Do Business Well

I have used the launching and marketing of The Business Network as an example. You can use the same formula to market and promote other projects. My intention is not to saturate you with information on the Network, but I do feel its best to speak from experience and most of my knowledge emanates from the Network. I also believe that networking is one of the most effective ways of marketing, so where I have used the words Business Network, simply replace it with your company name.

It all starts with an idea

When I first launched The Business Network, I needed to create awareness – especially as I set my sights on expanding it into at least eight prominent shopping centres. The first rule was to imagine that it was all already in the bag! When approaching someone, I didn’t say, ‘Oh, we’re thinking of doing such-and-such.’ Instead, I said, ‘We are doing suchand-such.’ The next step was to draw up a list of what I needed:

• posters in shopping centres
• brochures
• advertising space
• radio coverage.

The next step was to arrange the sponsors.

Posters in shopping centres

The individuals who attend meetings of The Business Network live and work in or near the suburb in which the shopping centre is situated, but I needed to get them together. I thus needed to create awareness of the meetings in the actual area in which the get- togethers would take place. I therefore approached the mall’s marketing department and made a proposal. I started by giving a brief description of what the Network was about. I then listed how the shopping centre could benefit. (To make this both enticing and credible, it is very important to make sure that the list of benefits for the mall is longer than the list of benefits to you!) I emphasised the following:

• The Business Network is a service to the community – by supporting this, the centre would be supporting the community.
• I would use the centre’s logo on the poster promoting The Business Network.
• Meetings would bring additional feet into the shopping centre early in the morning, when it is generally less busy.

• The members of the Network would shop in the centre’s stores afterwards.
• The venue hosting the Network meeting would receive additional income.
• The centre would be promoted in our Network diary/directory.
• The centre would receive extensive media coverage.
• The centre would be promoted in other shopping centres (all posters advertise other meeting dates and venues).

And what did I expect in return? All I wanted was for the centre management to pay for the posters and brochures I needed to print. The result? Marketing departments of virtually all the shopping centres I approached happily reached into their petty-cash boxes – and benefited in all the ways I had proposed. Because they had paid for the marketing material from the marketing fund, they were obliged to actually display the posters all around the centre. In fact, when I – free of charge -handed posters to one of the shopping centres that had not contributed to the printing costs, guess what happened? Yes, they did not display a single poster. The centres that did support the initiative, however, quickly began to reap all the benefits I had foreseen.

Brochures

Initially, the shopping centres covered all the costs of printing the brochures. But once the Network meetings started and began to gain momentum, I allowed members to advertise in the brochures and the revenue raised paid for the entire print run. Later, a member of the Network offered to do all our printing free of charge in exchange for coverage on the promotional material. The result was that we paid nothing for the brochures, and everyone benefited. In fact, the printer actually thanked me, pointing out that the advert in our brochure was one of her most effective ways of advertising.

Advertising space

I approached a newspaper house that owned about 14 local newspapers and offered to amend the title of the proposal in exchange for advertising space in it’s publications. I also invited its representatives who sold advertising space to attend the meetings. So, let’s say the newspaper was called The Sunshine Times, we called the network meeting ‘The Sunshine Times Network Breakfast’. The result was that they ran free adverts in all the papers on several occasions, and their advertising consultants attending the Network meetings sold advertising space to members. Again, a win-win situation.

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