Know Your Products:The First Step to Marketing

Know Your Products - Simplify Your Marketing:

If you're going to sell something, whether it's a product or a service, it's vital to know about your offerings and your industry before creating a small business marketing strategy. Make sure you research your products thoroughly, so that you're able to answer customers' or prospects' questions.

Use Your Own Products:

It sounds simple, but I know of a number of small business owners who don't use/wear/eat their own products! Their small business marketing strategy could use a few marketing tips, namely this first one: use your own products.

The benefits of using your own products are clear:

1. You learn more about what you're selling, including great features and drawbacks.
2. You get a better understanding of who your target market will be.
3. You have firsthand accounts to share with customers, who will see the confidence you have because you stand behind what you sell.

Anticipate Customer Questions About Your Products or Services:

If you were contemplating buying a product from someone, you'd want the sales person to be able to answer your questions. For business owners, anticipating these questions is a great way to guide your research, rather than delving into loads of books and industry magazines. You wouldn't want to create a small business marketing strategy before you know your product or service like the back of your hand. Here are a few steps to get you started:

1. First, make a list of questions customers might ask, based on what you already know about your products or services. This might include pricing, exclusions, safety features, physical characteristics (i.e. size), and delivery times.
2. Second, you can role play with your staff, colleagues, or customers to figure out what questions a potential client may have. Try to incorporate people from your target market as well, but including a number of people in this activity will help you catch questions you didn't think of.
3. Third, don't forget to write more down questions over time (and on an ongoing basis) as they come up!

Learn How to Find the Answers That You Don't Already Know:

While some small business owners have obtained degrees and certifications that afford them knowledge of their own industries and practices, every product and service is unique,and most industries change over time. Finding answers to both anticipated customer questions and ones that come up unexpectedly is important to your marketing strategy. Try these marketing tips: 

1. Get to know your suppliers, vendors, and partners. A quick e-mail or phone call, especially to someone with whom you've built a rapport, is often the easiest and fastest way to get an answer about your product. 
2. Study the brochures, websites, and literature provided with the products and services you carry. 
3. Use the Internet with care! Yes, search engines make answers available to us within seconds, but they may not be the best or even the right answers. Make sure a site is reputable by checking what organization publishes the content before incorporating it into your understanding of a product or service.
4. Craft a standard response for when you don't know an answer! Make sure that in the rare case you don't know some detail about your product, you can word your response in a way that helps your small business marketing strategy rather than giving the customer a shrug and an, "I dunno."

Publish What You Know About Your Products:

Once you've used your product, anticipated questions, and found the answers for those questions, don't keep your knowledge a secret. This knowledge might be the most important of all your small business marketing strategies, because you wouldn't be able to decipher your target markets or create advertising campaigns without it.

1. If you've got a website, put up an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) page. 
2. If you make brochures or flyers, incorporate your expert knowledge of the product into the literature. 
3. For small businesses with part-time or full-time staff, make sure that anyone involved in selling your product or service has been trained, so that their knowledge will get to the customers.

Ultimately, a good small business marketing strategy boils down to cleverly communicating what you know and love about your products and services to your customers.

The more you know, the more you'll be able to find some aspect of your product that appeals to, solves a problem for, or gets a customer as excited about the product. Those aspects will translate to profits when you learn to effectively transfer the knowledge in your head to your customers.

 

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What's Next

Next In This Guide
Part 2:
Knowing Your Customers - Understand your customers in order to maximize profits and minimize wasteful spending on ineffective ads. Get to know your customer!

Previous In This guide
Introduction:
Introduction - What to expect and what you'll get from using this guide.

Table of Contents
Street Smart Guide to Small Business Marketing

 

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