Monthly Archives: May 2011

Guerrilla Marketing: Ways to Save While Promoting Your Business

Guerilla Marketing Strategy from The Startup Garage

Guerrilla Marketing: Ways to Save While Promoting Your Business

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Marketing is an important strategy for any startup business. A new business can get a huge advantage from generating buzz. This process can be expensive by using advertisements like radio spots, commercials, websites, billboards, press releases, and yellow page ads, but marketing does not always need to be expensive. There are many Guerilla marketing techniques that can save your startup company lots of money by promoting your business cheaply. Here are a few great guerilla marketing strategies that can benefit your business while saving you money.

  • Viral Marketing: The internet is a great hot spot for consumer activity, and you can promote your company in many places on the internet for free. Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, MySpace, YouTube, and Linked In among many are free networks to post blogs, information, and even videos about your new startup company.
  • Flyers/Handouts: Printing up flyers and handouts is an inexpensive way to get your companys name out there. Usually there are many spots around that allow the posting of flyers. Even walking around parking lots and placing flyers on windshields is a great way to get your company name out there. Handouts can be another easy way to convey your companies name and they are usually acceptable anywhere there are large gatherings of people.
  • Stickers: These can be cheap and easy to make. With your companys name, location and phone number, everyone will know how and where to find your new company. The only thing to worry about with stickers is making sure you are putting them in places that are legal and not vandalizing property.
  • Word of Mouth: This is a free way for consumers to get to know your business. By asking family, friends, acquaintances, and previous or loyal customers to spread the word about your business, this can help your company flourish in no time. Giving your family, friends and professional connections your business card to spread around not only spreads word of mouth but also gives out your business information which is important. Offering an incentive to people who refer your company is another strategy that can impact your business positively.

Rather than spending thousands of dollars on TV spots or radio ads, guerilla marketing is a great way to get your foot in the door without egregious expenses. All of the marketing techniques above are free or can cost as little as $100. The money that you save will benefit your company significantly now and into the future, when you will be able to afford expensive advertisements.

 

 

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Give and Your Business Shall Receive

Entrepreneurship Give and Business Receive from The Startup Garage

Give and Your Business Shall Receive

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If you are networking to build your startup business, you might want to try the Give and Receive approach. The Give and you shall receive principle is popular in a lot of religions and mythologies. The same idea can be easily applied to your small startup business. Here, we suggest that you implement a more altruistic method of networking for your business, but keeping the same old objective to gain company awareness and sales of your product or service.

Volunteer. Find an organization, group, charity or a non-profit organization to which you can volunteer your time, services or product. Volunteer for something that has meaning to you and encourage your employees and family to do the same. The contacts made will be invaluable. The positive feelings from doing something with no strings attached or expectations are in itself a reward, plus you may have some fun too!

Partnering or sponsoring can build good PR for your company and brand. Serve on a planning committee for a prominent event in your community like a marathon or fundraiser. Become a board member for a nonprofit organization. By being an ambassador for a good cause you do get the chance to introduce yourself and to promote your business to people that have already build good impressions about you.

Educate. Sharing your expertise with others at seminars and training meetings can interest potential customers appreciate your product or service and later on buy it. Teach about the things that you know best and that would lead your future customers to your products or services. It is not hard to sell when your customer has some knowledge and confidence in your product or service. When you put on a workshop or seminar, you become the expert the go-to guy in the view of the class. Face-to-face interaction, whenever possible, is the key to building those priceless relationships.

Return on investment. It is important to clarify that this is not at all a short term strategy. The people you connect with are likely not in an immediate need of your products and services and the give and receive will not work right away. Over time, building those relationships will create value. If you position yourself as a respectable person as well as an expert in your field, you will be the first person that your contacts come to when they need your help or know someone who does. Therefore, investing your time and energy outside of your office may not lead to an immediate return but could plant seeds for the future.

Its surprising how if you give your best and do it for the right reasons, people will remember you, and business will follow.

 

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The Power of Referral

Power of Referral Marketing from The Startup Garage

The Power of Referral

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The process of getting new clients for a small startup is known to be one of the most intense struggles for a begging entrepreneur. As the doors of your startup open, marketing funds tend to be limited, brand awarenessbarely exists and new customers are hard to come by. However, if you own a small startup business you or your employees likely have gotten to know your customers well and even personally, so you have the opportunity to leverage these relationships to get referrals. The ability to use personal referrals could be your competitive advantage in a competitive market. The use of the following strategies could help you provoke some more referral customers for your business.

