What type of marketing do you use?

[RSTech]

Hello everyone. I am a self-employed Electrical Technologist; its been about 2.5 years now. I have been extremely busy up until now and everything seems to have ground to a halt. There are various reasons why but the biggest factor seems to be the downturn in the auomotive industry which is my primary customer base. So it looks like it is time to find some new customers, possibly in other industries. I also have experience in aerospace and the food industry so I am not stuck in the automotive world. I'm curious what marketing methods other self-employed individuals use. What do you do? Up until now all my work has come through recommendations and referrals by my suppliers and past customers.

I am by no means the "sales type"; I'm a technical guy through to the bone. I would have great difficulty in doing cold calls either by phone or door-to-door. I don't know if I should contract a sales person on a part-time, temporary basis or send out mailings or what I should do. Part of my dilemna is that it doesn't take much to keep me busy since I do work alone. I don't need a sales person landing me too many projects that I can't handle. Are there contract or commissioned sales people out there that would be interested in landing or generating leads for just a few projects? Thanks for any advice you can offer.

[Administrator]

Hi Rob,

We are in completely different line of business (web properties), but here is what we do to promote our businesses.

We make press releases and publish them using prweb.com, and we also send them by snail mail to major Canadian newspapers. You need something newsworthy to do that of course, but with little creative work you can always come up with something.

We've just started doing promotional contest on this forum, and we are giving away iPod Video 30GB worth $300 CAD. Because this forum is relatively quiet yet, I don't expect many contest participants this month, but this will only increase the chances to win for those who participate ;). I see that you are an active poster and I would like to invite you to join the contest (http://www.jobforum.ca/november_2006_contest.php).

We use AdWords to drive targeted traffic to our websites, and this works really well so far.

We get a lot of "free" search engine traffic; of course this traffic is not really free because we work hard every day to achieve this.

We buy ads on popular Canadian sites, which bring us more targeted traffic yet.

I hope all the above will give you a few ideas you can use to promote your business.