How does your customer find you? What marketing or promotion activities are your competitors finding success with? Which medium do they find you through; retail, web search, a package insert, TV advertising, magazine article, newspaper article?

These are all important questions to answer to have hopes of growing your company. If you don’t answer them you will wind up wasting time and money chasing the wrong channels.

For an established market many of these questions have been answered. Let’s say you sell backup software. Selling backup software is like selling insurance. The market has been molded through PR, magazine articles, newspapers, etc. Backup software customers are essentially everyone with a computer. The software backup shopper can be found at retail, web search and word-of-mouth.

Entering a new market is tougher. You will have a few starts-and-stops and although it will be more expensive and take more time to find the customer than an established market, the payoff is generally greater as you will be a bigger fish in a (hopefully) big pond.

Finding your customer and how to sell to them is key to growth. Once you find success here you can continue to leverage that with further time and investment.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 10th, 2010 at 2:53 pmand is filed under Guide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.