Part and parcel with owning your own business, is realising the amount of competition you will come up against. You, of course, need to present and promote your business to your target audience against other industries offering similar services or products to you. But you also need to compete for your audiences time and attention to process your business idea and branding enough for it to be memorable. To fight for the limelight in a world littered with distractions, encouraging your audience to see the value in your business is not an easy thing to do. If you’re beginning to research how to promote your company, here are a couple of ideas;
Host An Event
You could consider organising and funding an event to promote your business by aiming to invite, engage, persuade and impress those who matter for your business’s success. This might be potential business partners, existing clients, a pool of your target audience, journalists and to increase exposure of your business, a celebrity to attract more people to your event. Your party should have a purpose to meet, and a strategy to create an event that will help you achieve this goal. For instance, if it’s to gain an email list, this is what you should out to do. Also, try and think outside the box and provide something out of the ordinary for your guests. As sitting through a four-hour event with someone continuously explaining what your business is about may feel more like a lecture than an event and as a result, you can expect your audience to be quite disengaged.
This is your opportunity to influence and pull out all the stops out to create waves with your business concept, impress your guests, network, build rapport and achieve the desired goal from your investment to host an event.
Merchandise And Goodies
To increase awareness amongst people about your brand, you may wish to get your branding and slogan stamped on products such as; clothing, keyrings, badges, pens, mouse mats and so forth. This is with the intention to give these to your target audience. See here for some examples of promotional items you could invest in. This step is effective in promoting your business in many ways. For instance, if you own an umbrella payroll company and your target customers are recruitment agencies, to begin building rapport and getting your foot in the door with new companies you may want to send them some goodies. Pens, diaries, stress balls and mouse mats will also come in handy for this particular industry. Also giving your audience company gifts may encourage the following;
- Reciprocity – trigger your target audience to call on you if they require your services;
- Familiarity – sending merchandise to other businesses will also create a display of your logo on their desks and office space increasing familiarity with your brand;
- Accessible – Merchandise with contact details on, makes you readily available to Google and/or call;
- Reputation – Professionally made merchandise with a sharp brand image demonstrates credibility to customers.
Incentivising your audience with merchandise to use your services, as displayed above, has a lot of promotional uses worth exercising.
There is a range of ways to market your business and entice customers to buy from you, it just takes some experimenting with different strategies to find out what works for you.
When you are planning to promote your business, remember not to overdo it and badger your target audience with countless emails, calls, invitations and merchandise. Little and often is critical, and you should spread your promotional net far and wide to avoid trying to approach the same audience continuously.
