Marketing is Essential

Something that just about everyone running a business realizes, is that marking is an essential part of the process. It becomes almost impossible for a business to prosper with no marketing. This is an even greater problem when you are working with no fixed office.

While working without an office, no matter what you are selling marketing becomes the only way that customers are going to be able to find your business. This is because even though you may be working from a table in a cafe, or at the beach, you no longer have the potential of location to generate business. Either of these locations is far from ideal for setting up a shop as such, and even though a lot of people may be passing, the sales potential just is not there.

This being said there are a few basic marketing items that you really need to implement to make it as easy as possible for potential customers to see your offer, contact you, and do business with you.

HAVE A WEBSITE

Having a website for your business is the most important first step. The website effectively becomes your shop front not just to the world, but if you operate at a local level, more so to the customers. If a customer cannot see what you are offering then how do you expect them to want to buy your product. A website is literally the lowest cost and easiest way to do this.

However you need to follow up creating a website with marketing to promote the site. If people don’t know the website address, again how are they going to find it, while they could use a search engine the goal is to make it as easy as possible for them.

BUSINESS CARDS

While technology has taken over many area’s of your business, the good old business card is still an essential component of your marketing toolbox. The primary consideration is that the is that they be of excellent quality, having a poor quality card is almost worse then none at all. Your other consideration is to make them stand out, a slightly different size, colourful, or just something different. Finally be sure to use both sides, you wouldn’t create a tri-fold brochure, and only get one side printed, so why your business card.

BUSINESS FLIER

While you potentially receive marketing fliers or brochures from other businesses every other day. This particular type of flier is a little different. You can choose to include some product’s and pricing if you wish but the main focus is to introduce your business to your prospect. Include things like a blurb about your business, what your business offers (as a overall view), and even a picture of yourself or the people that make up your business.  Additionally include all your business contact details, especially your website.

DIRECT MAIL

Many of the conventional methods of advertising will not work when you are not a conventional business working from an office. Where most businesses can easily send out fliers, catalogs or direct mail and have customers then essentially come to them, you need to be aware that when you send out marketing especially direct mail you are moving the customer to take action to contact you. This is most easily done with direct mail, because of the nature of direct mail you to some extent have more time to get the customer interested, and more potential to convince them to contact you.

However this being said if your marketing material is poor to start with then you are still not going to get a great response. Also don’t forget to include your website on any direct marketing that you send out.

ONLINE MARKETING

While you may be aiming to operate your business on a local level, you should not discount the potential of extending your market further afield. This is what the whole point of having no fixed office should be is to extend your market reach beyond your regular means. Since you need to have a website as your shopfront anyway, then why not promote it to more then just the local businesses, through your business cards and fliers.

Take the next step and make use of the online opportunities available, through programs like Google Adwords, and social networks, to connect with potential clients and bring in more of the people that you want to deal with that are not right in front of you.

IN CONCLUSION

Marketing is an absolutely essential part of having no fixed office. If you were to start your business and do no marketing whether you had an office or not would make little difference. Having an office or store depending on the location you may be able to to build your business purely on passing traffic. However this is not something that you are ever going to be able to do with out any fixed location, if you do not market your business.