Simple Marketing Strategies to Increase Your Business

Marketing is the most common problem that people running or starting small businesses ask me about. Typically, they say something like, “I’ve placed some ads but they just don’t seem to be doing anything.” – In other words, not bringing them the customers, clients or sales they desire.

Marketing is More Than Advertising But marketing and advertising are not synonymous and ‘placing a few ads’ is never going to draw the kind of business a small business needs to be successful. Marketing is a process, not an event. It involves planning marketing goals and implementing (often a series of) marketing strategies to achieve them.

Now that doesn’t mean marketing has to be a complicated process. But it does mean you have to know what you want to achieve and get out there and work at it. Here are six simple marketing strategies you can use to increase your customers and sales.

Simple Marketing Strategies

1) Offer some free classes related to your products and/or services – in your home, in a rented venue or through a local education institution such as a Community College. Target specific audiences or events, if appropriate. For instance, someone with a beading business might offer special workshops on Beaded Christmas Projects or Beading for Girls. A yoga instructor might offer a class such as Yoga for Men.

2) Join local business organizations and networking groups. Many, such as home-based business groups, are inexpensive to join. And the marketing benefits are huge. Once they get to know you and what you do, the other business people in your group will mention your business to others and may even give you referrals. Local business organizations are also great opportunities to create and participate in some cooperative marketing strategies, such as holding special Market Days or other events.

3) Create or become front and center in a charitable event. You can get huge amounts of press for events like this – which can translate into new customers. One local artist has painted paper grocery bags which he is selling with all proceeds going to a selected charity, for example. But you don’t even have to go to the trouble of creating your own event; many charities have established events that you can become a very visible part of by becoming a sponsor.

4) Join and use Twitter. If you have time to get to know and use a variety of social media, do. But if you only have time for one, Twitter is my pick of all the social media out there because it’s so quick and easy to use.

Confianzys is a well-known, product management, customer Management, product marketing, market research company India, providing training in effective marketing research, customer management and product marketing. For more information please visit. http://www.confianzys.com

The Discipline of Product Management

Product development is the process of designing, building, operating, and maintaining a good or service. Software and Internet companies use a product development process to ensure that they are not just manufacturing a technology, but creating a product that people will want to buy and continue to use. To be sure, a base technology is at the heart of the product, but product development ensures that the customer’s voice is not lost in the rush to an exciting technology. Product development adds things like pricing, marketing, and customer support to the technology to create a complete product.

Without a product management philosophy and discipline, an IT organization becomes focused on the technology instead of the customers and is often organized along technology lines rather than in ways that benefit the customer. Ultimately, an IT organization must serve its customers or it will go out of business, either because the customers go away or because they complain to executive management until the organization is changed.

Product development is performed by a multi-disciplinary team whose goal is building, operating, and maintaining the product. Team members may include product managers, software developers, project managers, product operations engineers, customer support managers, software quality assurance engineers, user interface design engineers, marketers, financial personnel, and graphic artists.

The product manager serves as the leader of this cross functional team. While the product manager does not necessarily function as the operational manager for these people, she does lead, coordinate, and supervise their work toward the end goal of making the product a reality, launching it, operating it, and managing it throughout its life cycle.

Product management as a discipline is about what the product should be. Product managers are advocates for the customer’s needs and desires. A large product might have numerous product managers working towards its success at a variety of levels, all the way from the junior product manager writing specifications about single feature sets to a product strategy director who has overall responsibility to executive management for the product direction. A product manager’s responsibilities include the following:

1) Defining and planning product lines and product enhancements

2) Managing product contracts and sales

3) Setting strategic direction based on customer needs and business goals

4) Interpreting strategic goals into operational tasks

5) Making proposals to senior management regarding implications of proposed plans

6) Serving as a representative to internal and external clients. Taking the lead in establishing tactical plans and objectives

7) Developing and implementing administrative and operational matters ensuring achievement of objectives

    Evaluating risks and trade-offs

9) Proposing contingency plans

10) Analyzing business processes and creating applications to improve or support those processes

11) Branding

12) Working with graphic designers to create look and feel

13) Defining navigational flow and user experience

14) Defining feature sets and scooping releases

People not familiar with the discipline of product management frequently get a product manager confused with other players. For more information please visit. http://www.confianzys.com