Aug/101
Restaurants lead the way online
Restaurants, above most other types of local business, have the greatest opportunity to acquire new customers through online marketing. It is not only that they are catered for by a number of online companies offering to bring them new diners. It is also that people like to research online before deciding where to eat. Your job, of course, is to make sure that the people searching in your area decide to book your restaurant.
Having recently completed a review of the various services available to bring new diners to restaurants, I’m unable to think of a good reason why a restaurant should be without one of these.
Take Livebookings as an example. They work with over 500 websites, such as Yell.com and TimeOut, where diners go to search for restaurants. That is a total of 500 million potential diners worldwide. As the UK is a stronghold for Livebookings, a significant number of those 500 million will be potential customers of yours. If you use Livebookings, any of those people can book a table at your restaurant with a couple of clicks of their mouse. And you get an online booking facility for your own website too. The price for access to these new diners? A small fee for each new customer they bring to you.
Once you have those new diners in your restaurant, it is down to you to capture their contact details, particularly email and mobile phone number, so that you can entice them back in. Good food and service is not, by itself, enough. Particularly as there are almost always other good restaurants nearby. People are busy and have lots of choice. Collecting their details enables you to remind them, by email or SMS, about your restaurant and perhaps lure them back this week with a tempting offer.
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
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.
Nov/090
Go get em Tiger
Are you a passive marketer or an active marketer? Do you go out and get customers or do you let them find you?
Being passive means waiting for people to walk past your shop, find you in an online directory or search engine, be told about you by friends, come across your advert in the local paper. This is less effort than being an active marketer because you simply pay some money and then hope customers find you.
Once you have some customers, you automatically have the opportunity to become an active marketer. Being active means reaching out to your customers and bringing them back to you again and again using methods such as direct mail, email or SMS. This requires some effort.
Firstly, you’ll need to collect the details of every customer you meet. But shouldn’t you be doing that anyway? You have invested money in premises, equipment, advertising or other things to get those customers in the first place, so surely you must keep in touch to make the most of your investment? Otherwise, wouldn’t it be like buying a box of matches and throwing the whole box away after using just one match? Just as a box will provide you with many matches after the first one, many customers will potentially buy from you several times. That is, unless you let them forget about you.
Secondly, you’ll need to keep customers interested by sending offers that they find compelling. There must always be something in it for them. Yes, it may cost you something to make offers compelling but you are building long-term sales potential, which is no less important than any of your other expenses. If you do this, you will be rewarded with a good response rate each time you actively reach out to your customers.
This is when active marketing really starts to pay. If customers have given you permission to contact them and you have learnt enough about them to send compelling offers, such that you always get a significant response to a campaign, you have effectively built a money-making machine. You have the power to generate sales whenever business is slow, when you have a special event or when you launch a new product. In fact, any time you like.
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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