Promotion is not the same as marketing. Promotion of a small business encompasses all methods of getting the word about your small business out into the community. Marketing, public relations, networking, advertising, press releases, and many more actions all are forms of promotion.
The purpose of promotion is name recognition, without negative association. Famous criminals are not sought out for business relationships. Positive association is best, but even neutral or no opinion association is valuable. The objective is to get the most people possible saying "I've heard of them" when your business name comes up.
The reason name recognition is important to your success is because people are more likely to approach something they are familiar with. When they need the product or service you offer, and are looking at their alternatives, they are most likely to call the business whose name they recognize (unless they have heard bad things about it).
Part of promotion has to do with presentation. Negative association is more likely to come from poor presentation than from enemies whispering unflattering things about you. Therefore, a great deal of your promotional energy should be devoted to the quality of your promotion. Amateurish, error-ridden promotional work will turn people off, and once they are turned off, it is very hard to again make them receptive.
Presentation reaches beyond the quality of your printing or advertising. Every single contact your business name makes with anyone reflects on their impression of your business. Every email, every conversation, how you dress, how quickly your website loads, and any other interaction between you or your business and people are all promotional actions, and are affected by the quality of their presentation. So be professional at all times, and project competence and other positive qualities to the best of your ability.
Books have been written full of promotional ideas, and many can be found for free on the internet, by searching for "inexpensive promotion" or "promotional ideas" or the like. Many of them are impractical or inappropriate to your business, but some of them will make sense to you.
A fifteen-dollar table at a church flea market might result in 500 new people hearing of you or seeing your name. High school event programs are seen by hundreds of parents and are cheap to put a small ad in. Always having a business card to hand to anyone who will take it is a basic of promotion. There are hundreds of ways to promote a local business, including on the internet.
If your business is not local, but internet-based, promotion follows the same rules: keep the quality of presentation high, and seek out ideas with a search for "internet promotional ideas" and similar words. Beware anything that says "free" except downloadable ebooks. There are ways to effectively promote for free on the internet, but most of them are not advertised.
Look for bloggers with many followers, and make intelligent comments about their blogs. Get your website included in specialized directories (not the huge directories that no one uses or even sees). Offer a free ebook on free ebook sites. Probably the best inexpensive way to promote on the internet is with an ezine that you email out regularly, but that route is time-intensive and requires a firm commitment. You will find many more ways if you look for them.
You can measure the success of your promotional efforts in a local setting fairly easily: each month, ask 30 or more strangers if they have heard of your business, and keep track on a graph of the percentage who have. If the graph line isn't going up, you need to promote more or with better presentation or both.
On the internet, promotional success is clearcut: keep track of the number of unique visitors to your site.
One final warning: promotion is not marketing. Do not neglect actual marketing actions, as they are what will produce actual leads and actual sales. Promotion plows the field; marketing sows the seeds; salesmanship tends the crop and reaps the harvest.
***
Don Dewsnap is the author of Small Business Magic, published by Oak Wand Publishing. Small Business Magic details the principles of quality necessary to business success, applying to all aspects of business from production to sales. The principles of quality are not well known, and almost never applied to their full potential.
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Showing posts with label success. Show all posts
Friday, June 18, 2010
Small Business Success Tips - Persistence
A ridiculous claim has repeatedly been made for the value of persistence in a small business, which boils down to, "If you persist, you will succeed." The problem with untrue claims is that when they are rejected, any related truth is rejected also. So let us sort out the truths and untruths about persistence.
Starting a small business usually turns out to be harder than the owner anticipated. Almost all small businesses go through financial strains, especially when beginning, and take far more of the owner's time than he imagined he could supply. Frustration and discouragement are common. If your business does not fit this mold, but is succeeding easily, good for you, and keep on doing what you are doing. Otherwise, read on.
The two obvious truths relating to persistence are 1) if you give up, you lose, and 2) you cannot give up and win. The only other two possibilities are persist and lose, and persist and win. Logically, then, there is only one way to win, and that is to persist. Persistence does not guarantee success, but it provides the chance.
How does a small business owner turn persistence into success? One major action will do it.
Keep improving.
