Basic Marketing and Advertising Tips from SMC’s Coaches Corner

The Coaches Corner is an area in the SMC Corp. website which shows tips on how to increase your profit by brushing up on your basic advertising and marketing skills. It’s an online version of what personal coaches actually offer the SMC member for 90 days upon membership. After all, everyone needs to improve their skills even if they think they know everything. Sooner or later, it will be harder and harder to find new customers especially after all your friends and friends’ friends network have been used up. Best of all, these tips and answers to questions are often inexpensive and very doable to the seller. While traditional media like radio, print and TV are great medium, for a starting business, these are a tad too expensive to be reasonable. So for the starting home based businessmen, here are a few tips from the coaches’ corner, enhanced for readers:

Use Leave-behinds to the fullest

Leave-behinds are any SMC related collaterals that can be literally left behind in an area with potential customers. Catalogues, for example are great leave-behinds. They can be customized with your name or logo on it. For a more effective leave-behind, try to make the cover more enticing because a catalogue is a catalogue is a catalogue. Everyone is probably used to seeing one by now. So, go ahead and cover it with a Statement or Remark. Make it look like a sophisticated ad instead of a catalogue, at least where the cover is concerned. Homemade flyers and brochures are other ideal leave-behinds. If you have a website, don’t forget to include it in the collaterals.

In choosing which places to put the collaterals in, make sure it’s somewhere with heavy traffic but with plenty of idle time. Reception areas in places like doctor’s offices or gym lobbies for example are excellent spots. They get to read through without having to hurry off somewhere.

Place Ads in Local Schools

School ads are one of the most inexpensive ways to gain new customers for your SMC business. Not only is the target market right but also because there’s a large traffic which means your ad will be greatly seen not just by students but by parents picking them up, by faculty and even by visitors. Try local organizations as well who run publications in a small or medium circulation.

Following through with Stuffers

It’s great if you have a one-time order but it would be even better if you have customers coming back to you again and again for orders. To entice your present customers, why don’t you place in stuffers along with their orders? Catalogues and brochures are a great tool for customers to be enticed with other products down the line. SMC suggests the World of Products Catalog for waiting rooms, Sunrise Creek for lifestyle areas like gyms and spas, Bayberry Lane for areas where there isn’t much time for browsing and the Brochure Pack for stuffing.