You can see more about my company at www.osamcquillan.ie or if you want to talk to an accountant about Irish tax and accounts you can phone +353 1 283 4123.
You need to change the pace every so often. As well as promoting yourself and your business directly to customers, you may need to look at advertising and other marketing to get your message out there.
Don’t expect every one to jump at every marketing tactic. If all marketing worked, then we could just take a one-size-fits-all marketing plan and impose that on each business in the country.
Some people respond to fliers, others to a phone call asking for business, still more to an emailed tip relating to their business and related to yours. Here are some that are useful to consider.
Fax shots – these can be organised quickly and cheaply to reach new customers. You can stratify and target your fax to different markets. For example you could target businesses that sell bathroom fittings, or you could target all businesses within a postal code, depending on your products and services.
Email shots – these can be effective to introduce your existing customers to new aspects of your business that they should know about. For cold customers, that have never heard of you before, emails are cheap, but very ineffective unless targetted.
If you have a way of collecting emails from potential customers then use it, for example a restaurant could have a monthly draw for anyone that leaves their business card with them. Anyone that leaves their business card also ends up on an email list.
Is there a geographic area that you need to target? Or a particular industry? You can get a tailored list to suit your business from list brokers that specialise in compiling these lists and selling them to people that need them.
Signage – is there somewhere you put a sign for your business – outside your front door, on your car or van, can you get your courier company to sell you advertising on their van? Would your neighbours put up advertising for you on their building / property / front garden?
You can see more about my company at www.OSAMCQuillan.ie or if you want to talk to an accountant about Irish tax and accounts you can phone +353 1 283 4123.
Think of it this way – some people like to take photos on their phone, others prefer a ‘proper’ camera. That’s because of differences in the people, not because one person is better than the other, or one form of photo is better than another.
Therefore if you have a list of people you want to contact because you think they may eventually want your product or service, you will get some return from that list every time you use it.
You may want to think outside the box, and dream up lists of customers that could use your product that you have never thought of. For example if you sell first aid products, you may already sell to high street chemist shops. What about businesses that have to have first aid kits as a matter of law – hotels, shops, hairdressers all have to have fist aid kits on the premises. What are you doing right now to reach those customers.
Is there any way that you can sell products on your website using a credit card, shipping products to customers that you can’t reach now?
You may want to think about setting up a separate entity to service this area rather than going in to competition with your existing customers. If you are selling to retail shops, they may not appreciate that you are now selling in competition to them, so be careful not to annoy them sufficiently that they leave you.
However I stress again that you need to mix it up all the time, so that more customers hear about you in a different way regularly.
You can see more about my company at www.osamcquillan.ie or if you want to talk to an accountant about Irish tax and accounts you can phone +353 1 283 4123.