Inexpensive tactics for getting attention for your business

Ask a business owner to identify the most important factors in his or her business' success, and making customers aware of the business is going to rank right at the top of every list. You want - no, you need - to get your target customers' attention; the right kind of attention that establishes your business as a valuable resource and an asset to your customers, but you don't want to spend yourself into bankruptcy doing so. Here are some suggestions that too many business owners tend to forget, as well as some ideas that you might not have considered before, but have worked quite well for others.

The Fundamentals

Be the best at whatever you do. Yes, this is a cliché. But clichés don't usually get to be clichés in a vacuum; they achieve that status because they are usually true. It doesn't matter whether you manufacture complicated and highly specialized equipment, sell salted nuts from a cart, or teach other people how to do things. Do it very well, and people will notice and talk about it.

Know your customers. While it may be impractical to develop a close relationship with every one of your customers to the point where you know their kids' birthdays, you had better have a good handle on what your customers really want. And you need to remind yourself that even your regular customers don't care so much about what you sell them as they do about what those products can do for them. It can sometimes be difficult to define what your customers' real hungers are, but that is exactly what you need to do. By knowing what those hungers are and knowing what products best satisfy those hungers, you'll be in position to sell your customers what they need - even if what they need doesn't always coincide with what they think they want.

Share your passion. Enthusiasm is infectious. If customers see that you are excited about your product or service, they're more likely to think positively about it, as well. Let people know why you love what you do, but be careful not to cross that invisible line that separates enthusiasm from pushiness.

Getting Attention

It is a well-known fact that word-of-mouth advertising is more compelling than paid advertising. That is the main reason it has become increasingly popular to use "regular people" rather than polished professionals as pitchmen (and women). Of course, those "real people" are professional actors too, but they look more like someone with whom you'd share a cup of coffee, or a deep secret, than someone who works for a modeling agency. Fortunately, there are plenty of real "real people" that you can get to praise your product or service at minimal cost, and you don't need to pay them to toot your horn for you. Here are a few ideas that have worked before, and could well work for you.

• Become a valuable resource. No matter what the topic, there are always infinitely more people asking questions than there are offering answers. Unfortunately, too many of those offering answers are offering answers that are wrong. Fortunately, you can establish yourself as a valuable source of information or services, just by being one of the rarified few who appear in the right places, offering the right answers. Stumped about ways to become such a resource? Read on.
• Join professional industry forums and groups. Online professional forums and discussion groups have pretty well replaced the old Usenet newsgroups where like-minded people gathered, and it doesn't take much effort to find a group where your expertise or products would be a good fit. The one cardinal rule you'll need to follow is to "lurk" for a little while after you join, in order to get a feel for the group's atmosphere before jumping in. Once you feel that you "know" the group a bit (and have identified its predominant members), you can begin to establish yourself. Jump in too quickly, and you might end up with your own foot, firmly implanted in your mouth.
• Create a useful website. It needn't have all the latest bells & whistles, but it does need to provide some value to visitors. A few simple, information-rich pages that offer tips, answers to frequently asked questions, or even links to other useful pages will be a welcome change from the high-pressure sales techniques that are so common on the web. Best part is that you no longer need to know any of that obscure HTML coding, as there are plenty of intuitive web design programs that require no HTML knowledge at all. Some of them are even free to download.
• Start a blog. Share things you have learned in your business, and invite others to share their experiences, as well. You can promote your blog via e-mail, by requesting reciprocal links from other bloggers in your field, and of course, by mentioning your blog in your correspondence with others. Be sure to moderate responses to your blog, to eliminate SPAM, as well as the occasional obnoxious trolls who search for things with which to take exception. Both Blogger (https://www.blogger.com/signup.g ) and Wordpress (http://wordpress.com) offer simple, free templates for setting up and managing your blog.
• Send out an e-mail newsletter. While some consider e-mail to be so "yesterday," it is still an effective means of reaching a lot of people, simply and inexpensively. Although most of the free e-mail servers such as Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL don't allow mass mailouts, most Internet Service Providers offer listserv features that allow you to generate a huge mailout using only a single address. Most listservs are offered either free or for a minimal additional charge.
• Share your passion. Doing so can be as easy as writing letters to the editors of your favorite industry or special-interest publications, submitting op-ed columns on subjects within your areas of expertise, or submitting full articles to trade and general readership publications. Before submitting anything, be sure to check the submission guidelines for each specific publication, and make certain what you're offering falls within those specifications. Nothing will endear you to an editor as effectively as providing him or her with usable and pertinent content (makes the editor's job so much easier!). On the other hand, nothing will sour an editor as quickly as having to wade through a bunch of self-serving, unusable garbage. Your first impression will dictate how you're viewed from now on, with editors as well as readers.

Once you've got your foot in readers' doors, so to speak, they will continue to look to you for answers as long as those answers are provided. Not only will they look to you, they'll tell others about you, too, By sharing a valuable resource they have discovered - you - they will be establishing themselves as valuable resources, as well. Help your readers do that, and they'll go out of their way to make you famous. And that's the kind of attention every business needs, but can't buy at any price.