Excerpted from: Home Business Magazine’s Home-Based Biz Start-Up Guide: Order at https://homebusinessmag.com/home-based-business-guide
Step 6: Reach Out to Your Customers
Whether you call your homebased business’s target audience customers, clients, patients, or prospects, you need to determine who they are and how you’ll connect with them to sell your products or services. To paraphrase a line from Field of Dreams: just because you built it doesn’t mean they’ll come. You have to be proactive and systematic in reaching out to customers and you have to be smart with your marketing dollars.
Making a marketing plan
A marketing plan is a formal document describing your advertising and marketing efforts. Like a business plan, which was discussed in Chapter 3, you don’t need a well-written print copy of your ideas. You do need to think through each and every aspect of marketing so you can have a blueprint for your actions going forward. You’ve already done some market research in nailing down the type of business you’ve decided to run. Now you need to get into the details of how you’re going to make that business successful.
Elevator speech. Be sure that you can easily and quickly explain what your business is all about. It may be helpful to think in terms of giving a one- or two-sentence explanation to someone you’d meet in an elevator (hence the term elevator speech). This should include:
■ What you do
■ Why what you do is needed
For example, if your home-based business offers bookkeeping services, your speech might be something like: “We provide expert bookkeeping services for your business, which we can do remotely at your convenience to help your business save money.”
What problems are you facing? This could be stiff competition, changing customer demand, or something else. By honing in on problems, you are forced to think about ways to overcome
