Success in marketing your business will lead to an increase in sales.
If no one is visiting your brick and mortar business, no one will make
use of your services or buy anything, so you won’t earn any money. The
same thing applies when you are considering an online business. If no
one visits your website and sees what you have to offer, you won’t make
any sales.
Small businesses can sometimes be guilty of not taking
steps to build their brand and make their name known among the people
who would form their target market. Quite a few small and micro business
persons offline rely solely on word of mouth to bring foot traffic to
their enterprise.
Those that operate online may be aware of social
networks such as FaceBook and Twitter but they do not all use these
networks to their advantage. They may instead assume that only
organizations with large budgets can really maximize the potential of
these sites. However this is where they are mistaken.
The power of
social media lies in its reach. Whether you have a large or a small
business you can effectively utilize social networks to bring traffic
to your site. You can build a loyal community around your brand that
will offer feedback to you and spread the word about you to the people
they know.
- Social networks-via Wikimedia, CCA 2.0
I like to think of this as guided word of mouth. You create a profile on a social network
such as Twitter and through that profile, have a representative of your
company interact in a real way with the people who are interested in
your products or services.
Instead of just sitting and waiting for
visitors to come by and engage with your brand, you actively go out and
build a community of people who are eager to share the
positive experience that they have with your brand, through your representatives.
Once
you develop a system for doing this, your efforts at reaching people
who may become clients will reap rewards. Marketing plans may sound
intimidating but they are all about developing an effective way of
making people aware of your brand. A good marketing plan will also lead to consumers preferring to do business with you whenever they have a need that your small business provides.
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