Use networking to boost your company’s marketing operations

You’ve heard or seen this term many times over the last few years: networking. Very often used but rarely defined, networking is undoubtedly a tool that you already use on a daily basis as a company director. How do you define it and, above all, how can you make the most of it for your company?

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

Communication has always been the key to selling a product or good. From the town crier in the streets of old Paris to sponsored video advertising on social networks, the means have changed but the principle remains the same: communicate and exchange.

Networking is based on a principle that has been recognised for centuries by all managers: the importance of maintaining a network of acquaintances. However, networking is much more than just conversations between business leaders, and thanks to the Internet, it offers lasting and truly profitable connections. As long as you know where and how to use them.

As a result, many business associations and specialist events companies have jumped on the networking bandwagon. The aim is to respond to an obvious need for communication in the face of the loneliness of the “power” of the company director, but also to find viable and time-saving solutions for maintaining a network of relations, and sometimes even professional friends.

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

Networking takes on different forms, but always with the same aim: to bring together managers or marketing directors from different professional backgrounds and orientations to create encounters that are as enriching from a human point of view as they are from a marketing point of view.

Entrepreneurial lunches or aperitifs, meetings on major communication or webmarketing topics, and seminars are all on the up and are increasingly popular with many managers. These meetings are generally organised in a friendly and relatively calm atmosphere, despite the importance of the issues at stake for everyone involved.

However, to limit your presence to areas that are conducive to inter-professional meetings would be to miss out on an absolutely essential part of networking. So it’s a question of keeping in touch using the many professional interfaces such as Linkedin, Viadeo and others, but also of getting in touch regularly to exchange address books and potential customers. Not forgetting, if possible, to include the email address of your new contact in your direct mail campaigns or among the subscribers to your Facebook pages, for example.

Networking is therefore defined as the work of communicating in networks around different events, supported by a constant and seamless web exchange. For the entrepreneur, this means being able and knowing how to devote time to these exchanges so as not only to project a positive and dynamic image of their company through certain external interventions, but also to exchange views with other entrepreneurs on the trials and tribulations of business life. Who understands a business owner better than another business owner?

Other articles to read or re-read: