see what sort of response you receive.
Save a few of those postcards and some business cards to pin to information boards at other local businesses. Many small restaurants and most supermarket chains have a corkboard where entrepreneurs such as yourself tack up this sort of brochure, postcard, or information that frequent shoppers and diners check out. Use the free publicity – you’ll be surprised at how many people you can actually reach this way and the number of them that will actually need your services.
Use the web. If nothing else, make sure that your business shows up under local listings and is pulled up with general searches for companies offering your product or service in the local area. When potential customers go to the yellow pages looking for someone who carries your line of products, you don’t want to be the only business that isn’t found. What you want to be is the top of the list of available providers. You may even want to consider purchasing ad space in that location online, you can purchase ranking in the yellow pages of various companies.
To further advertise online, be sure to have a website. It doesn’t have to be greatly detailed or even interactive, as long as it is attractive and informative. You can add the web address to your yellow pages listing so that viewers can click right over to your site from your listing as well, making you convenient for them to contact. Note, however, that if your website is not interactive, you should make your contact information as easy to find as possible within your site, either posting it clearly on the front page or having a prominent link to a page with contact information.
Above all, never underestimate the power of word of mouth. If you please a customer, they will remember and tell friends and family, recommending you to others and helping you to build your business. You can also join in a networking group with others who are trying to build their small businesses so that you can all promote and recommend each others’ products and services.
Advertising doesn’t have to cost a fortune, and you don’t have to let big business outperform you just because big budgets allow them to reach a larger audience. You can make waves in the neighborhood and get a great start on what can turn into a very profitable campaign.
Good Ideas to Hold a Business Event
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If you know that you want to hold a business event but just aren’t sure where to start on the whole thing, here are some event ideas that might lead you in the right direction.
Event ideas can be as diverse as the companies and businesses that hold the events themselves. The first thing to think about when choosing what sort of company event to hold is what your reason for having the event is. Depending on the type of information you want to get out – a new business venture, a new product, a promotion – you can decide what sort of event will get your information out in the best way possible. Read More→
Brainstorming Successful Strategy
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There are a number of different home business ideas that can bring a small fortune to an individual person. A lot of people would love to have their own business but they can never come up with any ideas. In this article I would like to share some of my personal methods of finding and creating ideas for home businesses.
The first and most important thing that you’ve got to do is brainstorm. Its best to surround yourself with like minded people, it can be difficult for a single person to think of a business ideas and then get the business up and running. Surround yourself with good people, and start the brainstorming process.
Now there is a lot more to brainstorming then just throwing out ideas and hoping to come across a good one. As a group you need to discuss how much you’re willing to invest, how much time and personal commitment everyone is willing to give, and how much risk everyone is willing to make. These three factors will help you narrow down the type of business that will best suite you and your partners.
Once you’ve established how much time and money you’re willing to invest, you need to brain storm your talents and interests. Talk about the strengths of the group and your weaknesses. Try and figure out something that everyone is passionate about. The most successful people are those that are passionate about their work.
Once you get to this point you can start throwing out ideas, make sure your ideas are focused around the things that I talked about.
Unfortunately not everyone is blessed to have great people around them that would be willing to go into business with you. A lot of people have turned to the internet to start their own business by joining a successful team of online marketers. This is a great way to surround yourself with like minded people that are seeking the same things that you’re seeking.
Between Success and Failure
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Home business opportunity is very appealing to a lot of people because it gives the potentials of making a living from the comfort of their homes. Running a small productive business can be more challenging than the traditional nine to five work setting because there are many factors which can decide between your success and your failure.
Captain your Own Ship:
When you are working at home, it is easy to get distracted by other house hold activities. Being the captain of your own ship, you are in charge of your own livelihood and if you are not productive, you will not make any money. You must be able to distinguish between what needs to be done immediately and what can wait in order to make the right choices.
Designing an appropriate work schedule and following it is one of the best ways to create the kind of professional drive which is essential for required grow in your home business opportunity. Things will never stop from coming up and there will be innumerable things to do, but you should respect your home business and devote yourself to specific work hours.
Avoid distractions from other household activities, personal visits and phone calls during the specified work hours.
