How to make marketing easier

For the small business owner marketing is often a major stumbling block. It’s a pain in the lower region, an activity they don’t want to do or even know how to do. Nightmare stuff. You get my point!

What doesn’t help is that it’s not taught in college or university. You’re taught how to become a teacher, accountant or plumber. But you are not taught how to sell your service. How do you get a bunch of private pupils, clients for your accountancy practice or customers who need plumbing done? Not easy.

Faced with this kind of hurdle, how does the small business person start their own business. For example the teacher who lost her job, the brand new recently qualified accountant who can’t find a job or the plumber whose construction company has just gone belly up.

You’ve got to sell yourself?? Shriek, hysteria, can’t do it, don’t know how, impossible, too shy and many more excuses get thrown into the universe. So what is so difficult about selling yourself?

The difficult part is the fact that you think you have to sell your service to a total stranger. It’s also called cold calling. And we all know how we feel when some arbitrary person approaches us over the phone or face to face to try and get us to buy something or donate money.

How do you overcome this? Well have a ponder about the opposite of cold calling. Phoning somebody you know whether friend, acquaintance or colleague. How do you feel about chatting to them about your service?

Hi Jack/Betty/Agatha have you heard, I’ve just set up my own little business doing tax returns. You know I’ve been doing it for a few years now even as a student. I hear you’ve just launched your own business and that sounds really exiting. The world out there is going to be thrilled you are offering your services I bet you the competition is worried. And more of the same ending off with, you might be able to use my services.

How do you think you would feel chatting like this about what you can offer? It’s going to go a lot smoother, friendlier, more personal than if you phoned up an arbitrary person whom you do not know and tried to interest them in your new offering.

Now that sounds easy to do doesn’t it. However, how do you get to be friendly with a whole bunch of people you have never laid eyes on or exchanged one word with. That’s where your homework comes into it.

This is your marketing task. Learn all about the people you think might be interested in your service. That could be the people in your group at church, the folk you play footie with, the singers in your choir or even the regulars at the pub down the road.

As a new accountant you might want to check the local yellow pages and see who has listed new businesses in your area. But don’t do as a whole bunch of companies have done who saw the Marketing Fundi details in the yellow pages. Don’t pick up the phone and say to the person answering “I want to speak to the owner of the business”. Huh? Guess how far they got. Well actually to the second sentence where they wanted to set up a website for me. Huh again?

Is it that easy. Kind of. It’s just a huge amount of work. Because you have to identify the people or companies who might be interested and then do your homework in finding out what their business is and how your business could fit into it.  And it’s really not about skimping and just doing a few enquiries. It’s got to be a huge amount of data you collect.

In a way that’s how social media fits into your marketing mix too. The people that try and jump the queue by pushing their product too quickly are easily shunned. I know this from personal experience. I tried to rush the system on Digg. Sure I got a huge amount of traffic to my blog initially until Digg’s bots caught me short cutting and I got blacklisted.

The same applies in real life. If you are not genuine in your quest to find out what your potential customer is all about, you won’t get anywhere either. You have to build a solid relationship that makes the other side feel that you really care.

Does that mean you will get a sale every time? Of course not. But you will feel a lot more confident calling on possible customers and your success rate will be a lot higher than if you tried your hand at cold calling.

It reminds me of the story of an advertising executive who had an argument with a company CEO about whether people actually read copy in an advert. The ad exec said they did, the CEO laughed. The ad guy took out a bet with the CEO betting that the company dude would read every word of a full page ad he would take in a newspaper.

The CEO read every word of the ad. Why? Because every word was about him. If you want your prospective customer to listen to every word you are saying, then it’s got to be all about him. Every word. And how will you know what to say? By finding out about him and his business.

Give it a go. While you’re at it with the going for it, why not go for my RSS feed or check in to my e-mail newsletter. It’s free and I try and make the articles all about you and what you need to be able to market yourself. Win win isn’t it?