Home Business Marketing - Networking
May 2nd, 2009 by admin
How many times have you found a good restaurant yourself? Not marketing you say? Keep reading. Now ask yourself how many times a friend of yours has turned you onto a good restaurant. Compare the numbers. Ask this to most people, and their numbers are likely something 1 to 3 or even 6 - that is, they have been told about great places to eat far more often than they have found them. Why is that? First off, that is the power of networking, and that equates to the power of networking for marketing too.
But again, why is it that people find more good restaurants than me? Of course it is because there are more of them than there are me. In fact, it is not only my friends, but their friends as well. Each time a friend of mine tells me they found a good restaurant, they quite likely got that information from a friend. So there could be dozens of people that are helping me find restaurants.
Now take that to marketing my christian home based business. If I have a group of friends that I keep in touch with, and I talk about “work” with them, then they just may know someone who needs what I sell. They may even tell that person to contact me without me even being aware of it. And that, my friends, is only the tip of the ice burg.
What about when those same friends help me to get some insight about my home business or product that I can not get on my own? We often end up “too close” to things to get an effective feel for their context in the world. How often have we seen other companies really screwing up something from a customer viewpoint and doing nothing to change it, even when it is causing them to bleed customers? The same can happen to us, and our friends are there to save us from ourselves. Of course we should be listening to our customers the most intently here. And in a very powerful sense, our customers are some of the most important people to network with.
Network with customers? Yep. Definitely. Customers are often more likely to know other customers than we are. (Depending on the business type.) They can provide insight, referrals, references, and of course maintaining a relationship with a customers maintains their loyalty too. All from a little networking.
What about other people to network with. Of course there is that old saying about how you go where your friends are going. So why not get to know some people who are like minded? Especially if they are further down the road that you are traveling in a business sense. This is easier than ever with the advent of the internet. You can find people on discussion boards/forums quite easily, and on almost any subject imaginable. These people will vary in their perspective, their experience level, and locale. This can give you some of the broadest information of any networking opportunity.
And of course you don’t even have to network for peers. You can network for customers in just the same way. Your specific business obviously decides where your customers are, and how you can network with them, but you might find great opportunities on the internet, local clubs and organizations, and other places. Just think about what your customers to, and where they would congregate - then decide how you can best reach them.
All of these avenues take advantage of the basic human desire to find something that works. Each time someone finds that, whether that is as a customer or a peer, they remember it, and will be happy to relate it to you the next time that they see you. However often that is.
Stay tuned for the next installment of the Home Business Marketing 101 series - Avoiding Networking Overload.