Auckland Small Business Help

Auckland Sales and Marketing

Does your business rely on your Marketing efforts in order to bring in business?

If so, are you an expert marketer ?

There’s an old marketing proverb that goes “You can’t sell a secret”

If your business relies on marketing then the whole business is only as good as the marketing, and if you are not telling anyone about your business or product, then how do you expect them to buy it ?

If you are not good at marketing, then it makes sense to outsource to someone who is.

Fortunately there are many low cost marketing activities that you can undertake yourself, or outsource to an expert and get good results within a very short time.

These activities are generally Direct Response marketing such as Newspaper adverts, Internet adverts, mailbox fliers or Postcard drops etc.

Done correctly these can be very effective, however a business’s most valuable asset is it’s database.

If your business does not currently keep a track of your customers, then begin doing it immediately.

Your existing customers are your best prospects, as they are already familiar with your business and its’ products, so all it takes is for you to make them an offer that they cannot refuse and your turnover will immediately increase. The key is to recognise the lifetime value of your customers and then design an offer that will be very attractive to them and still make you money in the long run, through either repeat sales, upsells or cross sells, or through referrals of new customers.

Web Site

Another important tool in your marketing is your web site.

For most businesses, there should not be any expectation to make a sale directly off your web site, unless you have products that are saleable on a site.

Your Website is your customers window into your business and a brochure for your products.

Your customers will make judgements about your company based on how they find using your website.

That does not necessarily mean you need to have a flashy site with all the bells and whistles, as if the site is too slow because of all the add-ons then the prospect can quickly get frustrated and move onto another site.

Good sites are about providing quality information and solutions to the problems that the prospects have, not about how pretty they are.  So in ugly website with lots of good content may perform better for the company than a pretty one with little in it.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

Your web site is of no use to you if no-one can find it. This is where the SEO aspects of your site become important.

You can choose to ignore  SEO and pay for direct advertising such as Google Adwords pay per click PPC (the sponsored ads you see on the right hand side of search results and often embedded into sites) these cost you money every time someone clicks on your ad.

.

Alternatively, by careful use of words and choice of key words, by having good quality content on your site and by submitting your site to the search engines, you can have your site “Organically ranked” high on the search results for particular words relevant to your product or service.

This then becomes Free advertising (apart from the work you put into the site- which you should do anyway)

eg if you search Google for “Business Turnarounds Auckland” this site should be on the first page of the results.

To a small business with little advertising budget this is invaluable.

Other technologies such as Social Networking sites (Facebook, Twitter) provide other opportunities to reach a wide audience for very little cost and are well worth assessing as to how they might fit into your business marketing plan.

Be sure to check out the Website Tools menu above for some useful resources

.

.

.

.

.

Auckland Small Business Help