The Pocket Small Business Owner's Guide to Building Your Business by Kevin Devine

Author:Kevin Devine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allworth

PROMOTION

Often when people think of promotion they think of advertising. This is normal because most of us are nearly swimming in advertising in one form or another: on radio, TV, the Internet, signs, in movies. So when it comes time to think about promoting your solo business, what’s the first thing you think? Advertising!

For what it does, advertising is great, but advertising takes one thing you probably don’t have a lot of—money, and lots of it. So in this chapter we are going to discuss the bigger picture, all of the various ways you might promote your product. Some are low cost, some are free (except for your time).

Everything you do related to your business is a form of promotion, from answering the phone to the feel of your business cards, from the way you dress to the name you choose for your business. Every exposure your business has with a potential customer affects your promotion.

Here’s an example: A furniture-repair business is having trouble getting repeat business. So the owner decides that he should provide better service by placing more emphasis on communicating with his customers (we’ll assume that he is already offering top-quality repair work). This service might come in the form of a quarterly newsletter, more frequent phone calls, or perhaps by cleaning up the shop so that it looks more professional (a form of packaging). As a result, there is more business, which then allows the owner to raise his prices and actually turn away some business. Turn away business? Isn’t this foolish? Not in this case! Turning away business earns him the reputation of offering only the highest quality, which increases his prestige and also helps justify the higher prices.

In fact, in many situations, promotion is more important than any other single element in determining business success. Most of us know of situations where a business offered a mediocre product, had a high price without high quality, or offered a rip-off of another product and yet succeeded because it was able to promote it product more effectively. As we said before, it doesn’t matter how good your product (or quality or service or price, etc.) is; unless your market knows about it, they can’t buy it from you.

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