Small Business Marketing Tip #5: Marketing Your Business with Creative Networking and Volunteering
Written on May 4, 2007 by Susan Payton
Creative Networking: Shaking Hands as a Marketing Strategy
If you’re like me, you’ve just about exhausted the usual channels for networking. While networking groups are good for making contacts, those contacts don’t always translate into sales. Attending too many meetings with different groups can sometimes do nothing more than drain your pocketbook. So how can you meet people in your community that will be interested in your product, and bring you steady sales?
Volunteering as a Marketing Strategy
Think about it. You’re working with a diverse group of go-getters for a cause. While you will all be like-minded in the sense that you want to help a particular organization or non-profit, you all work in different parts of the city and do different things. Without having a specific agenda to sell, you will build relationships with these people, who will then think of you when a need arises that you can fill.
How Will Volunteering Help My Marketing Efforts?
Think about the people you have met at church, at your children’s school, in the community. You probably know where they work, and if anyone mentions needing services or products, you immediately think of the people you know can provide them.
It works the same with volunteering. People get to know you, and they know what you do for your day job. When the time comes for them to purchase the kind of item or service you sell, you are the person at the top of their list!
-Susan
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Do you have any suggestions on getting started? Would you just start asking some of your peers about what they need assistance with?
Carla–
Look in your community. There are so many volunteer opportunities, like American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life. My local Business and Professional Women held a fundraiser that I helped out in.
See, having a website isn\’t going to help your business at all if it doesn\’t show up extremely high in Google\’s search results. Anytime a person searches for something on Google, Google will return a page with the top ten websites they consider most relevant to the search term. The average person who\’s looking for a carpet cleaner in Kalamazoo, or a wedding photographer in Boise, isn\’t going to dig through pages and pages of Google\’s search results. Furthermore, when someone does a Google search for a local business, if your website isn\’t on that first page of results, the odds are very high that they\’re NOT going to click on your website to see what you have to offer.
[...] Marketing Your Business with Creative Networking and Volunteering [...]