Communication: how to get out of anonymity with few resources. The possibilities for craftsmen, traders, small business owners and consultants

In a hyper-competitive world, where communication has become a disruptive weapon, those who have the skills and financial resources to impose themselves on the market can make a difference. What about small businesses?

Communication activities, in today’s interconnected world, can make the difference between who uses them and who doesn’t. Small companies, closely involved in daily business, sometimes do not have the time to promote their business, to make known the ability to create added value to their work.

The size of the company itself does not often include the presence of a figure who takes care of highlighting the corporate prerogatives, through which to attract new potential customers and have a job schedule on a longer horizon.

In addition, the financial flow, typical of micro or small companies, often does not allow you to hire an internal human resource to deal with the promotion of the business.

But for the craftsman, the hairdresser, the beautician, the bar, the small producer, the consultant, the cleaning company and, we could go on to mention a thousand other professional figures, emerge from anonymity or win the competition, it becomes increasingly a need for survival and revitalization.

But how do you reach the goal?

Communication is an activity that aims to create empathy with potential customers and a means of retaining those already acquired by the company.

Empathy is that state of mind, on the part of the potential buyer, who chooses you rather than your close competitor or becomes aware of your business and decides that it might be interesting to try to use you instead of his usual supplier.

In empathy there are many sensations that do not depend directly on the product you sell or the service you offer, but it is a set of values ​​transmitted to the potential customer that tip the choice towards your business.

Communication should never be considered a means of direct sales, aimed at increasing turnover in the short term, but an activity that promotes customer loyalty over the long term, the consequence of which may be the increase in turnover.

Why do you order a coke and not another drink with caramel quite similar? The price? The quality? I do not think so. The suggestion of the product that creates the right empathy in each of us.

Why a person must come to buy bread from your shop or go to repair the mobile phone from you and not from the large distribution chain or have curtains for your home made in your shop instead of another or rely on a financial advisor instead of its competitor?

It is a question of empathy that, through local or large-scale communication, leads to making choices that go beyond the product, assuming that you have an expected quality and not less than that of your competitor, but not necessarily better.

This also applies to wholesale supplies, where a small business owner can produce umbrellas or vases or hangers or trash cans or orthopedic nets, to give some examples, with the same quality of product and service, he must be able to create a key to make himself preferred and to to be known by a wider audience.

But creating empathy is not like buying or selling a commonly used product, it does not achieve its purpose in a short period of time, it is a path that requires time but above all constancy.

Those who marry communication to make their company grow must be above all constant over time, whether things in the short term go badly or better.

With what resources and how to do it?

The construction of a communication path today does not require expensive investments, as it is possible to rent the work and calibrate the consultant’s weekly hours according to the needs and financial resources of the company.

Each activity has its own history, its sphere, its financial situation and its objective. Starting from the analysis of this information, a work plan is created with the entrepreneur that allows him to devote himself to his work and the consultant to bring out the company and create the empathy necessary to make a company prefer to another one.

Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.