Marketing: Where Do You Start?
What is Marketing?
Marketing is an umbrella concept. There are many different specific techniques that can create business for you.
The term marketing is greatly misunderstood. Too many people use the term advertising to mean marketing. Advertising is one type of marketing, but there is so much more available to you.
“Marketing is anything you do to get or keep a customer.” This definition comes from Harvard Professor Michael Porter. It includes reaching out to new prospects and getting more business from your existing clients.
Marketing is an ongoing experiment to find methods you are comfortable and that appeal to your ideal client. As you find techniques that succeed, marketing can become a simple routine that takes less of your attention. So, the goal of great marketing is for it to become easier and easier while you have more time and more fun interacting with your clients.
Marketing connects you with people. As these people get to KNOW you, LIKE you and TRUST you, they will use your products and services, and, even better, they will refer you to their network of friends. The more effort you make to keep in touch with existing clients, maintaining your relationship with them, the more business you’ll get.
What do you do first?
We have a worksheet we use with our clients called your “Marketing Pie”. We review everything you are doing now to market you business. We discuss what’s working and what’s not. Then we brainstorm on new ways to market your business that you may not have considered. We focus on low cost or no cost techniques to attract your ideal client. What works for you might not work for someone else. It depends on your personality and the resources available to you.
After we identify the marketing techniques, we help you implement the systems to make it happen. Sometimes we come up with the system and the client implements it themselves, other times we do the implementation. We let our clients decide how much or how little they’d like us to do to help them reach their marketing goals.
For example, some clients simply want a search engine friendly website created and they want to make the posts and maintain the site themselves. Others want me to set up a Facebook page for them, come up with a campaign of posts, and then make the posts for them too. I find myself saying “I’m flexible” a lot. I love that I can offer my clients flexibility. I work within their time frame and within their budget.
Ask about our complimentary 45 minute brainstorming session to get you started.
We look forward to hearing from you!!
Michelle Aspelin
Entrepreneur and Professional Implementer
Mindshare Marketing & Implementation Services
Call me directly at 952-484-6015