Just like your product information, ensuring that your clients can find information about your business is a key part of being in business. When you have an office, or even a retail store, there is a good chance that even without advertising if you have a good location people will find out where you care sooner or later. However if you spend half your time working at home and the other half sitting at a coffee shop working, then you are quickly going to realize nobody knows about your business.
This is where the fact that marketing is something that you need to be doing actually hits home for you. This is not just your ordinary marketing though, while in some respects you are going to have to do everything that you would have done if you had an office. You have to take it to the next level and push your marketing more in front of more people, use that marketing to actually make the sale, or at a bare minimum to contact you so that you can close the sale. Whatever you decide though the only thing that really matters with the marketing is that it drives the customers to contact you.
FREQUENCY – How often your marketing gets in front of prospective clients is quite important, while for a retail store the frequency can be further apart, because them being there when the person goes shopping is what triggers a memory of the marketing. Your marketing needs to get the customer to contact you, which wont happen every time, so you need to get your message to the customer more often, so that they are more likely to find an offer you have that they want to purchase.
TYPE OF MARKETING – How you get in front of the client is also important, just a flyer saying who you are and what you do may serve it’s purpose but it wont really create a feeling of wanting to contact you now. So it is almost a requirement to put some sort of offer that will build that feeling in a customer that they want to buy. Then once there is something on that that creates that feeling of wanting to buy make it easy for them to buy. Have Ordering over the Phone, Ordering by your website, Order by Email, and even Order by Fax.
It really is a simple concept that people need to know that your business is in existance, and what you do. Because while a well positioned retail store may survive with little advertising, when you operate your business from No Fixed Office, if you are not marketing you have little chance if any of making any money.