Mar/100
Forget advertising. Grow by word of mouth alone.
Everyone knows it is great to have word of mouth but how do you make it happen? Conventional wisdom says that all you need to do is provide a good product or service and word of mouth will do the rest. The truth is that it is less straightforward than that and there are a few subtle issues to contend with.
Some people love to find new things and tell their friends about them. If your business is something new or different, you’ll need to seek out early adopters because many people don’t like change. Your effort to find early adopters is usually rewarded as these people love to tell everyone about the great new things they have discovered. A word of caution, though. If you expect people to change their buying habits for you, your product or service will need to be remarkable.
What if yours is the type of business people don’t talk about very much? How often have you raved about the wonders of your gynaecologist over dinner with your friends? Do you talk about contents insurance at the pub? Not every product or service can grow by word of mouth alone.
Can you make it any easier for people to talk about you? Think about how your customers communicate. Can you send an email or an SMS with a special offer that they will want to forward to their friends? How about creating a Facebook page for your business and posting news, events and offers there? When someone becomes a ‘fan’ of your Facebook page, their network of friends will be able to see that.
Let’s assume you have provided a great service, you have given people a reason to talk about you (maybe an incentive), you have made it easy for them to remember you (perhaps a branded box of matches to take home or an occasional email update), made it effortless for them to talk about you and you have identified your most influential customers, paying special attention to them. What next?
Well, what do you want them to say? Can you describe what is great or unique about your business in the few seconds of captive attention you would have if a prospect were travelling in an elevator with you? It’s not always obvious and big businesses spend thousands working out their ‘elevator pitch’. If you can’t, it’s very unlikely that your customers will be able to. If you think it could be hard for customers to ‘sell’ your business in a few words when they bump into a friend at the supermarket, do something about it. Come up with a strap-line for your business and make it visible in your premises, on your van or your business card.
The good news is that, for some types of businesses, such as restaurants and bars, word of mouth alone can bring great success as long as they pay attention to the subtle details. For others, they’ll need to think carefully about how to get people talking about them.
Feb/100
Try not to be perfect
Sometimes it can feel like your local business simply isn’t progressing. Even though you are putting in long hours and trying to do everything right, things just aren’t going your way.
Your manager forgets to put the new menu out even though you reminded him twice. Your supplier shows up late, leaving you short of stock for a whole day. A staff member calls in sick on a busy shift. You constantly interview people just in case someone leaves at short notice, but half the time, interviewees don’t show.
Problems such as these make you feel like your hard work is getting you nowhere. It seems that, no matter how much you do, things will never be exactly as they should.
And, in a way, you are right to feel this way. Things will never be exactly as they should. Things will never be perfect. There will always be at least one small thing that goes wrong. If you are striving for perfection, you will never quite get there.
But the thing about striving for perfection is that your competitors will never quite get there either. They have many of the same problems as you do. Like you, they also have to work hard to make their business almost perfect. And you can bet that they often feel like pulling their hair out too.
So when times are tough and it feels like things aren’t working out how you planned, just remember, you don’t need to be perfect. You just need to be better than your competitors.
Feb/100
Worried about using your customer data for direct marketing?
Several local business owners have recently expressed to me their concerns over collecting and handling their customers’ data. They don’t want to annoy their customers and they want to make sure they don’t break any laws or regulations.
As more local businesses take advantage of mobile and internet technology to grow their own audiences, these concerns will become increasingly common. If you are a concerned business owner, here are the key points to keep in mind.
Firstly, you are right to be collecting your customers’ contact details and preferences. It is no longer viable to rent an audience from your local newspaper or radio station. Your competitors may be saving money and winning their customers’ loyalty by building their own audience. So should you. Don’t let your concerns put you off.
To succeed in building your local audience and converting them into true fans of your business, here is the most important thing to do. Get their explicit permission. Without that, their interest in your marketing messages will be minimal. Your response rates will be low and you may even upset some people. How often do you welcome a mailshot or email that you did not ask to receive? Invest time in finding good reasons for people to ‘opt-in’ to receiving your marketing. This is the best way to get high response rates. And responses lead to sales.
If customers give you their details as part of buying from you (for example, a salon takes your name and number when you make a booking), don’t assume that they want to receive your marketing. When you take their details, ask them if you can get in touch now and then when you have something special to tell them about. This is not only good practice, it is also an EU requirement for anyone that conducts marketing by electronic means. Oh, and don’t give their details to other businesses. At least not if you want to keep your customers.
Your next aim should be for customers to look forward to receiving your messages because this will generate the best response rates. To achieve this, you’ll either need to send very tempting marketing offers (very expensive for you) or send offers that are very relevant to people’s interests. If you are an off-license, is your customer interested in white wine, red wine, beer or champagne? This is where you’ll need to get creative about giving people reasons to tell you their interests and also making it easy for them to tell you.
It’s natural to be concerned about conducting business in a new way. The best way forward is to think it through, make a plan, then get stuck in. Treat it as a trial. Expect some error. When you get it right, you will enjoy a well deserved advantage over your competitors.
