Marketing & sales

Your business cannot succeed without attracting customers and closing sales. Use these marketing and sales techniques to maximize your business revenue.

Marketing Basics

Find customers who appreciate your products and services. Learn who your target market is and discover some basic marketing strategies that you can implement into your marketing plan.

Understanding Marketing Basics

Make sure you understand all the basics of marketing, such as online marketing, branding, advertising, market research, and more. Check out our blog or these tools from BDC.

Define Your Marketing Strategy

Once you understand the marketing landscape, it’s time to define your company’s marketing strategy. To market to your target audiences, you need to have a clear definition of your concept, image, market, and competition. You also need to find the right mix of product, price, place, and promotion.

Read these 6 Essential Marketing Tips to learn about some of the different strategies you can use for marketing your small business.

 

Prepare for Selling Online

When you are defining your marketing strategy, you will need to decide on the “place” or distribution channels you will use—how will you get your products into your customers’ hands? If you, like many other business owners, decide to use online sales as a distribution strategy, you will likely need a website (unless you sell through an online marketplace like Amazon or Etsy).

To get started, review these articles for help developing your website and online sales. There are many easy, user-friendly website development software systems available, but you may still need to hire a qualified web developer to build or edit some areas of your website or integrate ecommerce software to enable online sales.

You can also head over to our blog to learn more about provincial regulations, sales tax, and selling internationally for online sellers.

Create a Marketing Plan

Marketing plans are a key part of your overall business plan and important for securing financing.

Consult BDC’s 5-step no-nonsense marketing plan to get started and use their marketing plan template to create and implement a winning marketing plan for your business.

Promote and Advertise Your Business

There are many free and paid advertising opportunities available, depending on how much time and money you have to promote your business. Should you be using traditional marketing, digital marketing, or both?

Your traditional marketing activities might include print ads, events, public relations, and more. If you are ready to delve into online marketing, you might choose to invest your time in social media, email marketing, content marketing, SEO, online ads, and beyond.

Make the Sale and Maintain the Customer Relationship

Learning how to find leads, make sales, and build long-term customer relationships takes time and practice. Not a fan of cold calling? Join the club. Learn how you can avoid cold calling and find better alternatives.

Making the sale should not be your only goal and the relationship doesn’t end after a purchase. Visit BDC to discover how to deliver a seamless customer experience, build better customer relationships, and create a customer loyalty program.