So you’ve decided to proceed with the dream, you’ve set up the workspace or home office and you’re ready to get to work at that great idea. Now what? The marketing that’s what!
So what exactly is marketing? Well in its fullest sense it includes every step from the business concept to the pricing, the promotion and the delivery of the product or service. For the purpose of this post let’s just look at the promotion and advertising side of the equation. You were probably thinking advertising anyway!
How can you market a home business effectively? The answer will vary according to the business itself and the target market. First steps might be to think hard about who your likely customer is, then you can start to plan around that. Once you know who the customer is and how they can benefit from your particular service or product, you can then think about the message you want to get to them and where to reach them. For some businesses, placing ads in local newspapers may be the best approach, for others it may be network marketing, while others will be best off marketed on radio, in specialist magazines or the many flavors of online marketing.
Ask yourself where your target customer is likely to be reached. On the street? On a discussion forum online? Reading a magazine on sewing or fishing? Stuck in a traffic jam listening to radio somewhere? Searching the classifieds for a local service? Or maybe even searching the net using google? When you have identified where the customer is you can then plan on the message you want to use in that place!
As for the message itself, it needs to stand out from the others in some way, if it doesn’t it won’t get the attention of the prospect customer. Getting attention is paramount. The ad needs to stoke the prospect’s interest enough to trigger a desire to learn more about, or order, the product. It also needs to prompt action and get them to contact you or visit your website or whatever next step applies in your case.
Notice I just used the words Attention, Interest, Desire and Action in that paragraph, this is often referred to the AIDA principle of advertising. It’s just one method but it translates well to most businesses and advertising media. We’ll be talking about this again when we come to using Google’s adwords program.
Posted under Marketing
This post was written by admin on September 9, 2007
