Advertising Your Small BusinessAdd Your Email Address in the box (top right) & you'll receive new posts via email! Tip! Do your people (or you) balk at new ideas? When listening to a new approach to a persistent problem or novel ways to handle them - keep a positive attitude. You may have heard it before, tried it yourself in the past, etc. but don’t put them down for trying to help. Look for key strong points, take notes, and ask them to keep the ideas coming. Whether or not this one is actionable is not the point - one of these times they will hit on just what you’ve been missing. If you encourage them to keep thinking about ways to do things.
So often small business owners will attempt to tell the public and reader of a publication, yellow pages or Internet portal site, how great their company is, when they should be telling the company what they can do for them. For many years I had run a franchise company and we had specifications of what advertising we would and would not allow to insure that our brand name was not jeopardized and to insure the advertising pulled for the franchisees. In fact often we paid half the cost of the ads or reduced royalty fees to help pay for them. One thing I learned in franchising is that our franchisees, much like most of our competitors were small businesses and extremely proud of their businesses. This would come to life and become quite evident by the types of advertising I would see and by the types of advertising my franchises would submit to me via Facsimile for a 24-hour approval turn around. I cannot tell you how many times our franchisees would attempt to embellish their ads and say things like 5-trucks to serve you, when I knew they only had three and one being built. Meaning even stretching it the true number was four not five and probably not 5 until the start of the next peak season. You see I realized that it was human nature to embellish, but there is a point to this story and that is that it does not matter anyway? The customer could care less how many units on the road you have they care more about how good of service you will provide and would be quite happy if our competition or our own franchise was a single unit owner/operator and they could deal straight with the boss and not an employee sent out on one of their many units you see? Please if you own a small business it is better to say “We Love Our Customers” or “We Guarantee Super Service” rather than bragging in your advertising that you have some huge company. Because if you are that big, often the customer thinks you do not need or want their business and you have wasted your advertising on the wrong message. Please consider this in 2006. Tip! Instead of telling your employees what they should do, or how you used to do it when you were down there where they are - ask them for their ideas and opinions. It’s not necessarily important what they come up with - because they’ll know you’re interested and they will keep working it out in their mind. And since they probably know more about what’s really possible - they may have the correct solutions sooner than you.
Lance Winslow  Realize Your Personal, Professional, and Business Potential With A Little Help From Your Friends. Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
 
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