What Is The Best Way To Market Your Business? It depends...

Most people agree that marketing is a good idea but exactly how to do it can be quite daunting as it depends on so many factors. Here are a few:

• Your target audience - B2B, B2C or both - this will affect whether you use LinkedIn, Facebook, Google or good old fashioned cold-calling and leafleting.
• The price of your goods or services - not always, but more expensive goods or services may take longer to make a sale.
• One off or recurring income - for example, a workshop may generate a one-off sale whereas an ongoing managed service may generate recurring revenue.
• The length of your sales cycle - can you sell via your website, one meeting with your customer or several meetings over several months?

Added to that, you've got 3 main options if you want to implement a marketing plan for your business:

• Learn how to do it yourself.
• Get someone to help you do it.
• Get someone to do it for you.

Which option should you choose? Again this depends...

I posted a poll asking this exact question to see how many people prefer each option. Here are the results at the time of writing:

Of course, I forgot to mention - there is a 4th option - Don't believe in marketing!

This poll is showing that nearly half of the respondents like to learn how to do their own marketing, so if this is you, here are some things to consider:

TIME - You will need to invest a bit of time if you take the Learn it Myself route. The amount of time you have to invest depends on how quickly you learn and how good you are at applying what you learn to your business.

MONEY - Typically this is the cheaper option - at least in the beginning! Buying some books or investing in some online resources is normally not that expensive (YouTube is free!) but the hidden costs associated with finding new customers (instead of doing paid work for customers) can soon add up.

EFFORT - Not knowing how much effort you need to put in can be daunting. Not knowing whether you're on track (or not) with bringing in new clients can be frustrating. Not knowing how long it is going to take to bring in new clients can be tiring.

TOO BUSY - Doing client work, running a business, training staff - it's quite easy to not actually get the head space to put new marketing principles into place.

Marketing your business can be a maze, which is why it's important to consider whether to learn it yourself, get some help with it or pay someone else to do it.

If you like learning for yourself, you may be interested in my next LinkedIn workshop on 31st March 2023 via Zoom. The cost is ￡79.00 and it covers a 90 minute live session, group follow up session and 1:1 strategy session .

If you would prefer the done for you approach, we can help you get some good results from our LinkedIn managed service, starting from ￡325 per month .