Feb/100
Write to sell
You will sometimes communicate with your customers or prospects in writing. This could be by email, text message, your web site, a printed brochure or, increasingly less often, a letter.
If you are writing to create a defined response, such as to increase sales or engender loyalty, there are things you can do to get best possible results. Read on to find out more.
If you are not writing to create a defined response, you are probably wasting your time. More to the point, you are squandering a valuable and limited resource – your customers’ attention to you.
Having just read ‘Write to sell’ by Andy Maslam, I strongly recommend it to you as a quick and easy guide to selling using the written word.
In my opinion, these are Andy’s top five tips for great copywriting. If you are serious about writing to sell, I suggest you read the book.
- Above all else, people are interested in themselves. As Dale Carnegie wrote, a headache is far more important to most people than thousands dying of starvation on the other side of the world. You cannot write effectively unless you understand your audience. So it pays to spend time getting to know your reader and working out what interests them.
- Write about benefits not features. In other words, tell your reader why they should buy, not what they’re buying.
- Make a plan. What do you want people to know after reading? How do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do? Close your laptop and sketch your ideas on paper. Start typing only when you have a plan and a bunch of ideas you are happy with.
- Make your writing simple to read. Make sentences short and never use a long word when a short one will do. Write as you would speak because people, even business people, will relate more easily to you.
- Draft, edit mercilessly, redraft, edit some more. Repeat until you are satisfied that you have achieved what you set out to. Take a break before proof reading.
Feb/100
Do this and you will succeed
What would you say if I told you that there is one thing so powerful that, if you did it, your local business would succeed? Not only make more money, but become a resounding success. Far more successful than your competitors.
But that’s not all. If you do it right, you can tear up most of your to-do list, because it will soon become apparent that there is little else more important than this. Traditional marketing and advertising will become increasingly less useful and you will be able to fire all but your best customers. You will focus on this because it works and you will worry less about other tasks. Your priorities will be clearer and you will have more time and less stress.
Well, such a thing does exist and it is no secret. What you must do is find your 1,000 true, local fans. The 1,000 local people that love your business, trust you and talk about you to their friends and colleagues. The 1,000 local people that come back and buy from you regularly and enjoy giving you their money. These are the people that you must talk to and find out more about. These are the people you must communicate with and focus on.
Stop for a moment and think about the power of this. What is your average spend per customer? What do your best customers spend per visit? What if you had 1,000 customers that liked your business so much that they came back as often as they could? How much would you make in a year? Just from those 1,000? What do you think their lifetime value to your business would be? And what about all of the friends they would drive to your business?
Do you think you would still need to advertise? Wouldn’t it be great to focus all of your attention on making those 1,000 people happy? That would be the single most important marketing activity and it is quite likely that no other marketing would be necessary. When you get 1,001, fire you worst customer to make sure you have enough time to focus on your 1,000 true fans!
You don’t have 1,000 true fans? So start today. If you own a shop, pick a customer today that you think has the potential to become a true fan. Capture their contact details before they leave and think about how you will entice them back in and delight them when they arrive. If you do this each day, you will have 1,000 true fans within around 3 years.
You can start simply by inviting a person to receive your special offers by email or SMS. Then let them tell you what type of things they want to hear about. Next, tailor your offers to their preferences. And when they use your business, give them a simple way to praise or criticise without fearing confrontation or reprisal.
The magic of this approach is that it will make you focus on the important things, the products and services. In order to delight people and convert them into fans, you will need to do this. In addition, you will be forced to focus on the customers, creating a dialogue, finding out what interests them about your products and what they really think about your service.
The alterative is to follow the traditional path. Pay somebody else to rent their fan club, perhaps the local newspaper or radio station, in the hope that you can shout your message at them and that 2 or 3% of them might be remotely interested in you. This is not only hard work, stressful and distracting but it is also completely unaffordable when you consider that your competitors may be building their own fan club for little cost. The traditional path will make you feel like you’re progressing because it consumes so much of your energy and mind space. But if you want to succeed, you’ll need to take a different route.
Jan/100
Dumb persistence
Business people often talk about the importance of persistence and tenacity. Keep trying, they will urge you, even when things look bad. Never give up!
This raises an interesting question. When you feel like you are fighting a losing battle, how can you tell whether you are fighting for a lost cause or whether a victory is just around the next corner? More to the point, will your actions have any impact on the outcome or are you at the mercy of events beyond your control? If persistence is followed by success, hindsight makes you look like a genius. But when you see failure in the rear view mirror, that same quality of persistence renders you stubborn and ignorant.
Persistence, in itself, is nothing to be proud of. In order to be useful, it must be accompanied by an element of critical self-analysis, rule-setting and intelligent action. Firstly, when you look closely at your situation and think carefully, is there really a chance to succeed? What parallels, analogies or evidence can you find to support your view? Once you have made up your mind, you need to set the rule. Decide what you must achieve and when you must achieve it in order to prove that your view is right. If you find that it is not right, then cease to persist, take what you have learnt and put your energy into a new battle or venture. If you leave it too late, you may find that your energy and resources are too depleted for another fight.
