By: Allen T. May, C.E.O. of Westwood Associates, LLC
Acquiring a Texas shelf company is the easy part for most entrepreneurs. They choose one of our Texas shelf LLCs. Open bank accounts and sign office space leases. They make a few initial hires and drop a few grand at Office Depot. They sit back with tremendous feelings of satisfaction and “see” it all coming together. Life is good! They have a brilliant business idea, they know they product or service and have the energy and drive to make big things happen. Its a beautiful thing indeed. So what about their marketing initiatives? Our entrepreneur may be a custom cabinet maker so he clearly knows who his targeted marketing audience is….or does he?
The first and most obvious use of NAICS & SIC codes is that the allow you to target your marketing to specific industries. Otherwise, you’d be marketing all over the map and wasting valuable cash resources. With the help of NAICS Association, you can acquire a Targeted Marketing List by NAICS & SIC that can be laser targeted to suit your marketing needs. Back in the 1990s I used to purchased mailing labels from Dunn & Bradstreet is a similar fashion. I remember paying $0.10 per label and spending hours working on my own direct mail campaign. It was actually exciting when FedEx delivered my 10,000 labels! Unfortunately, I received a lot of return mail as a result of bad addresses. Still, it was the bomb back in the day to have as a marketing source geared to my targeted audience. The box FedEx delivered was big, heavy and impressive. Dot-matrix printed labels. Now those were the days! I looked at them in awe. I saw lots of dollar signs as I gently affixed each one to an envelope promoting one of my business ventures. I carefully placed them in bins and personally delivered them to the U.S. Post Office. It was a religious experience. We had cocktails afterwards and dreamed of all the responses soon filing our mail box. Our closing ratio averaged 2% and about 25% were returned “Addressee Unknown.”
Technology has and continues to improve so much fewer are returned with bad addresses these days. So, instead of purchasing mailing labels for a broad industry like we did back in the 90s, you may want to know who your ideal customer is. And, that option is available to the savvy entrepreneur. By appending NAICS & SIC code information to your existing customer database, you can determine which industries best represent your ideal customers. By evaluating your most frequent and high paying customers, you can implement strategies to retain your best customers and find more like them. And who doesn’t want more of that?
Imagine the entrepreneur who has a business selling a specialized medical device to hospitals and not realizing there are other potential sales from emergency care clinics. Once you read that sentence it comes across as common sense but many people miss the obvious. Most entrepreneurs have no idea what an NAICS or SIC code is so they miss a huge opportunity to identify similar types of businesses that will have similar types of NAICS codes. For example, if you know that you do well with companies with the NAICS code “236116: New Multifamily Housing Construction”, you may want to look at the 2-digit code “23: Construction”. A 2-digit code allows you to look at all related 6-digit codes in an industry. You may find new business opportunities such as code: “236117: New Housing For-Sale Builders” and “236115: New Single-Family Housing Construction.” Learning to navigate the NAICS structure can open new doors to great prospects and sales leads.
Please feel free to reach out to me to discuss this and any other matters concerning your new business venture. I can be reached at:
Allen T. May
cell: 214-893-2623
email: allentmay@gmail.com
cell: 214-893-2623
email: allentmay@gmail.com
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