Ideas from networking and joint venturing to honoring and doing simple math. Most of these ideas can be done with your investment of time and effort.
- Attend networking events in your community. Search the Internet, find and attend the next local Chamber of Commerce meeting. Be taken as a guest to your local BNI or other networking group meetings. Choose these meetings wisely based in the product/service you are offering. Keep in mind that not all networking groups will be attended by your ideal target prospect, but you may get an introduction from one of the members to someone who’ll fit your target. Most important, don’t forget to follow-up with any hot leads fast.
- Create joint ventures. Approach complimentary businesses that you think will be a good fit for joint marketing efforts. For example, a carpet cleaning business could do joint ventures with carpet sellers, builders or their local dry cleaner. Who will you collaborate with?
- Host a get together. It doesn’t have to be anything on a grand scale. Simply invite a bunch of complimentary business people together. Start a discussion about a common topic, stand back and listen. I guarantee everyone will learn something and walk away with new business ideas.
- Host a webinar or teleseminar. A good webinar or teleseminar informs participants, gives them very high value for their time, educates and motivates them to make a buying decision for your product or service. During the webinar or teleseminar, show how your product or service solves their problems ands what will happen if they don’t fix the problem. There are many free hosting services, simply do an online search.
- Hold a fundraising award show. Create an event to honor your clients, employees and suppliers with various awards. Inform your honorees about the award they have won. Invite the honorees, their friends, family and colleges to your fundraising event. They will want to come to your event collect their award and won’t mind contributing because it’s for a fundraising cause. Use the monies you collect to offset the cost and contribute the balance to the charity.
- Improve Customer Service. Most businesses can find areas of their customer service that need poking, tweaking and improvement. It’s all in the details. Happy customers will buy from you over and over. And it’s a lot easier and less expensive to keep an existing customer happy compared to replacing lost customers and revenue.
- Marketing is arithmetic. Direct marketing is measurable and as Peter F. Drucker, said, “What’s measurable improves.” Are you measuring the response to your ads, direct marketing effort or your web traffic? Direct marketing measurement is basically free. Whether you spend a nickel, a hundred or ten thousand dollars on your marketing, is it a great deal or is it a bad investment? The only real way to know is tracking and measuring your results. If you can add, subtract, multiply and divide, you can become a profitable marketer.
Now, pick one of these items and commit to adding it to your marketing plan and doing it on a daily or weekly basis.
Within a month, you will see your business climb with more clients and sales.
And remember, you can get the word out about your products, services and ideas without spending hundreds or thousands of your hard earned marketing budget.
If these marketing for sales professionals ideas are helpful, maybe the last 3 posts will help you even more.