Write on Time: Marketing Your Business

by Melody Brumis EBSTC Senior Member

Melody Brumis has been a contract writer and active East Bay STC member. Recently, she embarked on the adventure of starting a small business with her friend, Adrienne Tange.

Write on Time Solutions, LLC is a technical writing company that creates clear, concise and accurate technical documentation or Web content-always on time and on budget.

This year, we've started a small business called Write on Time Solutions. While starting off as a technical writing company, we've now expanded into more creative writing, including communications, ghost writing, and, of late, blogging. One of our biggest challenges has been how to successfully market our business.

Adrienne and I have been in the technical writing world for a combined 40+ years. We've been employees, contractors, and independent consultants, but now we're selling a small business. We're selling the idea that we can come in, estimate a project, and assign all the resources required to get the job done.

Finding Expert Help  

How do we do this? Adrienne and I brainstormed, and decided we needed to consult the experts. We found experts all around us. My brother George, a former advertising copywriter, was now selling his own business, RFP MD. We talked to him.

We also did informational interviews with successful small business owners from our own STC chapter: Joy Montgomery of Structural Integrity and Gwaltney and Carl Mountford of Mountford Group Inc. We took them to lunch and asked lots of questions.

Marketing Ourselves

We came up with the following marketing ideas, some of which we've already put in motion:

• Send out a marketing piece to family, friends, and our customer base to introduce who we are and what we do. Include a handwritten personal note in each communication.
  
  
• Tell everyone you come across in your daily life what you do and hand them a business card. Practice an elevator speech about your small business.
  
  
• Network, network, network. Go to your local STC chapters ( East Bay , Berkeley, North Bay, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley) and sell yourself.
  
  
• Come up with a topic of interest to yourself and other small business owners and prepare a presentation. Present it at your local Chamber of Commerce.
  
  
• Create a Web site for the business and update it often. Our Web site
  (www.writeontimesolutions.com) is up and running.
  
  
• Start a blog about anything of relevance to the business and write entries often. Our blog is called On the Write Road
  (www.onthewriteroad.com).
  
  
• And, finally, say yes to all those friends who have been sending you invites to LinkedIn, FaceBook, and other online social marketing sites. Be sure to introduce your business in your profile and write clearly about what you are selling.
  
  

Keeping Track —
What Works

What do we do next? We'll try out some of these marketing ideas and see what happens. Dr. Mike Unwalla keeps track of what marketing ideas work on his Web site (TechScribes marketing results). We'll ask that simple question: Where did you hear of us? And, we'll keep on trying new ideas.

Since our column is to share the "how tos" of small business we'll also report back here on what happens. Do you have a marketing idea for us? Please send it to info@writeontimesolutions.com. If we use it, we'll take you out to lunch to hear more.

Melody and Adrienne will be writing this column together to help you achieve small business success. If you have any questions for us, please email us at info@writeontimesolutions.com and we will address them in future columns.