  • Start with consistent great service. No one is going to refer you if your products and services are average or vary in quality. Remember, when someone refers your business to a friend, that person is putting his name on the line too. So, if you want to get more referrals, you need to first make sure your services are truly worth referring. Give every customer the outstanding service your business is capable of providing.
  • Look for networking opportunities. You dont want to be considered the one who is always pitching and selling. However, you should let people know who you are and what you do. Even if they dont need your services, they may know someone who does.
  • Partner with complementary businesses. We refer local businesses all the time because this is our job to find other businesses that can help our customers grow their startup businesses. We have benefited from the working relationship that we have created with those businesses and we know they will bring referrals back to us.
  • Give customers incentives for referrals. Motivate your customers into referring you. The way to do this is to give them something in return for doing so. One of the most common ways to do this is to give them a discount on future purchases for each referral they give.
  • Create a list of customers who might want to help refer your business. If you know that you have done a good job and that your customers were happy, ask them if you can use their names and what you have done for them on your website or another prominent place where others can see it. Client testimonials are an important factor that can turn a possible lead into a new customer.

Most customers today have an incredible array of information to consider when choosing a product or service. Still, the most trusted source of information is the personal referral and your small startup business should take advantage of it.

 

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Benchmarking for Startups

Entrepreneurship Benchmarks from The Startup Garage

Benchmarking for Startups

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In the business world there are a million different ways to measure success. In essence, what makes your business a success depends on your goals. So how do you measure your success? Its actually much simpler than you may think, using a process called benchmarking. Benchmarking is the process of comparing one’s business processes and performance metrics to industry bests and/or best practices from other industries. In fact, you should first be introduced to benchmarking in the earliest stages of your business, the business plan writing process, and more specifically the competitive analysis section of your plan. It is incredible how much you can learn from studying and analyzing your competitors, and a significant amount of research should be dedicated to doing just that.

In order to complete the competitive analysis section of your business plan you will need to gather as much information about your competitors as possible. The more information you are able to gather, the better the conclusions you will be able to draw from your research. The tricky part of benchmarking is deciding which factors actually apply to your specific market and your specific point in time. You will want to analyze not only the similarities between yourself and the competitors but your fundamental differences as well. This is a great opportunity for you to analyze your strengths and weaknesses compared to the competition. If you do this honestly and accurately, you will give yourself a better chance to improve.

Benchmarking is an effective tool to measure success if your business is already operating. Your goals should be clearly laid out in your business plan, and you should have a clear set of key metrics that you use to gauge success. Compare your list of key metrics such as gross revenue, net profits, profit margins, revenue growth, accounts receivable time, market share, liquidity, and turnover ratios to other industry participants and see how you are doing. This will give you a good idea of where you stand as compared to the industry average, and let you know where you need to improve as well as where you are already excelling.

Many business owners and people writing business plans do not thoroughly execute a benchmarking study because they think that they do not have access to their competitors numbers. This is probably because they havent looked for this data. Here are a few ways to track down some of the data that will be beneficial for benchmarking.

  1. Ask other business owners- Form alliances with similar businesses to yours, but located in other cities, so that you don’t compete directly. If you can agree to share financials with one another then you have a legitimate source for really good information.
  2. Ask an industry association- Industry groups often conduct polls of their membership in which business owners anonymously disclose information about their financials. While these won’t tell you how individual competitors are faring, industry statistics often give you good general comparison figures on how a typical business in your industry is doing.
  3. Buy or find market research- If you’re willing to spend, there is market research available on almost every industry segment.

Benchmarking is a very important process when comparing yourself to the rest of your industry. Do as much research as you can and dig as deeply as possible in order to find out the most information that you can about your competitors. Often times the answers to your problems are out there, you just have to spend the time and energy to find them.

 

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Finding the Right Business Lawyer for Your Startup Business

How to Find a Lawyer from The Startup Garage

Finding the Right Business Lawyer for Your Startup Business

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Every small startup business needs the support of experienced professionals. Without a doubt the relationship that your company has with a business lawyer is one that is very important. Before you spend enormous amounts of funds, time and energy it is essential that you make sure that your legal foundation is solid and that your business is protected. Here are a few advices on how, when and where to choose a business attorney.

