Homebased Marketing
Homebased marketing is an essential activity that will make your homebased business successful. In the possibly chaotic world of a home business it is easy to be distracted by all the other business activities outside of marketing.
Marketing is not an optional business activity. You must plan to spend much of your time and budget on marketing, especially when starting a business.
In order to thrive, the main goal of any business is to attract and keep many good customers. In order to do that, you have to get to know your customers, understanding their needs and wants in relation to the products or services you provide.
Some of the things you need to know about your customers are where and how they will buy your product or service, what needs or wants your products satisfy for them, where they are located, whether they are the consuming public or they are primarily commercial, their gender or genders, their age range, income range, education range, and what their characteristics are regarding those characteristics that affect purchase decisions (such as personality, attitudes, interests, or living preferences).
Identify your target customers. Target customers are those groups that can benefit the most from your products or services. If you sell fruit from a farm stand, the target customers are in the vehicles that pass by, and may also be people who live in nearby towns, local restaurants, canners, and other groups.
Determine the desires of your target customers through observation and market research. Try to learn the characteristics of your target customers, so you can most efficiently aim marketing at those customers. If you sell sporting equipment, for example, you may have a group of target customers aged 10 to 18 years, male and female, from families with incomes over US$40,000 per year with at least some college education who buy clothing and equipment for soccer (football), baseball, basketball, tennis, golf, and running or track.
If you are just starting a sporting equipment business you may need to limit your initial selection of goods to one sport, or one aspect of a sport or sports.
A constant marketing activity in our world of continual change is understanding your target market and adjusting the mix of products you offer to this market.
What homebased marketing actions can you take now?
In this online era, probably the most important aspects of homebased marketing start with a good web site. A good web site can make you competitive with large retailers.
But don’t forget that face-to-face contact can also be very powerful. To keep costs low you may have to do face-to-face marketing locally and market beyond your local area via the internet.
Another category of marketing methods is traditional marketing.
Face-to-face homebased marketing methods include:
- Offering business cards and simple sales flyers to everyone when appropriate
- Cold calling on potential customers in person, and asking them to do business with you
- Asking for referrals from current customers, clients, friends and relatives
- Interacting at clubs & meetings and providing public speaking about your field when appropriate
Traditional homebased marketing methods include:
- Newspaper and magazine classified ads and regular columnar ads
- Postal advertising using flyers, coupons and other methods
- Radio and TV advertising
- Cold phoning to potential customers in your target market
- Cold phoning to established customers to offer incentives for additional purchases
- Radio and television appearances or interviews
- Press releases from your company
Web site marketing methods can be very effective and inexpensive. Find out at Web Site Marketing Solution.