You have a business and you want the public to know what you offer so that they will buy from you. In essence, marketing is how you attract the public and make them customers. The best ways to market your goods or services differ greatly based on the type of business and the demographic you seek to target. The extent of your marketing campaigns will also vary. To determine what and how you want to market, Aaron can work with you so that you understand what you have to offer, the demographic you need to access, and how best to reach them.
To start with, we ask you to get one thing out of your head – you can’t ignore marketing or the advertising that is a part of it. Even as an absentee owner, you will still need to assess what advertising works for your business and how it works. And you would do well to deal with advertising yourself; no sales rep or account executive is going to be as interested in promoting you business as you are and no matter how successful a given campaign is, you will have learned nothing about your business or why that worked.
Aaron will teach you how to market your business. He specializes in service industry businesses with annual revenues of $200,000 to $5,000,000. If you take the time and make the effort to really understand how to market your business successfully, you will not have to rely on outsiders and you will have the tools to create a steady income stream for your business. We ask that you commit to learning marketing with us.
First, realize that marketing is different to advertising. Marketing is how people perceive your business. This perception is formed not merely by advertising, but by every way in which you interact with your customers. Of all the marketing strategies, the one we have found most effective for businesses of your type and size is to be perceived as having the best customer service.
How do you figure out whether you are so perceived? Through revenue growth, or how much money you bring in the door. You want a steady but not exorbitant growth for your business. Aaron will also help you learn to promise your customers the right level of service and results and how to keep that promise.
You will need to figure out the appropriate amount to spend on advertising, bearing in mind that advertising itself is not the only component of marketing. Aaron will help you figure out what the other components are for your business and how to maximize them. One of the most important things you should learn is targeted advertising. Not everyone is looking for your product. You need to figure out who your ideal audience is and target them with advertising. In advertising, quality is much more important than quantity. Don’t forget that your ideal audience includes your current customers. You need to learn to figure out who they are and keep them interested in your services and products.
Aaron will show you how to get paying customers – from existing customer lists, referrals, coupon books, referral generation groups, mailers, street exposure, your website, directories, craigslist.org, events, and major corporations in your area. In the end though, the most important thing he will do is to teach you how to look at marketing – as an art, more than a science. The best marketing for your business is going to change from time to time and you need to be able to adjust.
As a small business owner, it is essential that you track the results of your marketing. Unless you do so consistently and accurately, you will never know when a given approach has stopped working. You will need a system for tracking results so that you get data consistently. Our team is familiar with a number of different ways to track advertising and can teach you how to implement these. You should also learn about the technique of partnering with complementary businesses to increase your customer base and revenues.
In addition to finding more customers, you want to sell more to the customers you have. You should use three techniques for increasing sales to existing customers. These include up-selling, down-selling, and cross-selling. When you up-sell, you sell an additional product or service in addition to the one they paid for initially. Down-selling means selling a cheaper alternative when your customer cannot afford what they initially thought to buy. Cross-selling is the technique of selling something related to the initial sale – shoes, for example, after someone has bought a suit. Learning how to do this well will increase overall revenues.
Another important facet of marketing is learning to think of your approach as having a front end and a back end and learning to make both work well for you. The front end involves attracting customers in the first place and the back end is the method by which you make additional sales. Aaron will teach you how to wisely bundle items and services to increase your customer base and how to set up good frequent buyer programs and monthly fee programs.
To succeed as a small business owner, you need to know how to market your product or services to the people who seek it and how to track the effectiveness of what you are doing so that can always adjust your performance and techniques.
