How To Attract Paying Customers

How to attract paying customers: Try saying "Hello!"

I was just in Rome, Italy. Intrigued by some attractive handbags, my friends and I walked into a leather shop, looked at merchandise, and the clerk (or owner?) just kept reading his paper.  No greeting. Nothing. We walked out.

Later, seeking lunch, we looked at a menu outside a tiny restaurant on a side street. The owner came out and said, "Buongiorno!" He invited us in, and we followed him. Then, he even suggested what we should eat. He closed the sale.

Great lessons learned!

Create Successful New Products

I've been reading a lot about new product development, marketing and new businesses. And all the articles are getting mashed together in my head. However, one piece has stood out in my mind - "The Path to Developing Successful New Products", which appeared in Monday's Wall Street Journal.

The advice reminded me of what I hear Venture Capitalists and Angels say over and over: Be focused. Meet consumer needs. Listen to your customers. But the article also mentioned creating a culture that focuses on completing the project - have enough resources devoted to the project and focus on the needs of the project - not the needs of the people working on the project. What I wonder about is why such advice needs to be repeated so many times in so many ways. I guess it's because too many business people don't bother to listen to their customers. They just want to listen to themselves.

Here's a link to the article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB20001424052970203440104574400593760720388.html

Business Tip: Make Your Marketing Authentic

Sometimes I get emails from corporations that think they are engaging me. They offer me cute, fluff-filled blogs and hard-to-access coupons. In actuality, all they're doing is making me cringe. They're attempting to use social media and failing miserably. It's probably because the information has been approved through several layers of management who are too concerned with their own message. They wind up talking to themselves, not to consumers.

But entrepreneurs can make the same mistakes. To cut through the clutter and reach your audience where they are, you have to understand their needs. And you have to begin to understand the new, new media.

• Who are the trend setters?
  
• What do they want or need?
  
• What will make them spread the word about your new business, product or invention?
  
• What media are they using and how should you best use it?
• How can you develop an authentic voice?
  

It takes study and asking lots of questions to get to the right answer. To help you on your way, take a look at a new study from PopSugar Media. The summary is worth reading, at least if you want to reach women consumers successfully. http://www.sugarinc.com/5877055

10 Tips for Starting a Business - Tip # 6 - Get the Word Out

Despite the cliches, if you build it, people will not necessarily come. If you build a better mousetrap, the world will not beat a path to your door.

How will people -- customers -- know that you built the baseball field in the middle of a corn farm or a better mousetrap?

You have to get the word out. You can try word-of-mouth, which marketers sometimes call "viral marketing". That works sometimes. You probably don't have money for a big ad campaign. Lots of dot-coms that advertised on the Super Bowl during the technology boom failed because they spent too much money on advertising and marketing.

What you need to do is make a plan. Figure out who will buy your product and what you need to tell the potential customers about the product or service. Then, figure out the most efficient and effective way to get that message across to the target.

This can be PR -- putting articles into papers, contacting local news TV and radio stations. Or it can be going to trade shows and running small ads in the trade press or getting articles into the trade press.

The most effective and most essential thing you can do, however, is to create a website. It can be simple. But if you optimize it for the search engines, you'll get traffic. You can always refer your potential customers to your website so that they can read your story and see your products or understand your services.

See the article on search engines and local search that is in my list of articles on the right. Free local listings can be highly valuable for a start-up.

Contact me with marketing questions or comments - upstartwyn@gmail.com.

Entrepreneurial Marketing

Whenever I meet business owners, they're worried about one of two things -- not enough sales or not enough cash. They can't grow sales without spending money. But they have no money to spend. Somehow, many of them just grow organically, in spite of themselves.

But the smart ones think like an upstart. They use entrepreneurial marketing. That is, they find the ways to get the most bang for the buck.

I'm going to try to answer business and marketing questions with this blog. I'll share my opinions of what's going on in the business world. And I'll share some case studies from buisnesses I've known.

Finally, I'll provide links to resources that can help you grow your business.