Every aspect of your business, from production to sales to finances, can continually be made better, as in more efficient and more effective. In short, quality can be increased. All the principles of quality come into play in every area, but the most important is the first: Quality is an Attitude. You have to want and intend improvement, across the board.
Persistence without improvement is spinning your wheels until you have dug them into a rut too deep to drive out of.
Two other principles of quality are Learn and Fix. Here is where the bulk of your persistence time will be spent.
The more you learn about the various aspects of your business, the better you will be at them. No matter how busy you are, your future success depends on spending some time every day on learning. Most of your learning can be from articles and ebooks on the internet. Some will be from books and audio or video tutorials. We are not talking about learning from experience; that falls under the next section. We mean learning the theoretical and practical information about what to do and how to do it for every function in your business.
Then there is the School of Hard Knocks: learning by experience. You make a mistake, or you do not get the results you expected from an action, and you learn from it. First you fix it, to keep overall quality up, and then you figure out why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future.
What is the enemy of persistence? Discouragement. Whether you feel discouraged by how long it is taking to make progress, or because people are actively discouraging you, the best answer to discouragement is to acknowledge its presence, then spit in its face. Persistence almost always takes longer than you want it to. Discouragement is just a temporary reminder of that fact.
Persistence alone does not guarantee success. Persistence with continual improvement does.
Starting a small business usually turns out to be harder than the owner anticipated. Almost all small businesses go through financial strains, especially when beginning, and take far more of the owner's time than he imagined he could supply. Frustration and discouragement are common. If your business does not fit this mold, but is succeeding easily, good for you, and keep on doing what you are doing. Otherwise, read on.
The two obvious truths relating to persistence are 1) if you give up, you lose, and 2) you cannot give up and win. The only other two possibilities are persist and lose, and persist and win. Logically, then, there is only one way to win, and that is to persist. Persistence does not guarantee success, but it provides the chance.
How does a small business owner turn persistence into success? One major action will do it.
Keep improving.
Every aspect of your business, from production to sales to finances, can continually be made better, as in more efficient and more effective. In short, quality can be increased. All the principles of quality come into play in every area, but the most important is the first: Quality is an Attitude. You have to want and intend improvement, across the board.
Persistence without improvement is spinning your wheels until you have dug them into a rut too deep to drive out of.
Two other principles of quality are Learn and Fix. Here is where the bulk of your persistence time will be spent.
The more you learn about the various aspects of your business, the better you will be at them. No matter how busy you are, your future success depends on spending some time every day on learning. Most of your learning can be from articles and ebooks on the internet. Some will be from books and audio or video tutorials. We are not talking about learning from experience; that falls under the next section. We mean learning the theoretical and practical information about what to do and how to do it for every function in your business.
Then there is the School of Hard Knocks: learning by experience. You make a mistake, or you do not get the results you expected from an action, and you learn from it. First you fix it, to keep overall quality up, and then you figure out why it happened, and how to prevent it in the future.
What is the enemy of persistence? Discouragement. Whether you feel discouraged by how long it is taking to make progress, or because people are actively discouraging you, the best answer to discouragement is to acknowledge its presence, then spit in its face. Persistence almost always takes longer than you want it to. Discouragement is just a temporary reminder of that fact.
Persistence alone does not guarantee success. Persistence with continual improvement does.
Monday, June 14, 2010
Small Business Success Tips - Carefulness
Almost every printing company has this sign on its wall: "Why is there never enough time to do it right, and always enough time to do it over?"
This ironic, even cynical statement can be applied to almost any business, large or small. In some industries, up to two-thirds of working hours are spent on correcting mistakes. In a small business, wasted hours and materials can easily make the difference between success and failure.
Yet almost all mistakes can be prevented. The secret to preventing mistakes is in being careful.
Carefulness usually takes a little longer. Note this: a "little" longer. Being careful does not mean doubling the time it takes to do something. It means twelve minutes instead of ten, or seven hours instead of six and a half.
Two simple actions will eliminate almost all mistakes made in your business:
1) Pay attention. When your mind is elsewhere, mistakes happen. If you get interrupted, stop what you are doing, handle the interruption, then get your mind back onto what you are doing. If you start daydreaming, it is time to take a break. Go take a short walk, get a glass of water, and come back when you can concentrate.
