Home Business

Marketing You and Your Business is very important.

One of the more interesting questions I get is the question, “How do you market yourself?” or “How do you market your business?” Perhaps the question itself isn’t as interesting as the implications that go along with it. The person asking the question is awaiting my answer, expecting it to be succinct. He is hoping to find the one silver bullet that will kill the need for any constant marketing efforts, the one-step, easy routine to riches. Usually, he is disappointed. I tell him to think of a dozen ways to market himself, and I have probably tried them (and gotten clients from most). No, Virginia, there is no microwave dinner style solution to marketing. But this is a good thing. Most of the time, you don’t have to pursue a lot of options that just don’t fit your business or your personality. (There’s one big exception here; most marketing requires getting in front of people sooner or later. But just about everything else is negotiable.) first, let’s look at some basic, tried and true marketing ideas that every business can benefit from.

You’ll need list for marketing you and your home business.

- Address book/Rolodex listing of business contacts, associates, friends

- Computer and word processing software

- Business plan

- Calendar

Slow Frying Fish: Understanding that Marketing Takes Time

Yes, marketing is a special kind of slow frying fish. You have to grab the fish out of the pond today and throw it into the pan, so you will have fish to eat next month, next season, and next year.

Sometimes the toughest part of this process is that, when you are sitting in your office with a quiet phone and clean paper and a blank computer screen, it’s tough to get going. After all, what’s one day spent playing solitaire (or Tomb Raider or Pro Skater 4)? Plenty. This could be the day you were destined to catch a very large fish. That’s why you need to flesh out the Marketing section of your business plan. You’re going to come up with a list of things you can do, and put them both in your business plan and on your calendar. You’re only allowed to move them off your calendar if client work or a bona fide emergency crops up (with bona fide emergencies generally involving police, fire, or hospital personnel). This is something you need to do. And you need to keep doing it for as long as you own your business.

To do list for Marketing Your Work From Home Business:

- Draft or revise your marketing plan.
- Make a list of everyone you know.
- Write your introductory business letter and send it to your list.

The Marketing Cycle: A Typical Story

John is a friend of your favorite aunt. He heard about your business, and is considering hiring you. It is late January. You and John talk on the phone. You both like what you hear – he’s your ideal client, and to him, you are his ideal service provider. So, you arrange to meet in early February. There you are in February, snow swirling outside your favorite coffee shop, discussing possible projects and getting to know John a bit better. After an hour or so, the two of you come to the next step. John would like to see what you discussed in a formal quote, with a contract.

You race home from the meeting and prepare the quote and contract. John receives it, thanks you, and says he’ll review it – but he’s going on vacation, so it will probably be early March. He calls you on March 3 and says all is going well. However,

he’d like to expand the use of your services. Would it be possible to rework the quote and present it to his business partners as well? The two of you agree on a date when you will go to his company and make a presentation. It is now late March. Although you are nervous, the presentation goes extremely well. Everyone checks their calendars at the end of the meeting.

Tentatively, you could start on the project in early April. You’ll receive the signed contract, and a deposit, in the mail shortly. Have you noticed that more than two months went by from initial contact to signed contract? Depending on the size of the project, the time could be more or less. The client, too, might be very busy, and simply not as attentive as John was in the previous example. From the time you make first contact until you close, the business could be months, if not a year or more.

This is why marketing your home based business opportunity or program every day, day in and day out, is important. You need to work on your marketing today in order to have business coming in next month, next season, and next year. Plus, John might not have turned into a client. Something might have gone wrong, or you or John might have realized that there wasn’t a good fit. That can happen, and it might happen after you have prepared a quote, made a presentation, and performed other marketing work.

Say the word “marketing” to any group of people, and you’ll see reactions akin to eating a sour lemon. People tend to think of marketing as some sleazy, hard sell gimmick or game that lures the unsuspecting into purchasing something they neither want nor need. But that isn’t necessarily marketing (and it certainly isn’t good marketing). Marketing is simply letting everyone know about you and your business in order to attract clients. And because you will be doing the marketing, and representing your home business, your marketing will have your personal imprint. Here’s the most important thing to know: Next to the actual service you offer, marketing is the most important thing to do. If you don’t market, you won’t have to worry about bookkeeping (well, not much, because not much money will be coming in). You won’t have to worry about expanding, organizing your office, or filing. Without marketing, your home business is nothing more than a well-kept secret.