Whilst you continue to persist, give yourself the best chance of success by persisting intelligently. Don’t keep hammering away with the same approach, using the same tools. Be creative and find new ways to approach your challenge. The more remarkable your approach, the more likely you are to attract the attention of your customers or prospects. The more varied your choice of tools, the better your chance of keeping their attention.
From the perspective of your customer or your prospect, dumb persistence can be plain annoying.
Jan/100
Hope is not a strategy
Just as you were reeling from the blow dealt to your local book shop by the internet, the hammering your grocery shop received when Tesco opened nearby or the kicking your pub was dealt at the hands of the smoking ban, along came the credit crunch. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s no longer good enough just to open the doors and wait for customers to hand over their cash. There is just too much competition and not enough custom to go around.
It’s clear that you need to find new customers and it’s tempting to start placing ads in your local newspaper or paying for prominence in a directory such as Yell. The problem with doing those things is that you are taking the easy option. You are giving your money to the local paper and saying “here’s some cash, now go find me some customers”. Then you are sitting back and hoping.
There is nothing wrong with paying these companies to look for new customers amongst their audience, so long as you are convinced that the money is well spent. The question is, do you want to rely on them to make you a success?
The alternative is to realise that you can make yourself a success. Look around you. Do you have a shop? Do you have footfall? Do you have a van? Do you have a list of customers that have bought from you in the past? Then, you have your own audience. If you have not already collected their personal details, now is the time to start.
Why should they give you their details or tell you their preferences? How can you entice them in to your business, again and again? These are questions that you will need to answer. Once you have answered them well, you will not need to hope for success.
Jan/100
Email v Text
Which should you use for marketing your local business, email or SMS? Let’s take a look at the differences.
- Email is free to send, SMS isn’t.
- An email can be as long as you like, whereas an SMS is limited.
- An email can include pictures and images. Not an SMS.
- An SMS can be written and sent in minutes, whereas email requires time and money to be composed and sent properly.
- Most people read emails at home or in their office, whereas with SMS it’s wherever they happen to be when they get a text.
- Text messages get noticed instantly. Emails often don’t. Some people take days to notice a new email. Some emails are filtered into spam or junk folders, so never get read.
- Over 95% of texts are opened immediately versus around a quarter of emails.
Which is best depends on what you want to achieve.
If you want to say something to your customers that isn’t urgent and you want them to engage deeply with your message, then email is best for both you and your customers.
On the other hand, if you want to say something right away or you want certain people to be the first to know about something, there’s no doubt that SMS is best for you and those customers that want to be the first to know.
Is your salon looking very quiet next Monday through Wednesday? Why not send an SMS to the stay-at-home Mums in your address book and make them an offer they can’t refuse? Perhaps promote a luxury service rather than a standard cut, so that you don’t prevent them booking their usual monthly trim. What’s better, an empty salon or a busy one with customers paying half price for things they wouldn’t usually buy?
Jan/100
A resolution for 2010 – get permission!
This seems like an obvious point, but make sure that customers know what to expect when they agree to receive direct marketing from you. Are they consenting to email only, or also SMS? Are they opting in for special offers only or will they receive general news and updates about your business? The clearer this is, the more welcome your message will be, the greater chance of receiving a good response from customers. In this respect, people rarely welcome surprises.
Your aim should be for your customers to welcome and look forward to your marketing rather than to put up with it. If it is expected and welcomed by your customers, there is far more chance that it will influence them.
A list of your customers’ contact details is almost worthless unless you have captured their interest and gained their permission. If you have their interest and permission, you have a good chance of generating revenue with each piece of marketing you send.
Dec/090
Extend the Christmas rush into January
Many businesses, such as bars and restaurants, become extremely busy at Christmas time. They make far more money over Christmas and New Year than at any other time of year. They and their staff are completely flat out, their venues bursting at the seams. Then, very suddenly, it’s the 2nd of January and one of the year’s quietest periods commences.
What can be done to extend some of the seasonal rush past December into January and beyond?
For these types of businesses, the premises or venue is perhaps the most significant and costly business investment, as well as the most valuable. The value of a place of business is that it gives direct access to passing trade – prospects that can be converted to customers. A venue makes it possible to build sales from a standing start. Then, once the business is up and running, it provides the opportunity to build relationships with customers in person – something that many web-based businesses can only dream about.
Like any investment, it’s important to extract every bit of value from a place of business. If 8 out of every 10 people who walk into a shop are converted into regular customers, how long do you think it would be before that business would have to start turning people away or extending the shop to cope with the demand? A great problem to have!
This ideal scenario is altogether possible but it is not enough merely to engage with customers who walk in, although that is a great start. You also need to capture their details and preferences so that it is possible to reach out to them and entice them back in future. When you reach out to customers with a relevant and compelling reason to visit your business, some will respond. The more people you reach out to (always assuming a relevant and compelling offer), the more who will respond.
To start with, you need to seize every opportunity to collect your customers’ contact details and learn a little about them. There is no better opportunity than when they have chosen to walk into your premises. And, for the businesses in question, there in no other time of year when more people walk into their premises than at Christmas time.
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