What's Next? A Guide to Marketing Your New Business

Coming up with an idea, seizing the opportunity, and setting up a business was the relatively easy part. Now you are ready for the challenge of finding your customers, or at least make it easy for your customers to find you. Here are some tips for marketing your new and growing business.

Know & Understand your Customers

Find out or decide who your customers will be. Then find out as much as possible about them. Consider the needs of customers, and make sure your business or product fulfils those needs. Look at factors such as where they live, their age, their gender, how much they earn, their interests and pastimes. Detailed knowledge of your customers will help you to be more precise in your marketing.

Reach your Customers

There are many different types of media out there. Choose and use a media that you know will reach your target audience, and is preferred by them.

Consider approaching newspapers and magazines if you feel you have a good story, ideally involving a reference to your business, a planned event, or a special offer. Convey a message that will be of value to the reader and editor - this will promote interest in you and your business/product at the same time. Avoid blatant advertising.

If you are limited to, or looking to target local audiences in a specific geographical area, consider producing flyers and placing adverts in shop windows.

Television and radio advertising are the more expensive methods, and are designed to reach audiences on a mass scale. However, the returns are normally very small in comparison to the expense.

Highlight your Benefits

Most customers will focus on the value and convenience of choosing your product or service, before they will consider the actual features of that product or service. Therefore, it is important for your marketing campaign to concentrate on selling the benefits, before the features. Features are best marketed when linked directly to a great benefit.

For example, a small business selling their own brand of home computers would make a greater first impact by focusing less on features such as 2.3Ghz processors, 1GB RAM, 100GB Hard Disk, and 128MB Graphics cards, and focus more on the benefits of 'faster performance', 'ideal for multitasking', 'plenty of storage' and 'great for games and photo editing'.

Use the Internet

Of all the available mediums, the Internet puts businesses on the most equal footing. Your image and appearance on the Internet represents your business - this can be understated and straight-to-the-point, or it can be flashy and highly interactive. It is best that it matches your style of business, but you are not restricted if you wish to invest in making a big splash.

The Internet should be used to support your other forms of marketing, unless your business is specifically suited to the online market. If you are able to create a website for your business, do so as soon as possible. If you cannot do this yourself, pay for someone to create one for you, as it will be a worthy investment if used correctly.

Use other methods, such as joining newsgroups or forums related to your business or product, sign up to business networking communities, give free advice and answer questions. It will attract others to your offering (as everyone wants something for free), while building trust in you and confidence in your product and expertise.

Avoid using these for blatant advertising, unless the forum specifies that this is acceptable. Otherwise, you may be asked to leave and your reputation could be damaged in that field.

Be Consistent

Unless you have a product or service that everyone needs and no one else offers, your marketing efforts will need to be ongoing. Your audience needs to hear about you and your offering over and over again before they are ready to acknowledge and accept you. Therefore, be consistent with your marketing methods.

Avoid deviating dramatically between mediums, as this can confuse customers, or cause you to lose others who only focus on one of your selected mediums.

Make sure you know how much, and how often you can spend, when working out your marketing budget. Don't plough money into campaigns that you cannot afford to maintain. For example, an expensive, one-page spread in a glossy magazine will look nice and catch the eye, but unless you can afford to do this every week or month, the readers will quickly forget you. Choose a method that you can afford to repeat as often as is necessary to get yourself noticed (i.e.: flyers, local adverts, attending networking events). Otherwise, you may find that your marketing budget is used up before you've made an impact.

Measure & Review your Campaigns

Make sure you are able to measure the outcomes of your efforts. Items for measurement could be sales, number of enquiries, number of new clients, level of customer spend per occasion, for example. If you choose to run a campaign in a publication, consider adding a reference number to the piece, requiring the customer to quote this reference when contacting you. If using contact forms on a website, request the customer advise you on how they heard about you.

For each marketing campaign you undertake, use your chosen measurement tools to assess the effectiveness of that campaign. This will help you to refine your future efforts to get the best results. Even when you think you have perfected your campaigns, continue to review on a regular basis to accommodate any changes in the market and its buying behaviour.

Marketing is important to every business, and when used appropriately for your chosen customers, the returns can be very rewarding. Consider these tips when putting together the basis of your marketing plan.

Michelle Payne-Gale, owner of Essence Business & Admin Support Services, specialises in virtual administration, marketing, research & creative support for start-ups and growing businesses. Additional articles are available at: http//http://www.essence-services.co.uk