Accountants

Marketing = Change = Stimulus = Action

Marketing = change = stimulus = action

You can see more about my company at www.osamcquillan.ie or if you want to talk to an accountant about Irish accounts or tax you can phone +353 1 283 4123.

A lot of small businesses have no marketing plan at all, so if you do any marketing – congratulations, you are way ahead of the competition you face in the small to medium sized enterprises markets.  

If you don’t want to increase the profitability of your business, read no further.  And with any luck, your competitors won’t have made it this far either.

Now – customers respond to stimulus.  Almost any stimulus.  That’s what marketing people will not tell you, because for small businesses, it really is that easy.  At the end of this section I set out a few tactics you can use for your business immediately, and I can guarantee if you use some of these tactics, you will increase your sales.

So there you have it – a little extra work now in promoting your business can produce a higher income stream.

Marketing tactics for small businesses:

1.  Get printed paper pads with appropriate messages for your business.  If you are an architect maybe one edge of the paper could have a ruler, and if you are an electrician then you could put wiring ratings on your pad.  The more use the pads are the more likely that customers will keep them and use them.  Give them out to customers.  Paper pads can be done quite cheaply using internet printers.

2.  Give out other promotional items to your customers – pens, diaries and so forth.

3.  Get a website and make it interesting and useful for your customers – for an accountant, put tax rates, get a tax calculator and put it on your website.  If you have a car sales business, put the car tax rates on the website so people will use your website as a reference.

4.  Use email to get your message out to customers.  To do this, you will need to set up an email list.   You will also need information that is of interest to your customers and relevant to your product.  So if you are a printer you could send out images of all the brochures you can produce from one single image, and print everything to one theme.  You might even show a template website that you could design for potential customers.

5.  Use texting to advise customers of free offers, new products, launches that are coming up.  While not every one will use the new service, buy the new product, these contacts will remind the customers that you are there and will increase sales over time.

6.  Have a look at other free gizmos you can give customers – shopping bags, coin holders for their shopping trolley coins, mobile phone ‘jewellery’ to hang from a mobile phone – the list is endless, and just depends on your budget.

Don’t be put off by the impression that you need to have a Masters in Business to do any marketing.  Just use your common sense to figure out what’s appropriate to your business.

If other people in your industry don’t market, or you can’t think of any good ideas on how to market your business, then why not look overseas to successful businesses in your industry to see what they do.  You can then adapt some of their good ideas and use them in your business.

For some businesses, simply repeating your message to the audience is enough to get you noticed.  It’s called branding by the larger companies, but suffice to say that when you are high enough in someone’s mind so that your name pops into their mind when they think of your product or service, then you have good branding in that person’s mind.

Service businesses will tell us that it can take up to 6 contacts with the customer before they will  buy from that provider.  So for example, a recruitment company will need to contact a customer many times before expecting to get come business from that customer.

If you are in a business that rarely contact customers, say an emergency call out plumber, then it is vital that you keep your name in the customers mind.  So why not ask the customer for their mobile number, and take the time sometime to text some information about your business.  At the worst you’ll get some replies asking you to never text them again, but at best you will get some callouts because everybody keeps their mobile with them all the time now, and if the customer wants to pass your number on to their friends and neighbours they have your number on their mobiles now.

You can see more about my company at www.osamcquillan.ie or if you want to talk to an accountant about Irish accounts or tax you can phone +353 1 283 4123.

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