Work From Home Business need list:

- Business plan

- Calendar

- Rolodex, address book, or contact manager (however you keep track of people you know and their contact information)

Understanding Real Home Based Business Marketing

We’re going to start at the end for this home business section. Here’s the maxim you need to remember: You should be marketing full time or as close to full time as possible. Whenever you are not working on a project for a client, you should be marketing. Whenever you have nothing scheduled on your calendar, you should be marketing. When you have a quiet afternoon, you should be marketing. Marketing should take up a full work week until you get your first client. For the first one to three years of your business, you might spend 50% or more of your time marketing. After three years, that might drop to 35%. No matter how busy you are, you should still spend at least 20% of your time marketing. If that sounds like a lot, let’s consider the marketing cycle. Using the preceding definition, (“letting everyone know about you and your work at home business in order to attract clients”), let’s run through the typical marketing cycle in the next post.

You might think that cash is the lifeblood of your business. You are wrong. It is marketing.

It is the one activity (well actually, an entire group of activities) that will make or break your business. The day you aren’t marketing is the day that your business stagnates.

In this section of your home based business plan, you’ll answer these questions:

• How does the business reach customers?
• What are the unique features this business offers that competitors do not?
• How will the business interact with and retain customers?
• How is pricing structured in your line of work? What is the going rate for the service you provide?

Read on to learn about the information you’ll enter to answer these questions.

Describing How Your Business Will Reach Potential Work At Home Customers

Pulling together the information you’ll use to answer these questions might be quite simple. If you are offering surfing lessons, for example, you are probably reaching your customers on or near a beach. You are fulfilling their desire to learn how to surf and have fun in the water.

Of course, most answers to these questions are more complex because determining how to market to the right audience can be a complex task. You want to insert information about you and your business right in front of the people most likely to hire you. Where are they located?

If you are having difficulty answering this, visualize the target customer(s) you described in the previous section. Imagine one composite person who represents an entire target customer segment. When does this person get out of bed in the morning?

What kind of home does he or she live in? Sketch an imaginary day in the life of Carl or Connie Customer. At what point in the day is their desire for your product or service at its high point?

That is where and when your marketing should take place!

Describing the Unique Features of Your Home Business

Also in this section, you must answer the question, “What unique features does this business offer that competitors do not?”

In an earlier section of the business plan, you discussed your unique skills. The information you’ll enter here is similar to that information, but here, you describe those skills in the third person – as a quality of your business, not as a personal quality.

So you might say, “Carol Anne Carroll Communications offers one-stop shopping, from conception to printed product, for a wide variety of documents.” Or, it could be your location: “We’re the only full-service bookkeeping business in the tri-county area.” Or perhaps your equipment makes you stand out: “We are the only photographers with a fully-digital photo development process in the area.”

Here, too, you will need to do some competitive analysis. What does your competition offer, and how is your business better?

Tomorrow we will post more on how to create a home business marketing plan!

2. Asset: Marketable Skills

+ Give yourself extra credit for up to five skills.
√ If you have two to four skills, you pass this question nicely.
– If you have fewer than two skills, you fail this question.

If you have more than five skills listed in your description of the services or products you provide in your business, you probably should whittle them down to no more than four skills (or just those skills that can be marketed seamlessly). You’re allowed to go back and rethink the skills you would use in your business. You can undermine your credibility by offering services or products based on too many different types of skills.

So how do you know whether your skills can be “marketed seamlessly”? Let’s say that you want to start a work at home business as a marketing consultant. You have a background in sales that provides credibility to your advice in this area. But you have also been tinkering with computers, and you’d like to offer tech support, too.

Most people won’t go to the same source for assistance with both technical support and marketing expertise. These seem like unrelated skill sets, and potential customers might assume that if you’ve developed worthwhile expertise in one, you probably haven’t had the time and energy to develop
equally professional skills in the other. Marketing this combination would be a challenge, as well. It would be difficult to seamlessly transition from discussing your marketing services to discussing your technical support services.

However, let’s say that you are starting a marketing consulting business, based on the same sales background. You have also had experience with television production and video editing. So, you would also like to offer television production services, and plan to sell these services to many of your clients.

After all, many clients who are revamping their marketing plans (and seeking your advice as a consultant) might also choose to use your company to produce a television advertisement.

How To Improve:

• If you don’t have at least two marketable skills that are directly applicable to your home business, you need to gain the necessary training or experience to obtain them.
• If you have too many skills, and they don’t mesh nicely, prioritize them.

Which services would you most like to offer in your home business? In the preceding example, the business owner would probably need to choose between marketing and technical support—perhaps growing the business in to a “one stop” service center.

If the decision is tough, work through the business plan and budget for each separate business.