2) Check your work. This unbelievably effective procedure is overlooked by almost everyone, every day. Small business owners particularly are so full of self-confidence that they just assume they have done something correctly. Maybe nine times out of ten they have. Then the mistake in the tenth time costs them all the profit from the first nine.
Every action in a business deserves carefulness. Misspellings in emails and on websites project an image of ignorance and lack of quality. Incorrect invoices don't get paid. Unswept floors and dirty windows can repel customers, especially the ones you want most: the wealthy, well-bred ones.
Then there are the products or services your business sells. A nick here, a scratch there, a form not filled out correctly or completely, a missed spot in the painting, little mistakes that could have been prevented by being more careful, will make a customer look elsewhere the next time he needs that product or service.
As a small business owner, the burden is on you to insist that both you and your staff follow a firm policy of carefulness. When an error is made, figure out how carefulness could have prevented it, and make sure everyone knows, so it doesn't happen again. This doesn't mean to make someone feel bad for making a mistake; it means to make them feel better and more capable in the future. Probably all they have to do is slow down and be more careful. Don't worry: as they get more experienced, the speed will return, but without the mistakes.
Above all, do not, repeat do not, let mistakes go by with a careless phrase like "Don't worry about it. Mistakes happen." If you don't do something about it, the same mistakes will continue to happen.
Carefulness results in higher quality at lower cost. It is worth your investment.
***
Don Dewsnap is the author of Small Business Magic, published by Oak Wand Publishing. Small Business Magic details the principles of quality necessary to business success, applying to all aspects of business from production to sales. The principles of quality are not well known, and almost never applied to their full potential.
This ironic, even cynical statement can be applied to almost any business, large or small. In some industries, up to two-thirds of working hours are spent on correcting mistakes. In a small business, wasted hours and materials can easily make the difference between success and failure.
Yet almost all mistakes can be prevented. The secret to preventing mistakes is in being careful.
Carefulness usually takes a little longer. Note this: a "little" longer. Being careful does not mean doubling the time it takes to do something. It means twelve minutes instead of ten, or seven hours instead of six and a half.
Two simple actions will eliminate almost all mistakes made in your business:
1) Pay attention. When your mind is elsewhere, mistakes happen. If you get interrupted, stop what you are doing, handle the interruption, then get your mind back onto what you are doing. If you start daydreaming, it is time to take a break. Go take a short walk, get a glass of water, and come back when you can concentrate.
2) Check your work. This unbelievably effective procedure is overlooked by almost everyone, every day. Small business owners particularly are so full of self-confidence that they just assume they have done something correctly. Maybe nine times out of ten they have. Then the mistake in the tenth time costs them all the profit from the first nine.
Every action in a business deserves carefulness. Misspellings in emails and on websites project an image of ignorance and lack of quality. Incorrect invoices don't get paid. Unswept floors and dirty windows can repel customers, especially the ones you want most: the wealthy, well-bred ones.
Then there are the products or services your business sells. A nick here, a scratch there, a form not filled out correctly or completely, a missed spot in the painting, little mistakes that could have been prevented by being more careful, will make a customer look elsewhere the next time he needs that product or service.
As a small business owner, the burden is on you to insist that both you and your staff follow a firm policy of carefulness. When an error is made, figure out how carefulness could have prevented it, and make sure everyone knows, so it doesn't happen again. This doesn't mean to make someone feel bad for making a mistake; it means to make them feel better and more capable in the future. Probably all they have to do is slow down and be more careful. Don't worry: as they get more experienced, the speed will return, but without the mistakes.
Above all, do not, repeat do not, let mistakes go by with a careless phrase like "Don't worry about it. Mistakes happen." If you don't do something about it, the same mistakes will continue to happen.
Carefulness results in higher quality at lower cost. It is worth your investment.
***
Don Dewsnap is the author of Small Business Magic, published by Oak Wand Publishing. Small Business Magic details the principles of quality necessary to business success, applying to all aspects of business from production to sales. The principles of quality are not well known, and almost never applied to their full potential.
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