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.
Jul/100
Traditional marketing v new marketing
There is still a great deal of confusion, particularly amongst business owners who consume little digital media or don’t participate in social networks, about the difference between traditional marketing and new media or social media marketing. Hopefully, the following examples will help to ignite debate around the distinction.
A traditional marketer will focus on broadcasting a message to the local area using newspapers, posters or flyers. The message will reach people who may or may not know your business and will talk about why they should become customers. He is fighting to capture the attention of the masses, regardless of whether they are likely to be interested in your business. A new media marketer will concentrate on creating a piece of online content (a photo, video, blog, podcast or similar), which is aligned with your business and which your target customers will find entertaining or interesting. She will distribute it through the online networks of existing customers and draw attention to it in several places online, where people can find it. She is building a bridge (as Brian Solis would call it) between consumers and your business’ online presence.
A traditional marketer will want to improve your product or service and will start by asking your customers to complete a questionnaire. Maybe even an online questionnaire. He is producing a structured piece of feedback that will help you to make improvements. A new marketer will make sure that communication channels are constantly open with your customers such that they feel comfortable posting a comments on your Facebook wall or via Twitter to let you know about a bad (or sometimes good) experience. This marketer will take time to monitor the digital channels for conversations about your business. She is providing a simple and convenient way for customers to talk to you when they have something to say.
A traditional marketer will seek to acquire new customers. He will place adverts in the local press, invest time and money in making your website appear at the top of Google ranking lists when people search for certain keywords and perhaps pay Google to make you appear at the top as a sponsored link. He is forcing your business into the offices and homes of local people. On the other hand, a new marketer will focus on engaging existing customers and getting them to talk to their friends about your business online. She will give them a reason to talk to their friends about you. This could be an engaging piece of online content that they will want to share with their friends. She is making it easy for local people, at least those who are interested, to find you.
Agree? Disagree? Like it or not, social media is important to your business. As a local business owner, the most important thing is that you do your homework and form an opinion. At the very least, join Facebook, Twitter and Foursquare and see for yourself what all the talk is about.
Jul/100
The new word of mouth
Everyone understands the power of word of mouth recommendation. We want our customers to tell their friends how great we are so that they will become new customers. For a local business owner, word of mouth is even more important because you can’t afford the marketing campaigns that bigger companies run. Plus, it has the power, by itself, to make you very successful. If all of your customers’ local friends became your customers, you would probably be unable to cope with the demand.
Of course, word of mouth begins with a great product or service. It is this that makes your business worthy of conversation. People love to share positive experiences with their friends and they love to help others find positive experiences. Provide a memorable experience and you will become a part of their conversations.
But that is not enough. You need to make it easy for your customers to talk about you. The fact is that people have many of their conversation online, particularly in social networking sites such as Facebook. And some local businesses are already encouraging their customers (your prospective customers!) to talk about them online.
Don’t kid yourself that ‘this social networking thing’ is just a fad that will never take off. Understand that this has taken off and will only become bigger and more important. In the UK, people are already spending more time on social networks than on search engines like Google. Realise that you can become more successful if you understand how to get people talking about you online.
Nothing has changed. People still have the same motivations. People still enjoy sharing their experiences of a great (or bad) product or service. What has changed is the way people are talking about it. Instead of always having to find reviews or recommendations for products or services, those reviews or recommendations are finding your customers through their online friends.
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.
May/100
Amplify word of mouth with social media
Everyone is talking about social media. The discussion revolves around social networking websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace amongst others, and whether these sites can be used to grow your business. Is it something you should be looking into?
First of all, two questions: Do your existing customers use the social networks? If not, are there people who use the social networks that you would like to have as new customers for your business? The networks are used by so many different people across different age groups and walks of life that your answer is likely to be ‘yes’ to at least one of those questions.
As a local business, a great deal of your growth and prosperity is due to word of mouth. Give your customers a product or service that is remarkable enough and they will enthuse about you when they talk to their friends. That’s nothing new, so what?
