Article by Jane Tweedy, Business Advisor, Western Sydney Business Centre
Marketing is a vital part of any small business. There is little point having the best product or service in the world, if no one knows it exists! My colleague Emma’s monthly articles cover digital marketing, so today we focus on marketing in the real world, the world outside of our devices!
What are you marketing?
This may include you and your business, after all we buy from humans primarily. If your offering is new and unique, you may need to educate the market on the need they have for your product or service. Otherwise or thereafter, we’re focused on why they should buy specifically from us – what makes us different from our competition? What problems do you solve for your clients?
Packaging
Although this may include the physical packaging for a product, what I mean here is what we combine together to sell in a package. Ideally we don’t want to sell our service on an hourly basis, after all if we’re faster at completing a task, should we really earn less? One way of addressing this, is packaging our products and services to include a combined offering for a set result.
Productise
So you say “but I only have a service”, well my first solution to that is to productise some aspects of your service. What can you offer that clients would appreciate, without you needing to be physically there to deliver a service? You need ways to make passive income without requiring your labour.
Pricing
Determine what your pricing values and market positioning are. Do you have a price that is never discounted for instance? Do you always loss lead in that particular item, to bring in higher value business?
Promotional activities
Depending on whether you are targeting consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), will impact where you focus your efforts. Consumer activities may include markets, school fetes, pop up shops, however, you may also target other businesses that deal with your target consumers as referral partners.
Business activities typically revolve around networking but also expos, affiliate/referral programmes, industry associations, speaking and holding workshops. Get out there!
