When you first start your business, indeed on an ongoing basis, you will need to let people know about your business in order to sell your products or services. Marketing is also known as promoting and advertising.
This can seem daunting at first, but it is important to let people know about your business in order to find your customers or clients. People often ask if they have customers or clients, according to the dictionary definition, a customer is someone who buys something, especially from a shop. A client is a person or company that receives a service from a professional person or organisation in return for payment.
In order to know the best way to spend your time, it is important to spend some time considering who your customers or clients will be, they will be what is known as your target market, those who will be looking for the service or product you sell. Once you have determined your target market, you should give some thought to how and where they would be looking for your product or service. Wherever they will be looking is where you should ensure they find you! There will be plenty of websites where you can list your business details for free. It is important to keep a record of where you have listed and keep your listings up to date.
You should consider creating a GoogleMyBusiness page as well as a presence across social media platforms as may be appropriate to your line of work. Presence may simply be basic contact details to ongoing updates about your business and your work. We look more at using social media
Not all marketing and promotion will be online, you may consider visiting or telephoning prospective customers or taking advertisements in local newspapers or magazines or buying promotional products that advertise your services.
Those who become your customers or clients will be known as your customer or client base, it is important to think how you should hold details of your customers or clients and any value that you will receive by keeping in touch with them, newsletters, reminders, special offers etc, dependent on what your business is!
One thing you should always try to do is to track your marketing activities, you may spend a lot of time and money on promoting your business and it is important for you to be able to know what works and what is worth carrying on with as well as what is not successful. How you do this will as always be determined by what your business does, but can be done simply by asking your customers where they heard about you from special offer codes varying for different platforms in order to be able to identify where the customer found out about you!