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By Matthias Rothe
Far too many people start a business without knowing, and possibly never
wondering,
how anyone will actually learn to know about their business, their
products and start
buying. As it seems to be easier to set up a business online, even more
people do this
big mistake on the Internet. Once, when I started my first own online
business, I
belonged to this bunch of people as well. Assuming that putting up my
own web site
would get me a ton of sales, I never wondered how I would actually get
visitors to my
site. Instead I busied myself with a lot of different projects I
thought would be great
businesses online. Again without knowing where I would get visitors
from and start
marketing in the first place. Needless to say my first business failed
miserably.
Obviously I noticed my failings later on and got deeply into studying
marketing, before
setting out with another business earlier this year. In order to help
you avoid the pitfalls
I stumbled into I’ll tell you how to it right in a loose series of
articles.
After realizing that you must market your business to get sales, which
is the first vital
precursor to business success, you need to learn about marketing as
much as
possible. But where do you begin? There are so many different people
out there telling
you all sorts of things. How do you know what to belief and what to
avoid completely?
The key is to know what marketing truly is and what it’s not.
Furthermore you should
have a good understanding about people and the ways they’re likely to
behave in.
Adding to that common sense and a healthy dose of paranoia concerning
overly
”outstanding” offers, techniques and so-called systems should help you
stay clear of
the nonsense while enabling you to make use of the truly worthwhile
strategies out
there.
One of the first things you should understand and execute in order to
become a
successful marketer is the concept of “doing it now”. Procrastination
of the things you
know you should be doing will get you nowhere other than your sofa in
front of your TV
set. Do you really want to get there, or wouldn’t you rather get down
to work and see
the dollars rolling into your bank account? So, learn to do it now.
Whether it be to get
down on your bun to read some marketing books, articles and tutorials
or whether it be
to eventually execute what you’ve learned – learn to do it now. That
doesn’t mean
however that you should forget about all the other things that are
important to your life.
Your family is still important, so are the other tasks you need to do
while you’re
amongst the living ;-). To get started with “doing it now” sit down and
pull out your time
planner - now. Write down the tasks you need to accomplish this week.
Those you
already know and those you’ll want to add once your done reading this
article. Then do
them, one at a time, just as you’ve planned. Start now and do every
single task in its
appropriate “now” slot.
While your writing down all the different tasks you want to accomplish
this week, plan
to do your feared thing first. So, instead of putting it still another
week off to read that
book you wanted to read all along or writing that letter to your past
customers to ask
them for return business, plan to do those things first. It might
frighten you. Yes it may
even scare you. But it’s the only way to move forward. See how far you
got with putting
things off? Imagine now how far you could have come had you learned to
do your
feared thing first instead. There is no significant gap? Try to think a
bit harder. Still no
significant gap? Good! You obviously already know how to do your feared
thing first.
Everyone else, learn it, apply it and see the results coming in faster
than you ever
thought possible. It’s a concept that powerful. You don’t believe me?
Try to prove me
wrong.
Earlier on I told you that you need to see marketing as what it truly
is. Now what exactly
is it? Jay C. Levinson, one of the most renowned small business
marketing experts,
once stated that marketing is every single contact any part of your
business has with
any part of the public. That means it’s not just advertising nor is it
something only big
businesses can do. Telling other parts of the public that your business
exists and what
kinds of products can be obtained from you is as vital for your
business as breathing is
for you to stay alive. It generally doesn’t matter what ways you choose
to communicate
with the public about your business. As soon as anyone who doesn’t
belong to your
business learns about it, that’s marketing. Whether you tell your
friends, or your co-
worker spills the beans in the pub, that’s all marketing. Obviously
there’s effective
marketing and ineffective marketing. Marketing that increases your
bottom line to
incredible levels and marketing that makes you loose one sale after
another. Marketing
that makes people come to you in droves and marketing that drives
people away in
hordes to name but a few extremes. But regardless of what it
accomplishes, it’s all
marketing and that’s the all important fact right now. So, remember
marketing is every
contact any part of your business has with any part of the public.
Later on I’ll tell you
how to make it all to work smoothly and effectively.
Another concept you need to understand to become successful in the long
run is that
effective marketing is an infinite, circular process that never ever
stops as long as
you’re running your business, just as you never stop breathing as long
as you stay
alive. It’s actually quite simple to understand once you compare it
with your breathing.
You don’t gulp some air every now and then, in major singular events,
to live on the
oxygen you got in the gulp. Rather you constantly breath in and out. In
and out. In and
out. Just as you, as a living body, do that your business needs to
communicate its
existence not in rare major events, like to idiomatic super bowl ad.
Rather your
marketing needs to be an ongoing effort. Just as the aim of constantly
breathing in and
out is to get fresh oxygen as often as needed, ongoing marketing aims
for getting fresh
sales as often as you want them.
That leads us to the next important issue. There are only three ways to
get sales. From
entirely new customers. From repeat customers. And from referred
customers. As the
second and third way are cheaper and easier to get I’ll focus on them
in the next
articles and tell you how to use them effectively. To quote Levinson
again the three key
words in the last paragraphs are EVERY, REPEAT and REFFERAL. In fact he
states
that if your marketing is not an infinite circle “it’s a straight line
that leads directly into
Chapters 7, 11, or 13 in the bankruptcy courts.”
As you probably already know by now after reading the prior paragraphs,
marketing is
the one most central function of your business. I mean it lives and
dies by the quality of
your marketing. Stop communicating its existence and it ceases to exist
very quickly.
Now, that you know quite a lot more about marketing, there is one final
thing I’d like to
add to make it all applicable. In order to put it all into practice you
need to learn to
create and use a comprehensive system. Just as your lungs and the whole
system of
your body connected to them enables you to breath and the oxygen to
reach every
single cell of your body, you need to have a marketing system that
allows to practice
what you’ve just learned. How you should go about creating that system
I’ll show you in
the articles still to come.
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