The Marketing Quagmire
by Bruce Wade on 03/08/09 at 8:09 am
2 comments
Developing a marketing strategy around your niche product is not an easy project to get right for a small business. Creating the correct level of promise and call to action that will attract the right type of people to your business requires a huge amount of effort and thought that should result in not only first time customers but return customer as well.
The trend for small business owners is to over sell themselves to the extent that they promise the world to everyone. “We do it all” is the statement that comes from the lips of business owners at most networking functions. In reality this creates a lack of confidence in the minds of potential customers who remain skeptical about service delivery until they have proven results.
The opposite is also true when an unconfident business owner will under promise their business offerings to an extent that they fail to attract customers ready to be a ‘pilot project’ customer willing to put their money at risk with the ‘new guy’.
Getting the right level of speak that will attract the customers and be serviced at the right level of expectation, by the right level of staff competencies, at the right price, on time is all a bit of a juggling exercise we need to do each day.
How do we do all this and not drop the ball?
Bruce Wade is a survivor of the corporate and NGO world, author, speaker, business owner and entrepreneur, Bruce now runs the Entrepreneur Incubator; a member based organisation dedicated to serving those in the trenches of business through coaching, mentoring and leadership education. View more articles by Bruce Wade.
Donovan McFarlane
Aug 4th, 2009
I believe that to attract prospects, small business owners need to use some human psychology. In the first place we are dealing with humans here and not robots.
Bruce
Aug 4th, 2009
Well put. The problem with most business owners is that they are the technicians and lack those all important people skills.