Part 7: Pushing Sales and Advertising

Hey there! I'm Hari, and I'm back with another useful post for you. In this post, we will be focusing on how you can push your sales and advertise to keep your business operational. I would love to think that you were following this blog until here and were able to start your business. (If not, start here.)

So, What's the Deal with Advertising?

Like I said on multiple occasions, advertising is the key to spreading awareness of your business and products to people. Good advertising will improve your sales, whereas poor advertising would spoil your brand. Therefore you need to strike balance between the two extremes: not too good, not too bad. 

Timing also plays a very crucial role in successful advertising. If you advertise your product infrequently, people could forget your product even exists because you are not a very big business. Yet. So daily or weekly advertising would do you good because people are constantly reminded that you still exist. There are upsides and downsides to this, but we will talk about that later. The point is that you should maximise advertising to maximise sales.

Frequent Ad Campaigns: Good or Bad?

Think from the customer's point of view. Would you like advertisements to flood your notifications every few minutes? It is not very pleasant, is it? To come to think of it, I myself hate the repeated pings I get on an hourly basis regarding some product, etc. How do you, as a business, ensure you are advertising and not spamming? (for context, read this post.)

For the iKeme Store project, I tried a daily ad campaign and got no negative responses. That wouldn't mean people were not annoyed by it. This kind of ad campaign would work well for FMCGs (fast-moving consumer goods) because they are, well, "fast-moving". But not every product is an FMCG. 

If you are a tech start-up, daily campaigning would be ridiculous because your product (read services) wouldn't change so often. In my case, I had a different concoction of ice cream daily, so it made sense to advertise daily. Remember, there's only a thin thread separating you from advertising and not spamming. Even the slightest tug could sever the thread. So proceed with utmost caution!

Identify Frequent Customers and Keep 'em Happy

This may not come to you as a surprise. Unconsciously even you would have always tried to stay in the good books of the kindest teacher in school. Don't deny it. Even I've done it. The same idea can be adapted to business as follows:

Keep your loyal customers happy and try harder to gain more.

         Quote: Me.

Take a minute to think about the profound meaning this sentence contains. Just kidding! It's just a random quote I made up to put across my point. If it makes sense to you, I'm honoured!

The fact remains that you should always keep happy customers happy. This seems logical because those who regularly buy from you are given a high priority. But you must also try harder to increase your customer base. You don't want it to stagnate because you need to satisfy more customers. How will you do that by just satisfying existing customers and not caring for new ones? You must therefore give importance to new customers as well.

It doesn't seem too tough to run a business, does it? No? Really? Think again. If it is so easy, why do we hear about businesses closing down? In the next post, we will discuss why your business might fail, and if it does, why you shouldn't start again. See you in the next post!

Next post: https://thebusinessbot.blogspot.com/2021/09/why-start-ups-fail.html