Our second day of marketing, this is where we really got down to the nuts and bolts of what we should do to market our business. This included primary and secondary marketing, investigation and research i.e. competitors, competitive advantage, why would someone choose us over our competitors, what bodies are useful for starting up a business, not necessarily marketing: Ibec, Isme.

Some really good tips on questionnaires and examples of them out there: Google doc, Survey Monkey. These are usually a requirement for information to ultimately go into a business plan.

It was really impressed upon us is that referral’s are the best way to generate business. At long last I finally got to use some of the business cards - everyone seemed to like the simplicity of them.

Really liked some of the idea’s presented in this day of marketing, I am not going to give away too much, also the one to one session with the lecturer helped generate contacts, leads & angles that people would never have looked at.

One thing really clear from the session is that everyone is working lots of hours to get his/her business off the ground, but the question was posed:

Are we managing our time efficiently??

We should be setting smart goals, this seems trivial from the outset, but when it comes to actual time estimation… most people couldn’t give an accurate answer.