Jun/100
Building your own local fan club
What does your business need in order to take off? Most local business owners feel proud of their products or services. They believe that their businesses iare great and that all they need is for more people to find out about them. What they need, in order to grow, is awareness.
How can more local people become aware of your business? Of course, you can place ads in all sorts of local publications or shop windows. You can invest money to make sure that your website is visible within the top few search results on Google. But when people see you in those places, what do they know about your business? The answer is, not a great deal, other than that you are spending money to become better known.
If your mission is to grow awareness, your best friend is word of mouth. Personal recommendations from your existing customers to their friends and colleagues are far more powerful than any type of advert. This is something that every business owner knows. The problem, however, is that it is hard to increase the rate at which referrals are made. As a business owner, your main path to increasing referrals is improving your product or service.
If your business is so good that your customers send their friends to you, what can you do to increase those referrals? Here’s an idea. How about making it easy or comfortable or natural for your customers to refer you?
Think about this: Where do your customers have their conversations? Where do they talk to their friends? According to the latest figures for the UK, over 27 million of us have these conversations regularly on Facebook. In fact, if you compare the amount of internet traffic to social networks (such as Facebook and Twitter) with the amount of traffic to search engines (Google, Yahoo etc) in the UK, the former outguns the latter by 55%. And this trend is only just starting to take off.
Increasingly, people are starting to find out about businesses via social networks. In this respect, online referrals via social networks are taking over from search engine results.
As a local business with loyal customers, this is great news for you. If you are a coffee shop, you don’t have the resources to compete with the investment Starbucks makes in outranking you on Google when people search for local coffee shops. However, you do have good customers. And those customers do have friends (130 Facebook friends, on average), many of which will be local friends, who could also become your customers.
Your first challenge is to make it attractive and convenient for your customers to talk about you when they socialise with their friends online.
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.
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.
Oct/090
You get what you deserve
What do you get when you continue to do what you always did? The answer is, you get the same results that you always got. And that is what you would deserve. So if you want things to be better than they were in the past, you have to do some differently, right?
How good is your marketing now? Think about each piece of marketing you have done recently. What was your return? It can be tough to work out how much you made from a piece of marketing, so keep it simple – how many people responded to your advert, flyer, email or whatever method you used?
For most forms of local marketing, it can seem pointless trying to measure. For example, it’s hard to find out how many people came to you as a result of a recent advert you placed in the local paper. And is it really worth the effort involved in trying to measure that? Let’s come back to that question at the end.
There are many ways to measure. You can sometimes measure effectiveness by incentivising people to respond to your campaign. Other times, it’s simply about training your staff to ask – where did you hear about us? If you’re using email marketing, it’s much easier to measure. If you’re using mobile marketing or SMS marketing, it’s hard not to.
Think of it this way. Of all the different pieces of marketing you could possibly do, there are a few that will work far better; a few where you will make noticeably more money as a result. Do you want to find out which methods make a real difference to your business? Well, you can only do that by experimenting, by trying out different marketing ideas and methods.
In fact, this process is what makes marketing fun. Try something. If it works, do more. If it doesn’t work, try something new. Repeat until successful.
There’s just one catch. You’ll never know what works until you measure.
Sep/090
Is it worth advertising in local newspapers?
Is it worth spending the money to advertise your local business in the local paper?
On the upside, you know that the paper will be read by people in your local area and…well, that’s about all you can know.
You don’t know who’s going to read it and how appropriate they will be to your business. Local papers don’t offer that level of detail when it comes to their audience.
It’s also tough to tell how well a local paper advert has worked. You can try to include a coupon for readers to redeem but many people aren’t too keen on cutting out and carrying coupons around nowadays. They’d much rather show you a coupon on their mobile phone screen.
Local papers are also not appropriate for advertising last minute offers or special promotions. If you need to generate business for this weekend, you probably haven’t got time to create an ad before the newspaper’s print deadline. Mobile phones are the best way to send time-sensitive offers.
With all of that in mind, you’d think that it would be cheap to place a local paper ad. But in fact it isn’t cheap at all. You’d be doing well to place a small ad buried in an insignificant section for £50 – and that’s for one week! Try to get prominence or go for one of the local glossy mags and you’ll pay in the hundreds. That doesn’t include the cost of designing the ad. Compare that to zero cost in the case of an email or under 10 pence in the case of an SMS.
If you want to target, if you want to measure response, if you want to generate business instantly, if you want to make life convenient for your customers, find another way to reach them. If you’re determined to use the local press, forget about paying for exposure and focus on getting free PR in your local newspapers instead.
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