Issue link: https://docs.hic.us/i/403552
C C h h a a p p t t e e r r 1 1 – – M M a a r r k k e e t t i i n n g g Many people assume marketing and sales are the same thing. Taken a step further, they further believe sales and marketing are synonymous with advertising. But this is incorrect. Certainly all three subjects work together, but they are not the same. Marketing is a process that analyzes a given market and derives useful information about it. This information is then used to create a plan for reaching the customer and supplying their needs. (Advertising is a function of marketing plan.) The Marketing plan is then used to fuel Sales. Developing a general Marketing Plan was discussed in Section 1, Chapter 4. This chapter will look at Marketing processes and techniques that are specific to embroidery. Building A Customer Base It's finally arrived, the day that you've planned for and dreamed of, your first day in business. Your equipment is ready to run, your business cards are printed, your shop is set-up and your ready for that first order. You hang out the open sign and anxiously await for the customers to roll in. You wait and you wait, but nothing happens. You look at your machine and it stares silently back at you. So what's going on, where's all the business? You were so sure of your venture. You knew that if you bought it, they would come, right? Wrong!. Does this scenario sound a little bit far-fetched? It's not. Through teaching Seminars, I've met quite a few people who really believed that all they had to do was buy an embroidery system and people would automatically roll in. Most of them were quite dismayed to find out that it wasn't so. The embroidery business is just like any other, you must do some basic marketing to build a customer base.. There are lots of methods for promoting your business. Some things work better for one business than they do for another. For example, Yellow Page ads have been totally useless for our company. (Oops, I just heard Ma Bell roll over in her grave.) In the six years that we ran an ad, we received about twenty phone calls, ninety percent of which were useless. We got wonderful questions like "do you carry hook and latch kits?" Of course this also illustrates another point: the average person doesn't really know what embroidery is. They buy it, they wear it, and they like it, but they don't always connect the word Embroidery to the finished product. So it becomes essential that while we are promoting our www.hsi.us care@hsi.us 109