For small and start-up businesses, a crucial component to achieving the growth of the business is marketing.
Creating awareness about the business, what it does, how it does it, its location, and relevance to its customers and society drives the business’s growth faster. After all, a business has to be known before it can be patronized.
Various forms of marketing can be employed to create awareness like advertisements, email marketing, content marketing, but one of the best forms of marketing for small-scale businesses to employ is Telemarketing.
To further emphasize its importance, I would be discussing telemarketing in detail below.
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WHAT IS TELEMARKETING?
Telemarketing is the form of marketing that involves the process of promoting a product or service through the use of the telephone. This form of marketing involves a one–to–one contact between the business and the customers through the use of the telephone.
Telemarketing is one of the best forms of marketing for small businesses because it allows for the business to directly communicate to its customers, knowing their needs and wants, their likes and dislikes, their complaints, and the best possible way to serve them.
Telemarketing creates an environment for excellent customer service and the best manners to approach a customer, both existing and prospective customers. It also allows the business to reach customers in faraway or remote places and bridges any distance barrier between them.
TYPES OF TELEMARKETING
There are 2 types of telemarketing:
Inbound telemarketing
Inbound telemarketing involves handling incoming calls from customers. These calls could be to patronize the business and the services rendered, to make complaints, or to make further inquiries about the business.
Inbound telemarketing is very important in gaining and retaining customers for the business. The way matters are being handled and the manner by which customers are attended to affect their opinion about the business.
It is important to build a great first impression for first-time customers and to afford not to disappoint the returning customers.
Inbound marketing does not really require an extensive amount of experience or training. Possessing the ability to convince and calm customers in certain conditions and other important virtues is enough for this.
Outbound telemarketing
Outbound marketing involves making outgoing calls to prospective customers. This process is a bit more delicate and crucial than inbound marketing and it requires training and experience. Making calls to prospective customers to let them know about your business and then convincing them that your business is the best option for them is no easy task. The tactics and active methods used in the process would determine whether new customers are introduced to the business or not.
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ADVANTAGES OF TELEMARKETING
Telemarketing is a form of marketing that has the following advantages:
Builds trust
Telemarketing provides the fastest way of building trust in your customers and this comes down to having excellent customer service. If the needs of customers are attended to on time, their complaints are taken care of, and their inquiries are genuinely responded to, it builds a sense of trust in them that makes them keep coming back to you.
Flexibility.
Telemarketing allows flexibility in dealing with customers. It helps to keep in line and up-to-date the needs of the customers. It also allows you to take into account any change in request on the customer’s end and their new line of focus in your products or services.
Cost reduction
The cost of using telemarketing as compared to other forms of marketing is reduced. Telemarketing allows you to focus and reach a targeted market/ audience, thereby reducing the cost of marketing to the general audience. It focuses on prospective customers that are interested in the goods produced or services rendered by your business.
Individual interaction
It allows for a one-to-one interaction with the customers. This puts the customers at ease that each of their complaints and concerns are attended to individually and not generally or at random. It also allows the business to record and identify each customers’ concerns and address them accordingly.
DISADVANTAGES OF TELEMARKETING
As effective as telemarketing is, it also has some disadvantages attached to it. These disadvantages would instead affect the business negatively rather than the intended purpose. They include:
Lack of visual contact
Telemarketing can get various customers across the globe but only through the use of the telephone. The lack of visual contact in telemarketing can impact the relationship between customers and the business organization.
A lot of things can go amiss when you aren’t seeing the person that you are communicating with directly. Their reactions and gestures go unnoticed, even though they might be vital in the course of the communication.
Some customers also prefer to see who they are communicating with as they believe that they would only be taken seriously that way.
Unwanted callers
The purpose of telemarketing is to create awareness about a business, generate sales and bring in prospective customers. To do this, they need to call a lot of prospective customers and this might be seen as a form of inconvenience to some people and might cause loss of customers on the business’s end.
Expensive
Telemarketing, although reduces the cost of marketing, can be quite expensive if outsourced i.e. if the services of external agents that don’t work for the business are employed, it may cost a lot of money.
So, unless the staff of the business are the ones carrying out the telemarketing service, it may cost the business a lot of money, and using other forms of marketing sounds more appealing.
Short-term memory retention
Unlike physical interaction, telemarketing only allows for short-term memory retention. If a customer calls to complain or make an inquiry and he/she is asked to call back so that appropriate information about the discussion can be gathered, they may find it hard to recall any of the discussion at a later time unless the conversation was documented.
It is easier to retain information that was discussed physically than through the use of the telephone.
Telemarketing is one of the best forms of marketing that has been employed especially by small-scale businesses due to its various advantages.
However, as good as telemarketing is, it also comes with its disadvantages too. All in all, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages and can yield great results for the businesses that put it to use.