Business Coaching and Marketing
As a business coach, it is your job to educate business owners and their employees. Most are new business owners who want to take a step in the right direction or struggling business owners who need help getting back on the right track. There are many areas of business management that you need to cover. With that said, focus on marketing. To make money, a business must sell either a product or a service. If your client has a good product, but no sales, it is because their marketing plan fell flat. Speaking of which did they even have a plan?
One of the mistakes that many new business owners make is believing as soon as they setup shop people will come. A storefront in a well-trafficked location will help. Even then, it is not enough. People will stop and notice their business, but will it get them insides the doors? Not always. That is why a strong marketing plan is key.
Business marketing should be divided into two different categories. These are local marketing and internet marketing. All business owners and managers should utilize both. For example, a client who runs an online store should do more than just market online. They should market locally too and visa versa. Implementing both types of marketing expands reach and profits. Start with one section at a time, such as local marketing. Later, move onto internet marketing.
When covering the marketing aspect of running a business to your client, create a step-by-step plan. This plan should have three different steps.
Step 1 – The Importance of Marketing
As previously stated, some new business owners mistakenly believe if they step a store, the customers will come. This is rare. A good example is to create a “dummy,” website ahead of time. On this website, sell something, such as your services as a business coach. Do not market or advertise your website. Let it sit there. Ask a team member to search for it. See if your volunteer can find your fake website with a standard internet search. With no marketing and incoming links, chances are they cannot.
This exercise shows that just because you have a product or service available for sale, it does not mean people will know or be able to find it. Outline how internet marketing can change that.
Step 2 – Give Examples
Your job as a business coach is to first show your clients the importance of business marketing. This is a step in the right direction, but it isn’t enough. You need to show them steps to take. Business marketing should be divided into two categories, local marketing and online marketing. Give at least 10 examples. Do more than just say try these marketing tactics, but have them available in printed format for reuse.
When sharing business marketing tactics with clients, business coaches must think both inside and outside of the box. What seems like common sense to you, may not be to a client. You know that businesses should advertise in the yellow pages of local phone books, but does your client have a listing? If not, they should.
Then, think outside of the box. Suggest to your clients creating a monthly newsletter. Readers can signup for these newsletters via the company website. In that newsletter, share tips, review new products or services available for sale, and include a moneysaving discount code. Consumers are more likely to buy a product or service when they feel like they are getting a good deal or something for free.
Step 3 – Review
Before closing your training session, summarize everything you just said. State the importance of having a solid marketing plan, as well as the consequences for not. Restate a few of your shared marketing tactics and encourage management to implement these steps right away and build from them. Whether you are training one person or one hundred, open the floor for questions.
Manage Your Home Business Online
When you decide to build your own home business, you risk the chance of failing and losing almost everything. However, if you can learn what is needed and do them correctly, you will stand a higher chance of succeeding where many others have failed.
In the beginning, it can be difficult to manage your business, home and personal life all at once but it will get better as time goes on. You will remember and know the things that you will need to do everyday and this will mean less time reading a schedule just to remember what your next task entails.
A perfect way to manage your home business is to always remember that it is indeed a business. You want to appear professional at all times, and that will not happen if you miss deadlines and cancel important meetings to go to the movies with friends. Your business will not succeed if you don’t take it seriously.
Build a Home Office
A home office will allow you to better manage your paper work and your entire home business. Without one, you may end up searching the entire home for missing files and papers that are important. If you have children and others living with you, documents could accidentally end up in the garbage or filled with doodling and crayon marks.
A personal office for you business will allow better control over your business with the help of organization. If you have a den, you could convert it into your office but if you lack a special room for your office, find a quiet corner in your home and build your business there. In a situation like that, you can get a desk that has locking doors. This will keep your private business corner private, and prevent unauthorized access to personal customer information. It will also help to prevent children and animals from getting to your important business items.
Create a Budget
A business without a budget plan runs the risk of losing money. You have to pay attention to where your money is going and coming from to be successful in what you do. If you don’t have a budget it may take a while before you realize that you are losing money. With a budget in place, you can quickly assess your finances and make changes that could stop that money lose.
Create Online Business Website
All home business owners should have a website. You will be losing out on what the internet is all about. A business web page will allow you to create a special place for customers to read about your business and services that you offer.
If you only know basic html or don’t know any at all, you should have a professional setup a business site for you. A website that does not look professional will turn away customers. You may also neglect SEO and other factors that are important in creating a website that is loved by search engines.
If you do have experience with building websites then it will cost less money to build it yourself. Domain names and web hosting have become incredibly cheap over the years and most web hosting sites offer special business plans under a discount. These plans are great to choose because they will often give you free domain names, business emails, forwarding, high bandwidth and more. Check reviews and see what others have to say about a web host before you pay for their services.
Accept Payments Online
If customers will buy and pay for service or products from your website, you will need to have a merchant account with a payment processor. In the past, this was difficult to do and expensive, but with millions of home business websites created, it has become easier to add payment acceptance online.
A company such as PayPal has special codes that you can add to the website. This will allow you to accept payments from PayPal members and non members who can pay with credit cards, debit cards and online checks.
Home Business Time Management Tips
Learning to master time management can make or break your home business. In the early days of your home business, you will still have a lot to learn and as you fill orders, work with customers and businesses; the hours can fly by very quickly. You will discover that there are not enough hours in a day to complete all of your daily tasks.
Efficiently managing your time will help you to create order out of chaos. If you wake up and simply start moving things around without some sort of plan in place, you can easily forget important jobs that need to be completed forget orders, neglect to call back clients and lose customer confidence in your fledgling company.
Plan Ahead
Have a plan in place such as a daily schedule. Follow up that schedule with a weekly schedule that fully covers all of your daily tasks. With this plan in place, you can quickly take stock of your time to figure out what needs to be done. This will help you to achieve your goals by completing important tasks first, and getting through simple tasks with time to spare. Get into the habit of checking, editing and updating this schedule as last minute plans may arise.
This plan will allow you to get your work done without creating a backlog because you accepted too much work in a short amount of time. When new requests come in, you can look at these schedules to see if you have the time to spare or if you should turn down the job due to lack of time. It can be hard to turn away new business or repeat offers but if you accept more work than you can complete in a comfortable amount of time, you will disappoint clients who will go elsewhere when they have new jobs.
Start Business Early
Some people will create a home business to sleep late and work whenever they want to. However, this is not likely to happen. If you sleep all day, no one is running your business and it will not be successful. If you have family as well, getting up early will allow you to take care of them and send off in the morning. You can then shower, eat breakfast and head off to your home office awake, refreshed and ready to work.
Separate Family and Business Life
Spending more time with your family may be one reason that you decided to open your own business, but you will have to keep the two separate to appear more professional and to keep everything organized. If you have young children, keep them away from your home office if possible. If you allow them to play in this room while you are working, they may feel that they can enter it when you are away. This can lead to ruined or lost paper work, schedules and important tasks that you need for your business.
Separating business and family is also a good way to help you to relax and get away from work. When you have completed your tasks for the day, you can simply close the door and go spend time with your family. This is hard to do if your computer and business is in an area that is accessible to the entire household. You want a personal space that you can shut away from the outside world when you are working and away from your personal life when you want to get away from the home office.
Set Priorities
If you do not have your priorities in order, you can end up doing a lot of work and have nothing to show for it at the end of the day. Completing a large amount of work one day, won’t help you if you have forgotten to complete an important and time sensitive job because you did not schedule your time correctly.
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