It’s a very British thing to be modest, to politely queue and not complain and it is all too American to enjoy self-promotion. In many instances, people of merit or who provide worthy services lay unrecognised due to a tight lip and ‘well nobody likes a big-head’ attitude, and yet how are clients, companies, and colleagues going to be aware of your skills without self-promotion? The humble and modest nature of British companies could well be losing both clientele and accolade.
The key things to consider for a firm’s promotion is audience and awareness. Is your audience aware of your products or services and, most importantly, your expertise? The chances are, your more confident competitors are attracting clients that your business could benefit from.
With technology advancing and social media growing in popularity it seems a waste not to harness the potential of promotion for your business.
We’ve narrowed down four key factors to consider when promoting yourself and your business:
Sales
Everyone is selling, whether you’re a business, entrepreneur or even a teacher we all sell information or services and people will buy people. Yet how are people requiring your services going to know what you’re selling without promotion? Being fantastic at photography or an excellent copywriter serves as nothing without evidence such as testimonials, high quality images and reviews. The first thing a client is going to do before contacting you, is research you. A presence on any social media platform such as Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn can provide a potential client with a bank of persuasive information about your business and the skills it offers.
Normality
It has become the norm to promote ourselves and yet we still cringe when we see people announcing their achievements while others are ‘uncomfortable about promoting myself’. We should take a more American approach to promotion and see other people’s achievements and skills as potential to promote and grow our own businesses.
The American’s are also proud of their failures. In Britain, we daren’t fail whilst our counterparts over the pond view each failure as a positive step towards something great and wear their subsequent failures as a badge of honour.
PR is about reputation management and whilst we’d encourage you to showcase your company’s positive news, showing determination against the odds to succeed is just the kind of PR content to gain you some free media exposure and increase your chances of winning awards.
Time
Most of us are low on time and in running our businesses, we lack the time to perform uncomfortable self-promotion so it simply doesn’t happen.
There are ways to outsource promotion through the experts such as us at MacComms and the utilisation of social media management tools such as Hootsuite. This provides time-saving scheduling facilities (just be careful not to schedule everything, social media needs ‘as-it-happens’ engagement as well as scheduled, broadcast posts).
Helping
The main message to remember is that you are in business because your product and/or service is needed. Consider the mountain of clients in need of you or your businesses skills. We use the internet to research, gain knowledge, advice and information. Your customers, relevant journalists and bloggers want your content so place yourself as the expert in your sector and give it to them!
Join us on Twitter @MacCommsYorks and speak to us by emailing info@maccomms.net to see how MacComms could help promote you!
