Johan

Marketing Tips for Women Entrepreneurs

Are you a female entrepreneur searching for new ways to market your new business? If so, there are many great ways to do so. Even better, the suggestions mentioned here are very affordable. Remember, unless you’re lucky enough to have an unlimited supply of capital, it’s always best to go easy on your finances in the beginning.

Always Have a Plan

No matter what kind of small business you’re in charge of, it’s always best to have a plan before you put things into action. This is true of every aspect of running your business. You may want to keep an audio recorder or small notebook with you, or find a note keeping app for your smartphone. Once you have a plan laid out, stick to it to the best of your abilities.

Set Optimistic Goals

In order to get work done effectively, it’s best to establish goals that you can work to achieve throughout the day, week, or month. These goals should be things that are attainable. Otherwise you’re just setting yourself up for failure. However, they should also be optimistic and challenging goals that will encourage you to push yourself in order to be as effective as possible.

Know Your Target Market

Research into your target market, before you even open your doors to the public, is crucial to your marketing plan. The more specific you can get, by drilling down categories, the better. Not only do you need to know things like age, gender and income bracket, you also need to know what motivates your ideal client or customer to buy.

Build a Strong Portfolio

As the owner of the business, the way that you present yourself is often the first impression that potential clients or customers get of your organization. Make sure to always have a resume or portfolio available so that your future business associates can see all the hard work that you’ve done in the past. If they’re impressed with how you represent yourself as a person, it’s much more likely that they’ll want to do business with you.

Form a Network

It can be difficult to market your product or business on your own. Fortunately, social networking makes it easy for just about anybody to reach out to potential clients. Make sure that your business has a strong web presence, and establish pages for it on social media sites.

But, social media isn’t the only way to establish a network of clients and business associates. Whenever your business works with another company, be sure to establish a relationship between the two of you.

Keep Searching for New Opportunities

Never pass up an opportunity to market yourself or your business to others. Make sure that you always have your business card with you in case you run across someone in your personal life that you want to form a connection with in your professional life. You never know where you might meet your next customer.

These are just a few marketing tips for women entrepreneurs. Realistically, this is just the beginning. Obviously, you don’t have to try all these things at once. Trying one or two at a time is usually the better way to go.

How to Prepare for a Crisis (Even If It Never Happens)

More than likely, you may never deal with a crisis in your business. However, it’s always better to be prepared than having to deal with a crisis with no thought or idea of how to do it. It may seem like a negative to think about this before it happens, but you’ll be glad you did because it’ll make overcoming the crisis much easier and more likely.

Make a List of Potential Crises

For each business owner, this will be slightly different. If you have a home business, you may want to include any type of crisis that would affect your ability to do business, even if it’s not business related.

Create Response Templates for Each Issue

Now that you know the types of crisis that might affect your business, take the time to create a response template for each issue. You may be able to locate templates on MS Office via Word and Excel to help give you some ideas about it. Mainly you want to go through what to do for every single element of each crisis, from PR to physically fixing equipment. Whatever it takes.

Inventory Your Assets

If you don’t even know what you have, it’ll be hard to replace it if disaster strikes. Take pictures of your assets and create an online inventory of everything it takes to run your business – from software to physical equipment like smartphones, laptops, and printers. Whatever you have you’ll want to note with a picture, a description, and a copy of the purchase receipt.

Keep All Stakeholders Informed

Know exactly what your plans are for communicating with your stakeholders. Whether they are investors, customers, or they work with you, know how you’ll keep the lines of communication open should a crisis occur.

Remember PR

Don’t forget that continuing to promote your business positively during a crisis is imperative in order to be able to overcome it with a business still intact. Don’t stop your usual promotions (unless you need to due to finances) when something happens.

Stay Transparent

Whether you’re talking to the press, your customers, or posting on social media about the crisis, be sure to always stay open, honest and transparent. Even the appearance of stonewalling can be a PR nightmare for a small business owner.

Create Backups of Everything

Whether it’s software, or data, or websites… whatever you use for your business needs to stay backed up. You’ll want to have redundant backups of everything so that if one method goes down, you’ll have the other.

Create a Vendor Response List

One document that is important is to know how to contact everyone who works with you, especially vendors. For example, do you know how to call your payment processor if you did not have access to your computer or your smartphone directly? Can you sign in from any computer from anywhere to get a list of your vendors, account information, and so forth so you can deal with it?

Give Power of Attorney to the Right People

What happens to your business and the people you work with if you are not available at all for whatever reason? Is there someone you can give POA to that can work for your business’s benefit if you’re unavailable due to the crisis?

Crisis preparation is key. Take the time to get the information together that you’d need if something happens. That way, you’re ready to take on the problem from day one instead of trying to invent a way at the last minute for dealing with it. Whether the crisis is one of PR or one of a natural disaster, with planning you can ensure you come through it with flying colors.