Herisha Wijesurendrage – 15/12/2023
“Don’t find customers for your product, find products for your customer,” Seth Godin
Whether you’re a small business owner or have years of experience it can sometimes feel like you’re juggling multiple roles all at once, from administrative duties to accounting tasks, adding marketing into your day-to-day tasks can be seem overwhelming, you may even feel like outsourcing to marketing companies. However, the truth is marketing your business doesn’t have to break the bank. You know your skills and experience more than anyone else so use that to your advantage.
There are several avenues that you can use to market your business, but before you put money into it have an overview of where your business sits in your market industry. Creating a marketing plan will help you understand the current state of your business and will give you a vision of what you want your business to look like and how to achieve it. Ask yourself questions and not just from a business owner perspective, think like a prospective client as well.
A full marketing plan template is available on the Business Victoria website below:
www.business.vic.gov.au/tools-and-templates/marketing-plan-template
Let’s look at some of the key elements to discuss in your marketing plan:
Mission statement. In short this is the purpose of your business.
- AIC VIC Mission Statement: AIC Victoria is committed to best practice conveyancing. We aim to advance the interests of all conveyancers in Victoria and build public confidence in the State’s conveyancing industry.
Market/Competitor Analysis. This analysis will help you see the competitive landscape within your industry and how your business fits into the industry. Ask yourself what separates you from other Conveyancing businesses? Market analysis will give you the price clients are willing to pay for a service, buying motives and even consumer values. Look around your area and see what other conveyancers are doing differently to you. This step is important because it will influence the strategies that you will implement.
SWOT analysis – helps you understand the internal and external environment that your business is in.
- Strengths: What your business does well, this doesn’t necessarily set you apart from the competition, but it means one less thing you must work on.
- Weakness: Identify the internal weaknesses in your business and ask yourself questions; are you understaffed, are you available to your clients? Look at areas where your competitors are excelling in, things like online presence and client engagement.
- Opportunities: look at your industry as a whole, are there underserved markets you can target and benefit from?
- Threats: External factors that can harm your business. Being in an ever-changing industry like Conveyancing means there’s always new laws and regulations that you need to be educated on and if you don’t keep yourself up to date, it can cause problems for yourself and your clients.
Target market: This represents your ideal clients; this can be limited to one client or a few different clients. Do you want to appeal to buyers who are looking for a Toyota or a Mercedes? Do you want clients to reach out to you or you reach out to them? Look at the pool of clients you have worked with and do market segment profile:
Demographic: Age, income, marital status
Geographic: Location, culture
Psychographic: Lifestyle, interest, opinion, concerns, values, and goals
Behavioural: Intent, engagement, purchasing habits.
Once you have gathered this information you can see a pattern in your clientele. You can then use this information to see what target market you need to reach to grow your business and to earn the most profit.
Marketing Objectives: This is the driving force behind your marketing strategies. These can be short term and long-term goals.
Marketing Strategies: Now it’s time to use all the data from above and come up with strategies to make your business grow. Take into consideration the four P’s of marketing when thinking of strategies, in order to maximise the chance of your business potential.
- Product: Service quality and guarantee
- Price: Price strategy, are you charging too high or too low?
- Promotion: Advertising, promotion channels, social media
- Place: Marketing channels, locations
Once you’ve completed your marketing plan, it’s important to touch base with it time and time again. See what’s working, what’s not. Your marketing plan is not set in stone and can be changed as you progress in your business.
Herisha Wijesurendrage is the Marketing Coordinator at the Australian Institute of Conveyancers (Victoria Division)