How To Make That First Contact With Offline Businesses
It is important to be properly prepared before you go about establishing contact with offline business owners. This includes having a domain name, a website that displays the services you are offering, a set of business cards and printed material that outlines the services and benefits. They are the basics, but they are essential.
Keep in mind that small business owners are busy people. They are not necessarily going to want to spend a whole lot of time analyzing different service plans and considering what is best for them. Also, you may not be the first person who has approached them about having a website. In fact, they may have a website, a very bad one, for which they paid a lot of money. Therefore they may be reluctant to respond positively to your approach.
Therefore you need to practice your approach beforehand. This will vary depending on your existing presentation skills. It is crucial to come across as a confident, experienced professional in your field. Write down the key points you wish to make together with any supporting evidence. Rehearse it a few times until you feel relaxed and confident.
If you already have some experience as an online marketer then boost yourself with the thought that it is probably easier to market to offline businesses than online businesses, who are much more aware of just how many resources and alternatives are available online.
There will be times when you meet up with someone who is not at all responsive, in which case you should thank them politely for their time and move on.
Bear in mind that there a whole host of offline businesses who need your services and if you do all the preliminary promotional work you are not going to have any difficulty in recruiting a large number of customers.
The statistics are overwhelmingly in your favor. Approximately 50% of small businesses do not have an online presence. This has two important consequences for you as you prepare to launch your business of marketing to offline businesses.
Firstly, you are going to have very little competition. That’s a far cry from traditional internet marketing where, in some areas, competition is intense.
Secondly, you are presenting yourself to people who probably have a very limited knowledge of the services and benefits you will be offering.
Therefore your confidence should not be an issue. Do your preparation and you will be successful in turning those initial contacts into paying customers.
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Categories: Customer Service, Small Business Consulting Tags: initial contact, small business owners
DIY or Outsource: which one is best for your business?
When the economy gets tough, a lot of business owners (especially small businesses) look carefully into cutting back on their expenses. The things that get cut down the most, before everything else, are the efforts and budget they devote to marketing and staff.
With the same number of tasks to do and fewer employees to perform the work, those business owners are then often forced to try to do a lot of the work themselves. With this added load, there is no time left to build their business. They end up spending their time working IN their business and not ON their business.
Is this the best way for them to save their time and money? Are there any alternatives available that they can use?
Let’s look at several things business owners can do to continue to keep growing their business, especially in tough economic times.
The first thing that can be done is to market their business creatively, thinking outside the box so to speak. Using their business cards more effectively is one way of creative marketing.
Taking their offline brick and mortar business to the cyber world of online business is another cost effective way to market the business.
Here are several other cost effective ways to market a business:
- Joint Venture marketing, where two or more businesses gets together to promote each others’ businesses.
- Affiliate marketing is a way of marketing where businesses let other people’s to promote their business and services and get paid based on their performance. Meaning businesses only have to pay their affiliates when they make a sale.
Outsourcing is a great option for business owners that feel like they do not have enough hours in the day. It offers an alternative resource to do all the tasks they know need to be done. Several tasks that you can consider to be outsourced include repetitive works that do not directly impact the bottom line such as cold calling, follow up calls, and data entry. Most businesses outsource their accounting chores.
Outsourcing is a logical extension for other tasks that may be more efficiently accomplished by specialized assistance. Creating a professionally designed and optimized web site for an offline business for a small one time fee is also a great and effective way to outsource for specialized services. This can prove to be very profitable over the long term.
Creative marketing and outsourcing are only two of many examples of what businesses can do to grow and increase their profits effectively and efficiently. There are many other ways available.
All that must be done is to think creatively and be willing to learn from other successful business models.
