When it comes to marketing and selling, it is something I am very poor at. I cannot make any type of sales face to face. My negotiation skills are not very good. If I have to sell something and the person would ask for lower price without much of effort in getting a higher price, I will give it up. Somehow, I feel very shy when it comes to doing negotiations. I always feel what will the other person think if I ask for more price, will they think I am greedy for money....haha.
When I started my Airbnb, I outsourced the marketing part of it. I was very skeptical of doing it. I tried also in the beginning and I realized that people were taking advantage of my poor skills. I always felt they had an upper hand on me and I would succumb to their demand price. But over this one year, I have managed to stabilize myself on this front. I have started doing marketing on my own and thanx to some of the social media platforms, that makes it easy for me to handle the job.
I majorly use Instagram, I can run ads there which can reach out to a large number of people and I do not have to do any convincing to sell my product. With the ads whoever is in need they directly contact me. In the past I have had bad experiences with Facebook. There was hardly any visibility of my page even with paid promotions and for those very few who would reach out were all meaningless, and I would feel that all of these platforms are doing a thug business. But then my friend advised me to try out Insta, she was using it and she mentioned to me that it is really helpful.
I tried it out and I started getting good response. Most of my marketing and sales is now through Instagram only, and a few other sources. I do not have any direct interface here so I am good with it. I don't know the opposite person, I cannot see them, so I am more confident when I am interacting with them. And yes, with time, I guess I am getting the confidence of marketing.
All these years, I never ventured into any marketing activity thinking I can never do it, but now I am feeling with help of these tools I can do it. At the beginning the agencies I worked with for marketing purpose had heavy fees, they would take a cut of almost 20% to 30%, now that I have started managing a big part of it on my own, I am also able to get more in my pocket saving up on those commissions. Still, sometimes some customers are very good at bargaining, but slowly gradually I am learning to be firm with them and at the most refuse them completely.
Currently, I am only working on Insta, but I am thinking of starting to use YouTube also. With time I guess I will be able to manage it all by myself. While online marketing is becoming easy for me, I am sure face to face is still going to be a challenge.
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