Aha! Moments

A few members share their most successful marketing strategies

• We find that personally contacting people is the most successful strategy for us. We believe in long-term relationships and really getting to know people. We try to use networking events to generate warm leads. It's a cheap form of marketing and gets excellent results. - Carolyn Queale, SpySee.

• I find that going the extra mile works for me. At Natiki we only take on the number of clients that we know we can give excellent service to. We prefer to have a waiting list of people wanting to use our web design services than taking on too much and not being able to deliver the goods. Each client is unique and we want them to feel comfortable asking even what they regard as "dumb" questions. I believe in treating each person with respect no matter how tech-savvy they are. This way of operating seems to work for us as we don't need to advertise Natiki, we have a constant flow of new customers that are referred by our happy clients.

• My best marketing tip is to know your target market - who you're selling to - intimately. I find this is an issue for a large proportion of my clients, they know roughly who they are selling to, however they've never considered in detail what problem/s they are solving for their customers, where and how their customers shop, their personal values such as environmentalism or consumerism, how much they are likely to spend on similar products, what magazines, websites and forums they read, etc. You have to know your customers inside out, the more you know about your customers the more effective your marketing will be. You can't guess based on your own experiences or those of your friends, you have to research your target market themselves. Melinda Brennan, WAHM Biz Builder http://wahmbizbuilder.com