C L B Engineering

About Us

Sub contract, precision engineers who specailise in small to medium batch, including one offs. Manufacturers of high quality component parts. CNC milling and turning, skilled assembly and design and manufacture of special purpose machinery or equipment.

Marketing an engineering company on a zero budget

Its easy for marketing costs to skyrocket, theres design costs, printing costs, postage costs and then theres the amount of time it costs to organise all this. But what if you simply don't have any funds for marketing, what if your budget is zero. Should you just carry on without any marketing until you have some money available, surely it can wait a month or two until your cash flow is looking more ....well... flowing. Besides your time is better spent on more productive things surely. The answer is no, your business MUST be marketing, constantly and continously. It should be at best a daily activity and at worst a weekly one. The should never be a month that goes by when you havent contacted old, current and prospective customers in one guise or another. There is no more important activity in your business than marketing. It would be great if all businesses were highly profitable and we could employ the services of a marketing agency to take care of it for us. But often we business owners are left with the challenging task of marketing on a zero budget. It sounds difficult but its suprising how many low cost methods there are of getting your details out there, without it costing a fortune.Email - the ultimate method of contacting customers and prospects. Use it to let everyone know what capacity you have, if you currently have spare capacity, if you have taken on any large or interesting contracts, send out photos of your team, or a photo of the person who is a key contact for your customer (people are basically nosey and are always curious about what people look like), start up a facebook page full of photos of your company and team and email EVERYONE about it with a link and an invite to take a look. There are endless reasons for sending out emails and best of all its completely free.Phone - one of the best methods of creating rapport and improving relationships is to talk to your customers. Phone them to ask how business is going, have they any projects in the pipeline that you could get involved in, let them know you have some capacity available and if they needed anything turning around quickly you may be able to help. Let them know about anything thats happening with you, such as new staff or new equipment/machinery.Cold calling - without doubt the most effective method of contact. Print out some capacity sheets and a special offer (free bottle of wine for orders placed this month) and hand them out to customers and prospects. An ideal opportunity to let people know what you can do, and build rapport. But make sure that you do more listening than talking, ask them how their business is doing, what sort of year/month have they had, how long have they been here etc. Face to face contact has far more impact than any other method of contact and is totally free.PR - make it a goal to have a story about your business printed twice a year. Let them know about any new recruits, new investments how you have survived the recession, any plans you have for the future. Its only when you know you have to create a newsworth story about your business you begin to make newsworthy things happen. When the story is printed, its a great excuse for phoning or emailing your customers to let them know about it. Laminate the story and take it with you cold calling.There are plenty of other free and low cost methods of contact but the ones listed above should be mixed up on a weekly rotation for best results. Because if your not doing it, then your competitor will be and as manufacturing begins to recover and the work once again becomes plentiful it will be the companies that are getting their names out there that are going to benefit and flourish.

Specialist Services

Manufacturing Specialist, high quality ,precision machined ,component parts produced for any industry in a wide variety of materials including stainless steel, mild steel, aluminium, brass, plastic and acetals etc.

Trade Bodies / Associations

Member of Federation of Small Business Member of Calderdale & Kirklees Manufacturing Alliance

Opening Times

7.30am - 5pm

Trading Since

1993

Other Services

• Free Parking
• Delivery Service
• Free Quotes
• Special Delivery

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Our Reviews

• great communication

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  • Overall

    

  a pleasure to do business with highly recommended

  By andrew clifford - 17/11/2010 Report this review

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