Setting short term goals along with the long term goals in your business is the only way to go about the whole episode. Goal setting helps you to mark out each day and it will be easier for you to assign the tasks for the day.
A business plan with goals aids in coming up with the resolutions to the problems which you might face in an ongoing basis. If you do not have any idea about your next task or plan, you will just be spinning wheels and decreasing your productivity.
Organization is the Key to Efficiency:
Efficiency in your home business opportunity is about eliminating wasteful activity and improving your organizational skills to grasp new strategies and implementing them with your home based business.
Use technologies for more efficient handling of your documents and mail to keep your data on track and in a systematic way. Staying focused on a particular task for the day does not allow you to be sidetracked until you finish the task. Staying on schedule and not letting things pile up for the next day helps in minimizing the workload and enhance efficiency.
Keep up your Desire and Motivation:
If you forget, why and what you are doing, it is difficult to organize yourself and accomplish what you need to. Your desire and motivation keeps you moving forward. Keeping the goals and objectives before you will encourage you to take the necessary pains and hit the target.
Allow others the opportunity to be in contribution to you
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I was reading another chapter in one of my favorite books, The Art Of Possibility. This is one of the best books I’ve ever read on transforming your personal and professional life. On page 55, the authors introduce the practice of, “being in contribution.”
One of my clients says contribution is essential to being who she is. She says, “Helping others is part of my life purpose. I need to help at least one person in some way, every day.” For many, being in contribution to others is a core value. Many have defined the value of contribution as meaning, “being in service to others” because they want to make a difference in the world. Read More→
Charge $1.5 million for a ten page document
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The point of all this is that the size of a company really has no bearing on the concerns of those charged with running it. They are all essentially the same. Nor does any business owner have the time or inclination to be devoured by detail.
Although detail is important to substantiate claims, summary reports are more effective for supporting the needs of business owners. They simply want accurate and reliable information to act on regardless of the form it takes, but preferably not three feet thick de Small Business Owner Concerns
Regardless of company size, the concerns of executive management are all essentially the same. E- Bryce’s Law
I was recently at a gathering of independent consultants from around the Tampa Bay area and we got around to talking about the concerns of owners of small businesses. From this, we devised a list of pet peeves commanding the attention of small-to-medium sized business owners, to with:
Employees
- Human Resources – staffing and allocations, payroll, benefits, and management.
- Work environment – facilities and equipment, corporate culture.
- Systems – implementing business processes productively, and staying abreast of technological developments for competitive advantage.
- Regulations – complying with rules as established by government and industrial concerns.
- Time Management – scheduling and devoting time to the proper set of priorities.
- Financial Resources – managing and planning cash flow and investments for optimal return on investment.
General Planning
Strategy – both short term and long term, including an analysis of the market and competition.
At the end of this session, we discovered that the concerns of small business owners are essentially no different than large corporations, except on a much smaller scale. The only difference was that the small business owner has to move faster than his corporate counterparts simply due to the size of his operation. For example, he doesn’t have time to read voluminous business plans and financial statements. Instead, he requires summary reports which get to the point in a couple of pages. He needs good, sound supporting advice to make his life easier.
This got me thinking about the amount of time and money corporate executives invest in managing their company’s affairs. True, some things require considerable time and effort to investigate, such as researching new products services and checking market conditions, but most of what is done is what I refer to as %22meatball%22 type analysis which should be easy and relatively inexpensive to prepare.
Let me give you an example; a couple of years ago I was working with a Fortune 500 company who had contracted with another firm to produce a Business Systems Plan. This took several months to perform and resulted in a substantial document over three feet thick I kid you not costing the company $1.5 million. I was asked to flip through the document and give an opinion. It only took me a couple of minutes to discover the authors had reused narrative from other client projects in the document and that most of it was superfluous. But the fact that it was incredibly thick and printed on some pretty impressive looking paper, gave the company the feeling they had gotten their money’s worth from the consultants.
Interestingly, the company never acted on the information contained in the document simply because it was so voluminous and they couldn’t find their way through it. In reality, a ten page report could have satisfied the company’s needs, but I guess you can pas.