When do you need an attorney for your startup business? The best answer to this question is now, even if you havent started your business venture yet. If your business needs to go to court and you dont have a lawyer, you might already be a step behind. Approach an attorney as soon as you are committed to starting your business. A good startup attorney can ease the process of starting a business, choose the right kind of legal formation for your business, obtain the necessary licenses and permits, get you through your hiring practice and create some day to day rules for you as a preventative approach. If you plan on seeking funding from venture or angel investors legal aid is essential as your business needs a clear documentation on the expectations from both sides of the deal. If you have partners, a business lawyer can help you define the exact agreement on your equity splits. In this blog we had previously talked about the importance of having well defined exit strategy for both you and your partners as the future might hold some uncertainties even for the best partnerships out there. After all you might be the next Mark Zuckerberg and it wouldnt hurt to have a solid lawyer to back your case from the start.

Go local when selecting your business attorney. From time to time it is OK (and it is free) to seek advice from your college buddy that lives on the opposite coast and is a successful business lawyer. When it comes to your business you will need someone who is reliable and close enough for you to get in touch with when needed. Going local with your law firm choice has a few added benefits. A local business lawyer will help you spread the word about your business, might help you tap into some founding sources, invite you to local networking events and introduce you to other neighboring businesses and valuable resources. Also, by choosing local attorney you preserve the opportunity to know your business attorney socially and to receive that priceless professional business advice as from a friend, off the clock. The better you know your lawyer and the better he/she knows your business, the better advice you will receive.

Choose the right sized law firm. If your startup works with a big law firm you might find yourself struggling for attention, fighting to get your small business problems noticed as they are representing their titan clients. Despite the big firm reputation you may not get their A player but an inexperienced new lawyer and even then your business will not be their personal or professional priority. One thing is for sure, generally speaking big law firm has a bigger overhead and therefore higher hourly rates. On the other hand, going with a law firm that is too small or too specialized can turn out to be the wrong choice as well as you need to assume that your business would be developing and growing and you might need legal help on a wider scale.

Local lawyers focused on startups are easy to find online or through your professional network if you are about to launch a business it would be worth it that you look them up. Remember that your goal is to find a lawyer that will get to know your business well since he/she must not only protect it but also foresee the future threats and provide you with valuable preventive options.

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Blogging. How To and What About

Blogging How to and What About from The Startup Garage

Blogging. How To and What About

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If you are a startup entrepreneur your blog might be an asset to your business.
Your blog is a valuable business tool that allows you to reach your audience, to access your customers, to educate about your product, to market your services. If you care about any of the above blogging could be a valuable strategy for you.

But How? And what about? Startup entrepreneurs often understand the importance of blogging but are not exactly clear on the question what to blog about. Some simply lack the confidence to talk about their businesses to unknown virtual spectators. Here are a few basic guidelines on blogging.

1. Know your target market dont just blog about everything, blog about the things that matter to your target customers. They probably dont look up to you for advice on business planning and startup strategy. Ours do, so we blog about that. You should blog about what you know best your own product or service. Give your readers the information that will make them buy specifically from you.

2. Have credibility cite your facts or otherwise make sure they are expressed as opinions. Your customers dont want to be lied to or to be misled, so you are not doing yourself a favor when making up facts. That is unless you are in the business of selling fairy tales.

3. Educate more, persuade less. Your blog is a place where you can teach your customer about the value of your service or product, the store is where they think about buying it. Being too much of a sales man can hurt not only your sales but also your creativity So, make sure your customer knows all the benefits your product can offer and as they say your product will sell itselfof course with the help of your blog

4. Be yourself! Dont lose your voice or your identity, instead try to stay authentic to who you are. There is no need to sound too smart or too funny. Your customers will see who you are in your words.

5. Dont get stuck considering every word. Just say what is on your mind even if it doesnt seem to sound just perfect. If you dont follow this rule you will never hit that Publish buttonand you probably will never get it to sound perfect anyways.

6. Dont be offensive. We do suggest that you do share your opinions and even that you involve your audience by stirring up discussion where different opinions are raised. But make sure to be respectful as there is no benefit in offending the mass of people who your business is benefiting from.

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And now that you have started blogging we some good news: according to a recent study done by Universal McCan media agency 77% of Internet users read blogs. That means that there are over 200 million people in North America alone why might be just reading your blog.
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