How to give your business a boost – 3 top tips
Guest Blog
Mark Harris has been a Business Advisor for small businesses and startups for over 9 years. Here he gives his 3 top tips for anyone whose business needs a boost, or perhaps they need a boost!
What makes you special?
When you are trying to get others interested in your business (be that face to face, social media, or online networking) you will have their attention for a very short space of time – you have to use that time to make them want to know more.
Strangely, this can be harder for an existing business than a new one – you know your business inside out, but that makes it hard for you to see the wood from the trees. Go back to basics – what is it that makes you (and your business) special? Your prospect is not telepathic. I have a personal hatred of sentences which start with the word “Obviously….” – it’s not obvious!
For me, if I say I’m a business consultant, the response (in the prospect’s mind, if not out loud) is “Oh, another one”.
If I say “I’m a business consultant who specialises in micro businesses, with more than half my client base being solopreneurs, and I help them work on the things they’re not good at.”, people then ‘get it’.
And if they don’t want what I’m offering, that’s great – I can invest my time in someone who might!
How will you tell people?
You can sit around all day processing the countless emails in your inbox and feeling productive, but people will not flock to your door unless you encourage them to do so.
How best to do that does vary depending on you, on what you’re offering, and to whom you want to offer it. As a generality, you need to define your perfect customer, work out where and how you can engage with them, and then put yourself in that place.
“That place” could be real or virtual. It could be a black tie dinner, or a Facebook group, or any mixture of countless options. There is huge value in working this out – you can talk to a brick wall for as long as you like – it won’t get you business!
And of course how you tell them is key. Your messages must be clear and consistent. You need to engage people, to make them want to know more. There is no simple formula for this – the number of variables are huge, so the number of “right answers” are huge too.
You’ve probably been marketing your business since its inception (I hope so!). That actually makes it harder for you to take a fresh look at your marketing, to see it as others see it. Which leads me nicely to…..
