Your Business....Part One

If you want to attract clients and promote your business, you must know what successful marketers do. Without a doubt, you must always be able to be reached. Even if you are speaking to another client, or are in a consultation, you MUST call that person back within 24 hours.  If you are out of town, you must call and leave a short message as to when you will get back in touch with them. If you have an appointment, you MUST always be on time or ten minutes early. If you are not, you will be not honoring the other person’s time, and this is a time infringement. You MUST send them an email. This email must be professional. Be sure to ask for this information on your telephone message. You simply cannot forget about a call or a client; you need to have an appointment book and notes about when to follow up and put these into a marketing notebook with follow-up dates and look at this daily. We are all human, and sometimes, we forget. If this happens, you MUST be sure to apologize to the client and make it up to them in some way

You started your business with a idea/a dream. You need to be able to want to focus on the work you love, not the process of sales and marketing. The most important part of your business is how you market it.

“Remember always to “under-promise” and over-deliver.”

So, how do you Attract Customers?

Marketing is the most important element to consider when opening a small business. Marketing is what happens before the purchasing decision is made; sales is the outcome of this marketing process. Just tell one person and just like the game we heard about telling one person and by the time the circle is complete, many people know!

You can market with little to no cost! We are living in a world that is interested in relationships; they want engagement. They want to be heard and they need to trust you.

You are Brand You. Your audience is being emailed, called & even harassed daily, the trick is to be your own voice because you are your brand. Over the past 30 years, I have learned one very important lesson. Remember when John Kennedy said, “Ask not what your country can do for you; it’s what you can do with your company.” It is really very simple. It’s not what other people can do for you. What can you do for others. How can you serve as a result of having your company? How can you help other companies to grow?

I can remember taking out an ad in the local newspaper for a one-time 1/2 page ad for $50 and no one saw it! Each generation’s definition of the word brand vary, but relationships are always “in style.”

Our marketing must empower people to focusing on the client’s needs instead of on the product. People tend to buy from people they like. You have to find a way to make people like you. In order to do this, you need to provide the right resoucres for a particular client. Teaching and educating is the way to go. The seller needs to be able to ‘suggest’ that you have an understanding of the client’s needs and that you care. They need to see you as knowledgeable and they MUST trust you. The intended client needs to believe they can trust you.

In my marketing efforts, I use surveys. Now. Online, I use surveys. Why? BECAUSE THEY WORK!.

Michael E.Gerber says, “You need to work on your company, not IN your company. Others (sales teams, interns, etc) can work in your business, while YOU develop it (writing newsletters, blogs, getting articles written about you and so on. I signed on with Ezine to get the articles published

If you want to get people to buy your stuff, you need to understand how people make purchase decisions.

Product quality and seller reputation count… it goes without saying. What about when the product matches the customer’s needs and they trust the seller? What are the things that influence purchase decisions once those fundamentals are in place?

Online purchases start with a Google or Amazon search. Most people perform online research and compare different options. Actually, 73% of purchase decisions purchase decisions begin with research conducted on either Google or Amazon.

Here are 3 things you should know about purchase decisions. Read next articles for the rest of these purchase decisions.

1. Peer reviews matter.

Many studies conducted in the last decade have confirmed what we already know: people read reviews and decide by them.

Approximately 88% report that they trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations and 39% read reviews on a regular basis whereby only 12% of those surveyed don’t read reviews at all.

So start gathering reviews on your site. If you sell commodity products, you might want to look into pulling reviews from an external site so you can display more of them.

Don’t delete negative reviews – They help sales!s if there are only a few of them and they are politely worded. If there’s tons of negative reviews, most people look elsewhere.

2. People gather information from mixed sources.

Even though social media and Internet rule, customers make purchase decisions using a combination of old media, new media, and old-fashioned conversations with friends and family.

According to a relatively older study  by Harris Interactive, the most common methods of gathering information prior to making a purchase are:

• using a company website (36%).
• face-to-face conversation with a salesperson or other company representative (22%).
• face-to-face conversation with a person not associated with the company (21%).

Asking people around us for recommendations is still commonplace. This means the experience you provide to your customers matters a great deal.

People often know why they prefer something.

In a study about ja= tasting, I read somewhere along the way up to my Ph.D., there were scientists who asked consumers to rank jellies on the taste, putting them from top to bottom.

Then the scientists re-did the study statistically representative group. This time, they asked the sample to put the jams in order of taste and tell the people in the study to give an explanation. The jellies that the first group ranked as best tasting were judged to be the worst by the second group. As we all know, a "study" can arrive at any conclusion it wants, depending on the variables!

The conscious brain had been involved in something that it really doesn’t know. Suddenly there are all these social pressures (e.g. what they “should” choose), leading the answers away from what the people actually liked.

The point is that people make instant decisions on a sub-conscious level. If people are asked to explain why, the -rational mind gets involved.

Don’t trust people when they explain why they bought something or didn’t. They might not know themselves.

www.drjoyceknudsen.com An Image Research Company [email protected]