imagine you have established a small company and you are looking to expand your

Question

imagine you have established a small company and you are looking to expand your business in its current field or into related fields. Currently, your business primarily relies on word of mouth and has a small online presence, but has not branched out into social media and networking. Your small business has the potential of growing exponentially with the implementation of the right strategic communication plan.

In a 500-750 word report, discuss the value of networking in developing business opportunities and sustaining long-term relationships for your startup company.

Explanation / Answer

Developing business relationship is essential for the success of small companies. As ours is not an established one, people may not be aware of our company and product and may hesitate to buy our product. Hence we should try to create relationship with the customers so that people would start buying our product and communicate regarding the benefits to other customers which would help us to increase the customer network and position our product in the market. The communication strategy and relationship building can be either direct or through online. We need to adopt advertising methods which involve advertising in media, direct selling or sales promotion to market our product. Another important way to build relationship is through online marketing. In the current situation online marketing using social media and networking plays an important role in the promotion of new products. Most of the people are more interested to search products through online media and once the product gets a positive feedback it spread over the social networking sites instantly and more customers prefer buying the product based on the feedback. Reputed brands also fail to sell their product if they cannot create positive impression over social media. Hence we should concentrate more on social media and networking sites. It is very cheap to adopt a communication strategy based on social media and our company can make maximum profit out of it. Once the customers accept our product it opens up a way for us for building long term relationship with the customers by adopting appropriate strategies involving attractive discounts and offers.

As we are currently focused on communicating with customer through word of mouth we should start focusing on online media to explore the opportunities around the world. We need to tie up with the distribution channels that would help for the distribution of our product when the customers place the purchase request online. We need to develop our online strategy that would provide maximum benefit to our product and should try to build customer trust and develop positive feedback among the customers through a better online policy that give more importance to deliver the right product to the right customer at the right place on right time.

Apart from tying up with ecommerce websites like Amazon and eBay we need to develop our own company website to market and sell the product and we should also promote our website through online social media websites like face-book. Our website can be used for sending branded email to customers regarding the new products and the offers going on in the website. We need to find the cost effective ways to develop and maintain our website and also while selecting appropriate distribution and marketing strategies. Once we make our presence in the online market it will be easy to promote our business and establish new relationships that can be taken forward for long time.

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