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The Web Design Business Kit Chapter 6 - Market Your Business
Why Your Marketing Should Be Very, Very Cheap
The point of marketing is to generate interest. What’s the best measure of “interest”?
Leads and sales! The return you generate from your marketing efforts should far outweigh the cost of those efforts.
Marketing your business shouldn’t just be inexpensive—it should be profitable. It should be profitable because it works. It should work because it is highly targeted and effective.
Simple!
Targeted marketing means ROI.
Your success depends on finding people who are not your clients, but should be. The people who should be your clients will not differ much from those who are the current clients of your competitors. That makes sense—these people aren’t your clients, but they have all the characteristics of the people who would buy your services. Let’s illustrate this concept with an example.
Defining Your Market—And How To Reach It
We want to find out what the characteristics of your target audience are, so that we can get an idea of which marketing tools will be the most effective. First up: identifying your market.
There are two things about your market that we can assume to be true:
- Your prospects with the greatest potential to become your clients will generally live within a fifty kilometer radius of your business.
- Your prospects with the greatest potential to become your clients will operate a business. That business will probably be a small business—most businesses are.
What we’re trying to do here is find a common thread among your potential clients. Now that we’ve got this information, the next step is to find out how these potential prospects might hear about Web development businesses that offer the services they need.
Remember what we said above: the current clients of your competitors have all the characteristics of the people who would buy your services. And what characteristic—in addition to the ones we discussed above—identifies the current clients of your opposition?
They all have Websites.
It’s time for action! Call businesses in your area who have Websites, tell them you’re surveying the ways people hear of Web development firms, and ask how they first heard of the firm they use. Don’t try to develop the relationship any further than that—you’re just completing research at this stage. The people you call will usually be happy to help… and before you know it, you’ll have a fantastic idea of what tools you should use to market your business to the right audience!
You’ll also have the names and addresses of about 100 people who have Websites, and who now have a relationship with you. Mail them all a “Thank you” letter for participating in your survey, along with a summary of the survey results. Keep in touch, making contact with them every three months. Soon, a few will inevitably start to trickle over to your business.
Research Hint!Here’s a quick hint to improve the way your survey call is received. We make the results of every survey we complete available to our local media (and, on occasion, national media). When we call businesses that might be in our market, we say something along these lines:
“We’re currently completing a survey that will be made available to XYZ Television Station. The survey question is ‘How did you first hear of the Web design firm that designed your Website?’”
This approach lends you instant credibility, and increases your response rate. If the people on the other end of the telephone know that the survey will be made available to the local TV station, they will search high and low to find you the answer!
Narrowing The Field
These simple steps provide an excellent basis from which to attack your marketing. But focus a little more deeply and you’ll find even more valuable information. For instance, by looking at who has Websites and who doesn’t) you’ll find that, in certain industries, there are more business Websites than in other industries. Let’s assume here that high-tech industries have a higher percentage of businesses with Websites than do any other industry segments.
You’ve now narrowed your target market to include:
- small business operators
- who manage high-tech businesses
- within a fifty kilometer radius of your business
From your survey, you know how most of the businesses in your area hear of Website
designers.
That’s a well-targeted market!
Now you can grab your market’s attention with laser-like precision. Moreover, because your marketing is so well-targeted, it should be very successful.
The moral of this example? It makes no sense to take $5,000 worth of newspaper advertisements and hope for the best if, with just two hours' work, you can find out exactly how your particular market hears of people in your line of business, and target your promotions, far more cheaply, to them.
Case 6.2. Mmm ... Donuts
My business is perfectly situated—it’s directly above a bakery, a café, and a Domino’s Pizza! The café has changed hands three times in the past twelve months. Why? Because the operators don’t target their market.
The market for the café will be people located within a radius of about five kilometers of the store. The absolute best market will be people within a 100 meter radius. An even better market will be people who work in offices within about fifty metres of the café, which is open largely during business hours.
At any point in time, my business might have twelve employees working frantically away. Almost all of us here like to eat lunch out of the office, or at least to go out to buy our lunch, which we then bring back to the office.
Yet, in the twelve months we’ve been in those offices, we have never had the café staff knock on the door and say, “Hey, you guys! Come and eat lunch with us! We make great kebabs, sensational sandwiches and perfect pies, have icy cold drinks and we will treat you like the important people you are! Here’s a voucher for a special deal to try us out this week—come on in!”
You’re in business. You want to sell whatever it is you sell. Tell people about what you sell. Ask them to buy.
The café should be dropping their new menu in to us every week. They should have wandered around the nearby offices and introduced themselves. They should letterbox drop flyers galore. They should have fabulous big signage outside their shop. And they should do whatever they can to tell people that they’re in business, and that they have something to sell. Only then will they start to sell.