A lot of what we have covered in these blog postings have been geared toward start up business owners. This will be no different. What happens when you try to make a sale to those who don’t know you? How do you know if your are at a point where people will buy your product or service? What should you really be focusing on at this point of your journey? We will cover these ideas briefly in this post to help you make sure you are focusing at the right areas in your business.
I’ve found that before a sale takes place, a company needs to build awareness and a following. If those two are not in place, then the sale may only be a one time transaction. It is much easier to retain customers if they are following you and for them to follow you they obviously need to have awareness of your brand. I find that in any area of business, awareness needs to be the first focus. When promoting your brand, you should focus first on making others aware of who you are and what you do. This is where giving aware free stuff comes into place. I discussed a little while back the importance of that in my Freemium post, which you can check out HERE. Making videos for Facebook ads to do this is a great way to build brand awareness. You can also sponsor other businesses with a large following. Just keep in mind, this is not the stage to start asking for people to buy your product. They need to be more familiar before they take that step.
The next step of success is building a following. After people become aware of you and your brand, they will need to get to a point where they are tracking what it is you are doing on a consistent basis. For this, you need to make sure you are pumping out some kind of content on a regular basis. This can be doing FB live or Periscope live streams of what you are doing. It could also be posting on Instagram or Snapchat. Another great thing you can do is share your journey. If you have the attention of people and they are seeing you build your brand, they will most likely want to see you succeed. People love success stories and if they can be a part of it, they will likely try to help.
At this point, after building awareness and gaining a following, you can start looking for people to want to support the business as long as you have quality product or service. They now have time invested in your brand by watching, sharing, and socially supporting you. There are many people or businesses that I support because they have a great product or message and I want to see them succeed. I know the owners heart and mission because they openly share it with others. If you want to mention that services or products are available for sale so they can support your mission, there is nothing wrong with that. Remember people love and want to be a part of a success story.
Thank for reading this weeks Business with Bordeaux blog. For all my blog posts and podcasts, you can visit businesswithbordeaux.com.
Thanks and God Bless
