Using networking to strengthen your company’s marketing operations

You have seen or heard this term many times over the last few years: networking. Very often used but seldom defined, networking is, however, a tool you already use as company manager. How to define, and more importantly, how to get the best out of it for your business?

Networking: a new communication tool for one of the oldest tools, marketing!

Since the beginning of time, the sale of a product or goods starts with communication. From the town criers of medieval Paris to sponsored contents of advertising videos on social networks, the means may have changed, but the principle remains the same: communicate and exchange.

Networking is based on an old principle recognised through the centuries by all business managers, which basically boils down to maintaining a contact network.
More than just simple conversations between company directors, networking offers sustaining and extremely profitable contacts thanks to internet. That is, from the moment when you know where, and how, to use it.

Many entrepreneur associations and event-specialised companies have breached the networking gap. It’s not just a question of responding to an obvious communication need faced with the manager’s “lonely at the top” situation, but also to find viable and less time-consuming solutions to maintaining a relations network, and in certain cases, professional friends.

Knowing how to maintain long-term professional relations or how to make networking “profitable”?

Networking can take different forms, but always with the same goal: to reunite managers or marketing directors from diverse horizons and professional directions, and create rewarding meetings from human as well as marketing points of view.

Entrepreneurial luncheons and cocktails, communication or web marketing meetings, as well as seminars are all the rage, and are attended by more and more managers. These meetings are generally organised in an amicable and relatively calm atmosphere, despite the importance of the issues at stake for all concerned.

Nevertheless, limiting its presence to the common ground of interprofessional meetings would be to deprive marketing of an absolutely indispensable component. It is not just a question of preserving contacts via multiple professional interfaces such as Linkedin, Viadeo and so on, but also by maintaining regular relations with the exchange of address books and potential customers. Not forgetting, where possible, to note the email contact details of your new relation in your mass mailing campaigns, or even among the followers of your Facebook pages.

Networking can be defined, then, as communication work accomplished in a network situation, based around different events with a seamless and constant web exchange. This implies that the entrepreneur should have the savvy to not only devote the necessary time to these exchanges, in order to spread a positive and dynamic image of the company, but also to share the torment and the great joy of company life with other entrepreneurs. Who understands a company manager more than another company manager?


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