Cut out the middle man….go direct!

I recently read an article in Business Review Weekly by Mark Bouris, a brilliant businessman with an extremely interesting business history, look into it. In the article he revealed that the strongest business asset he has are his advisors. The article was quite informative and detailed how advisors can help you identify pitfalls within your business and areas that require further development. The article seemed particularly relevant for business in the early stages of getting started, such as planning. The reason I’m going on about this is that it got me thinking about advisors and business.

Obviously the reason you want an advisor is because they aren’t intrinsically attached to the business so hopefully they won’t be emotionally influenced and thus identify key areas for improvement. This can be of particular importance during the planning stage of your business. Any who has started a business knows they need to consider their target audience, and whether they are likely to purchase or use the service you are introducing into the market. These advisors should be able to assist with this sort of planning, but what if you just went straight to the consumer? Yes it has taken a couple hundred words for this to become relevant but here we go! Personally, I think (Obviously because I think it, it must be correct) that I would rather hear from the people I am going to target rather than someone who presumes to know what the consumer thinks.

Whilst I would love to hear if it has been done, to my knowledge business rarely start up a Facebook prior to launching the business to ‘test the waters’. Why not get out there before you launch and ask the public what they think? Would they use your product? Would they hire you? Would they respond to your proposed marketing campaign? These are all questions best answered by the people you are intending to target, particularly for certain demographics. For example, and I’m not speaking from any experience here, but I would think most trusted advisors would be from a more mature age bracket. I would hardly think Coca-Cola has hired an 18 year old to look over their marketing plan to identify deficiencies. That said, they’re exactly who they want to buy their products?

If that’s not enough, what about cost? I’m sure these top notch advisors are really ‘cheap’. And don’t get me wrong, I’m sure they are worth every cent as Mark Bouris suggests, but why not go direct to your consumer for free?

For those of you on Facebook you will have noticed the recent addition of ‘Questions’, where people can now liter cyber-space with irrelevant questions, such as ‘blonde or brunette?’. So why not take advantage and ask a question worth answering? If there is one thing I know it’s that people are sure what they have to say is paramount. We all think that our opinion is the key to success, hell why would I be writing this otherwise. The simple fact is, people love to give their opinion, and on Facebook you can guarantee it will be the truth, so why not ask?

I know most of my articles, if you’ve found yourself without anything to do recently and read them, bang on about what you should be doing, but honestly you should. For years it has been the bain of advertising and marketing companies that they can’t receive direct feedback from the public on their campaigns and now that the resource has been created why aren’t we leveraging aggressively? Well I certainly don’t know why, that said feel free to contact me if you want an advisor, I’m sure I can find something to do between 9am – 5pm at your office while Social Media does the job for me!