If you decide to get a business up and running to make and sell your own product, bear these two things in mind:
1- No matter how good your product, your success may depend almost entirely on the effectiveness of your marketing. Good marketing can sell a poor product (at least for a while) but a good product won’t survive poor marketing.
2- Once you’re set up, you’ll probably have to devote much more time and thought to marketing than to making and delivering product, as healthy sales require a sustained marketing effort. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that your product’s quality or low price will save you the trouble.
Definitions of marketing are legion, but it boils down to the art and science of (1) finding and (2) winning as many customers as possible by (3) the cheapest and least time-consuming means so that (4) you can sell your product and avoid going bust.
For a new product the marketing effort divides roughly into two phases. The first is reaching people who might buy your product and letting them know it exists. The second is more complicated and involves making your marketing more effective by analysing actual sales patterns: who is (and isn’t) buying, and why, and where, and when etc.
You’ll probably have to manage at least the first phase unaided, as professional marketing expertise is (a) too expensive for most start-ups to contemplate and (b) of very patchy quality anyway.
Good marketing promotes the benefits of your product that will persuade customers to pay a decent price. It justifies the price you’re charging by highlighting the unique selling proposition (USP) or stand-out benefit of your product that its rivals don’t have. This should be your strength. Many USP claims are hackneyed and unconvincing, but you’ve got a genuinely new, different and better product to shout about.
Marketing is such a huge subject that we can’t do more than scratch the surface. What is important is that you study all your marketing options and set your chosen marketing strategy in motion well before Day One of your business.
How do you give yourself a crash course in marketing?
• Many colleges and universities run occasional short, low-cost marketing courses for small businesses, where you can learn and make useful contacts.
• Read. Look for titles aimed at small businesses. For wit as well as wisdom read books by ad agency gurus who have survived at the sharp end of marketing: for example David Ogilvy’s classic Ogilvy on Advertising or Jerry Della Femina’s From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor.
Effective low-cost product promotion
You must first look for ways to get free or very cheap promotion and publicity for your business, to generate enquiries for your product in ways that eliminate ‘cold calling’.
Forget print advertising, as that eats money and only pays off if ads appear regularly in the right publications. Forget exhibitions too; they need highly professional handling and are rarely cost-effective at your level of operation.
The method to try first is the press release (or news/media release) that feeds snippets of information about your company or product to relevant media in the hope of a free mention. Press releases are cheap to produce and the format isn’t difficult to master.
