Small Business Marketing Solutions

Marketing should never stop. Marketing needs to constantly remind your customer base that you are there and what you do. Even when you don't have one minute of manufacturing capacity to sell, you need to constantly market your services. Personnel changes within your customer base are targets, personnel changes within your prospect base take place and the new people need to know who you are and what you do. You need to constantly line up prospects in the wings to take the place of customers that leave for one reason or another. You are also marketing to your bank, your insurance agent and other organizations that interface with you. You need to make a continuous effort every month to market your company to the world. You can't play catch up with marketing.

Every industry has trade organizations that interface with it. There is and organization for Purchasing Managers, Manufacturing Engineers, Mechanical Engineers, Quality Engineers, Planners and more. Each of these organizations has local chapters and your company's counterparts in your customer plants are members. Most organizations go through a lot each month to produce a program for the members. By developing a program to educate these organizations, you put yourself in a position of being an expert from your industry. An ad in their monthly newsletter reaches the people that you do business with and ones that you with which you would like to do business. Even better is participating in panel discussions. I taught classes in buying mechanical parts to aspiring purchasing managers as part of their professional development program and spent one night per month for four months with a class full of buyers working on their purchasing manager certification. Trade organizations become a place to communicate with your customers and prospects.

Do what you do best and then make sure you are rated on that process. You need to have your customers and prospects identify you with what you do. When someone mentions machining, do they think of your company? This is why you need to make your company name is synonymous with the service you provide. This is branding. You need to make your company stand out from the others. You can do this with articles in trade journals, blogs, your web site and active participation in trade organizations. Brand your company, now!

We see many OEM's now re-evaluating their own manufacturing operations. When they look at their own internal costs of manufacturing, many times they do not fully burden all of their operations. In order to effectively market manufacturing services, you must be able to fully understand how your customer analyzes their costs. Your customer is looking to control their costs of manufacturing and deal with peaks and valleys in their manufacturing cycle. It is a simple fact that must be exploited. You spread your overhead costs over a number of customers and you fill your peaks and valleys with multiple customers. Your customer only pays for the services that they are buying. When one job slows down, you utilize your staffing on other projects. The OEM must either lay off people or "make work" for staff during slow periods. It is human nature when the work slows down, the workers slow down also so they don't face being out of work. It is your advantage and their disadvantage when you can move cross trained employees to other work while the OEM suffers with excess capacity which is costing them money.

There are tons of machine shops and sheet metal fabricators as well as other metalworking services. I have found that most shops do not have a direction, they seem to take anything that they can bid. If you look at your "sweet spot" (see our article on sweet spot) you will be able to let customers and prospects know what you specialize in doing. By asking for opportunities to quote to your sweet spot, you can be more competitive and your prospect/customer now can identify their needs with your shop. Later, you can discuss what else you do as well as re-enforcing your sweet spot to your customer.