Marketing for local businesses no-nonsense advice, personal experiences and lessons learnt

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.