Small Business Marketing Kit For Dummies, 3rd Edition

Getting to Know Your Product

The first step toward stronger sales is to know everything you possibly can about the products you sell and the reasons your customers buy.

Look beyond your primary offerings to consider the full range of solutions your business provides. Likely you’ll discover your offerings are more diverse than you first realize, a finding that can lead to stronger, more targeted marketing efforts.

Consider the products of a lakeside resort. The owners would list the number of cabins, seats in the restaurant, and rowboats for rent. Then they’d include the shopping opportunities in the resort’s bait shop. Their list may also include summer youth camps, winter cross-country ski packages, all-inclusive corporate retreats, and such intangibles as family memories, based on their finding that many reservations are motivated by an emotional response to the lakeside setting as an annual vacation site.

Similarly, a law office might describe its products by listing the number of wills, estate plans, incorporations, bankruptcies, divorces, adoptions, and lawsuits it handles annually. And if it’s well managed, the lawyers will know which of those product lines are profitable and which services are performed at a loss in return for the likelihood of ongoing, profitable relationships.

What about your business?

What do you sell? How much? How many? What times of year or week or ...