Why Joining A Chamber Of Commerce Will Increase Your Marketing Potential

by Chris Puetz

Earlier this year I started a second business with some business partners. The business is a consulting business in a certain niche. It is really an offline business venture, but of course a lot of marketing is to be done online to drive traffic to our new website. As part of our marketing we decided to join the local chamber of commerce in my city. This has been an interesting experience for sure and in plain numbers this move has not paid off yet. However, there is something else that has made it worthwhile and has open the door for opportunity.

Joining a Chamber of Commerce is mainly done for networking and branding purposes, but it is often a great source to receive leads, too. Usually every Chamber of Commerce has so-called LEADS groups where business owners or business representatives come together and share knowledge and eventually refer leads to each other. A leads group usually only accepts one business representative for a specific niche, industry, or market to make sure the groups are effective and not just a gathering of business representatives of one  industry. As an example, how good would a leads group be if it is only made up of real estate agents? These real estate agents would compete with each other and the last thing they would do is share a lead with a competitor. You get the idea. So, as a result each leads groups has only 1 member of a profession or trade.

So, when I joined the Chamber of Commerce I was able to join a leads group that kind of had died a few months ago and then a new Chamber member picked up the pieces and put new life into it. New members joined the leads group and so it has become a very active and motivated bunch of business people that makes this specific leads group.

I am honest I have yet to get any leads from this group or from the Chamber in general, but I have gotten something else and that is information. Inside information that is. I am in the B2B market with my services and so it is important to know how business owners think about services they use and what others do to market their services. We meet once a week and so far for every week I have taken away some knowledge that helps me to further fine-tune a marketing strategy and to adjust my business. I feel like that I have become a much stronger business leader and marketer myself that way. In addition I am able to share some of my own knowledge with my fellow leads group members which will (hopefully) help to establish me as a knowledgeable and helpful individual that one day they are happy to refer customers to.

Another thing that I was able to take away was an idea to add some additional service products to my new business portfolio. This is one of those gems that you can only find out about if you talk to people and this would never happen in a normal conversation with the same business representatives under different circumstances. I was able to identify a need for a certain product or better a service. Currently that service is offered by some larger companies that do not really target small businesses. These larger companies out-price them self for these small businesses. However, the services they offer are also a little bit beyond of what a local small business would really need. So, that got me thinking and I am currently in the process of designing the service and to build it out in a way where I can automate parts of the service and also outsource some other parts easily. This combination allows me to offer a service that is better suited for small businesses and that comes at a price that is affordable for these businesses and that lowers the barrier of purchasing it. And even more important – by the time I am ready to launch this product I have established a trust-worthy relationship with many other local businesses that will allow me to sell this service and probably gain some strong foothold in the market with this new product.

Conclusion: Joining a Chamber of Commerce is a very interesting part of marketing a business. I never really thought about it in detail until now. I have been working online with my first business since 2002 and only once had thought about joining a Chamber of Commerce, but that was mainly to get a back link to my website. Now that I actually joined the Chamber of Commerce under different circumstances I really recognize the value it can give a business. Each Chamber of Commerce is different and the smaller ones might work better for local handyman businesses, plumbers, and real estate agents, but once you join a Chamber that also has members from other industries it becomes really interesting. The knowledge that Chamber members share with each other comes from real life experience and you will have problems finding the same kind of business advice published in books or websites. Certain types of information can only be found through person to person networking.

Chris Puetz is a technology specialist helping small businesses to find cheap web hosting solutions.