Well, the point is that many people spend time ‘talking’ with their friends on social networks. For example, Facebook has over 22 million users in the UK at present. This is around a third of the total population. Facebook users are getting older and their average (median) age is 33 (as of November 2009), so they’re not all kids. In fact, the fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females. Facebook users spend a total of 8 billion minutes per day on Facebook. With around 300 million users worldwide, that’s an average of around 26 minutes per user per day.
Outside of the social networks (in the real world!), you give people a reason to visit your business, you give them a great experience when they visit and they, in turn, refer their friends.
The good news is that it’s the same process in the digital world of social networks. Let’s take Facebook as an example. You create a Facebook page about your business and you fill it with regularly updated, engaging content (information, photos, news, updates etc) such that customers have a good reason to visit it regularly. If your content is good enough, they might interact with you by leaving comments or adding messages. With the click of a mouse button, they might also share your content with their social network friends, many of whom will live nearby. Think of it as a turbocharged website for your business, which is much easier for you to maintain and much easier for your customers to interact with than a normal website.
There are two things to note about this scenario. Firstly, your customers are interacting with you in their spare time! Secondly, they are sharing their enthusiasm with their friends, not just one or two but potentially hundreds, all with a simple click of the mouse button. The speed at which word of mouth can grow online, and particularly through social networks, is the reason why this type of marketing is often referred to as ‘viral’.
Your main challenge is not about learning how to use the social networks. This is easy to learn – you just need to get stuck in. The key to your success is to make your content engaging and update it regularly enough to provide your customers with an incentive to visit regularly, share it with their friends and grow your business in their spare time.
To get your creative juices flowing, here are some of the most popular Facebook pages in the world today:
www.facebook.com/Starbucks
www.facebook.com/skittles
www.facebook.com/pages/Nutella/24932281961
www.facebook.com/michaeljackson
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
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.
Oct/090
Do you know what your customers want?
Have you ever had the feeling that a customer was not entirely satisfied?
In the UK we’re famously bad at complaining, but as a perceptive business owner, you will usually know when someone is less than entirely happy with what you’ve sold them.
So what do you do? You try to improve. Bring their drinks faster, present their food better, try not to keep them waiting for their haircut, show up on time to fix their boiler. But, hang on a second, is that what was bothering them?
It’s not always obvious why people use your business instead of your competitors’ and it is more obvious in some industries than in others. Do people come to your pub because you serve the best pint in town or is it because they want to see, be seen and perhaps flirt a little with your other customers? If the beer was their main motivation, they could save money and time by drinking at home. Do people visit your hair salon because they want their hair to be shorter, curlier or more blonde? Or is it because they want to walk back out into the street feeling like a million dollars?
Some businesses are more functional than others, in the sense that they fulfil a more tangible need. For example, restaurants are more functional than bars since hungry people go there to be fed whereas thirst, as we have established, is not usually the key factor in driving people to bars. For the more functional businesses, the way customers want you to make them feel is still very important, but just not so much of a deal-breaker as it can be for the less functional ones.
So whatever your local business, ask yourself what your customer really want. And when they use your business, make sure they walk away with the feelings they hoped for as well as the products or services.
Get this right and your customers will reward you with loyalty and recommendations. How right do you have to get this? It depends on how good your competitors are.
Aug/090
How to get competitors to grow your local business
In your local area, how many businesses do you compete with? And how many do you work with? Do you have more friends than enemies?
If you are a hairdresser, do you compete with all other hairdressers in your area? If the answer is not clear, it might help to ask yourself: Am I trying to attract the same people as them? Clearly, if you are a unisex upmarket salon, you are not competing head-on with a barber, although there is probably some overlap.
If you’re not competing head-on, is it best to keep a safe distance to safeguard those customers that you could lose? Or is it best to co-operate? Let’s build on the salon/barber example.
If you tell your customers how great the local barber is, how many of them do you suppose you would lose? It’s a pretty safe bet that you’d lose very few as most of them will already know about the barber anyway – he’s only around the corner, after all. But how many of your customers would go home and tell their husbands or boyfriends that you recommended the local barber? That’s a pretty valuable recommendation coming from a competitor!
You see, you are often in a stronger position to influence people about another business than your own. This is a great reason to co-operate with some other local businesses. Then you just need to figure out what they can do for you in return.
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