Page 23 - 101 Ways to Market Your Business

101 WAYS TO MARKET YOUR BUSINESS

Seven days later someone called, apologising about the
delay and protesting that the extra advertising had made
them so busy that they could not cope with the thousands
of calls they were getting every day. By this stage my friend
had given up trying to quit and she still smokes.

There is a valuable lesson to be learned. If you start to do
a lot of marketing make certain that your business can cope
with the increase. All businesses want the phone to be run-
ning hot but few can cope with a sudden increase in business
without making at least a few operational changes. New
customers that come to your business as a result of your
marketing activity will be testing you to see if you can deliver
what you promise. If you don’t impress them the first
time around you may never get the opportunity to try again.

Why is it important to be different?

Imagine if you had a dose of the flu and you decided that
you needed to buy some medicine. Imagine you go to the
shops and find ten individual pharmacies next door to each
other, all in a nice neat row and basically all the same. How
do you decide which pharmacy to purchase your flu medi-
cation from? Do you look for the cheapest, the one with
the most helpful staff, the biggest, the smallest, the longest
established, the one that you have visited before or simply
the one closest? These are the kinds of questions that we
subconsciously ask every time we go to purchase an item.

The big question is: what makes your business different
from your competitors? If your customers are trying to choose
between your business and your competitors’ businesses, why
should they use yours? You need to come up with the answer
to this question and it needs to be convincing.

Several years ago the very famous company Federal
Express found themselves struggling in the highly competi-

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