Market your business right

This Article first appeared on Forbes India.

Marketing your business well is all about generating the right ideas to fit in the entire scheme of things

If you’ve ever given a serious thought on building your own business, or value-adding a business to leave an indelible imprint on it, then a great case study you could come across is movie ‘The Pursuit of Happiness’.

In the movie the protagonist, Will Smith plays the role of an American entrepreneur, Chris Gardner displaying the 5 essential virtues of marketing a business right – Positivity, Value of Building Relationships, Creativity, Building Brand Identity and Flexibility.

For every business mind out there, the movie teaches important corporate lessons. Most importantly, the business is a brand in itself, best considered as a person or a product rather than a company or an organisation.

Fighting for a share to gain the attention of prospects, the idea is to generate sales by following the exact steps that are required to market a product or a service – persuasiveness, passion to deliver and quest to succeed.

Here are some tactical steps, both effective and cost-efficient that help market a business better and help create a brand that everyone looks up to. The core idea here is to develop an essential marketing plan for businesses that ingrains business strategy with key messaging, creating tactical yet critical high-quality marketing content, strengthening brand loyalty and improving sales conversions.

Docket

The most important aspect of building a business is to start with you. Create a document that mentions what the business stands for. Build it into a marketing pitch that is essentially your soul pitch, and concise it into a unique elevator pitch that shall seal the deal.

Networking

Create a network of past and present connections, the stakeholders, target audiences, social media audiences and digital listeners, and scale up the communication for them. In lucid, clearer words define the messaging for each target group and hammer it in.

Get to know contact and network hard. Go out there and meet new prospects and reach new audiences. Get real-time feedback and offer solutions on the spot. You never know what magic a small conversation leads onto.

Open Communication

Encourage and involve your employees to engage in open communication, maintaining a consistent relation with past connections and keeping the stakeholders updated with the ongoing internal processes however big or small, are the mantras of scalable communication that shall help to build the business better.

Relevant Content

Another important aspect that one needs to keep in mind while marketing a business is to create content that meets the business objectives. One needs to be hawk-eyed to the kind of messaging that is being relayed while building the brand. This messaging must be constantly chiseled to create a brand identity that not only is unique but easily identifiable.

Feedback

Building credibility with feedback of successful and satisfied customers, goes a long way in creating brand integrity that attracts greater business. Working on building sustainability featuring solutions, which are scalable and are ready to be tested across varied consumers also allows for transparent scrutiny; create a positive brand image and helps establishing the brand into the audience mind space.

Stay Curious

While building a business and marketing it well, one needs to keep asking questions to tune the way point at regular intervals. Questions like – ‘What is your uniqueness’, ‘How are you a better solution than competition’, ‘Have you brain stormed’, ‘Do you know and understand when the customers go for a service with the competition’, amongst others helps build up the right business profile and enables the business owner to keep the business on the right track and market it right.

Be Future Ready

In a business, being future ready is always the safest course. The business owner needs to create a strategy and communication that is always future ready and is a look forward towards scalability.

Think Out-Of-The-Box

While these solutions help build a scalable business that is bound to grow bigger, in today’s dynamic times thinking out-of-the-box helps in building eye-popping arresting business utilities which are built to last. Some of the divergent thinking modules to try out now are:

Speak Up

Market yourself and your company at social speaking opportunities. Remember you are the face of your company so getting out there building an expertise and a brand for yourself always helps much.

Stay Relevant

Break the norm and do something unique. Today being different and creating viral content is the way to go. Get some outrageous activity out and create a memorable impact on the market.

Give Away

Let people experience your product. People love to try products/services/experiences before they invest in it. If you believe that your product is a game changer then give away a few early samples and let the positive word of mouth act as a referral.

Collaborate

Collaborate with similar successful businesses. Why? Because, if you believe that you are the best, then let the audiences can see your products side by side to your competition and have a first-hand experience of what you do best. Make taking competition head on your mojo and see your business grow like never.

Best is to partner with businesses in the similar work space to either market or get a research done or sponsor an event. Let the partnership rub off the credibility of the partner and position your business in the same mind sphere where you would like to be established.

Build Relationships

Building Relationships always pays. With relationships, you can look out for a second chance as well in product delivery, if somehow the first plan didn't really work out. Human factor always helps when things may fall apart and hence never underestimate the power of personal interaction.

Be an Underdog

People love the underdog story. You never risk losing much in it. Partnering with a small achiever, an underdog or ever sponsoring a small yet credible event helps garner the right eyeballs and offer cost-effective positioning that can be scaled for success. With a right underdog partnership, you would seldom go wrong.

In the end, it all comes down to building relationships and going all out in the pursuit of success. Marketing your business well is all about generating the right ideas to fit in the entire scheme of things. After all, it all boils down to how you choose to trade the cards that will lead you to win the deck hands down.

Zubin Zack is a Managing Director at O. C. Tanner.