When you are marketing your business, you can’t help get passionate about what you do, do you?

It can be all too easy to tell all your potential clients about all your products and services, all of the time.  After all, you want to make sure they know everything about what you do, don’t you?

This is a common mistake that many small business owners make.  Just think about many of the high street shops are gearing up for christmas at the moment.  Promotional signs up everywhere – and yet which are the shops that you decide to go in to?

If a shop window is full of messages and big red signs shouting different messages, it is confusing and you will walk by.  A shop with a very clear message “50% on all stock” will attract a higher number of walk-in customers.

When marketing your own business, have the courage to promote one product and one service at a time. It may feel like you are missing out on opportunities to make a sale, but by giving your customers one message at a time, they will be clearer on what it is they need to do to “walk in to your shop”.

Got a question you want to ask about your current promotions? Submit your question in the comment box below.

One of the easiest ways of making your business more profitable is to stop offering lots of choice and put your prices up.

Offer “affordable” and “low-cost” solutions to your clients and it is easy to get caught in the trap of constant promotions.  You can see this happening on the High Street at the moment.  Big retailers are offering pre-christmas sales and slashing their prices.  But the low margins mean that they have to get large numbers of customers through their doors to hit their sales targets.

When you run your own business, this is a strategy that rarely works.  It’s hard to attract the high numbers of clients you need to make the profits you want.

Here is a simple example using workshops to show you what I mean.

Half-day workshop tickets sell at £45
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £10 per person
Gross Profit per person £35

To make a total gross profit (and remember you still need to take in to account all the cost of promoting the event, work book printing, admin support, etc) of £500, you need a minimum of 15 tickets sold. 

Full-day workshop tickets sell at £195
Delegate rate & room hire cost you £40 per person
Gross Profit per person £155

To make the same £500 gross profit, you only need to sell 4 tickets.  If you sold 15 tickets, you would make a gross profit of £2325.

You would have to run at least 4 half day workshops to make the same gross profit as running one full day workshop.

Which workshop programme do you think will take less of your time to make £2,000?

(Please note, these calculations are highly simplified.  Do make sure you work out your net profit carefully when running events and don’t get caught out by focusing on your gross profit per person!)