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Six ways a small business can leverage its customers

By Reed Richardson

By necessity, most small business owners quickly become creative problem-solvers, finding unorthodox means of survival and alternative pathways to success. After all, almost all entrepreneurs launch their businesses with a shortage of funds and a lack of support staff, meaning that they must not only figure out how to build that better mousetrap, but also produce it on a shoestring budget and then advertise and sell it using low or no-cost marketing tactics.

But for all their resourcefulness, there is one potentially powerful asset that small businesses all too often overlook or underestimate; it’s the same one that fills their cash register everyday—their customer. So, if you think that your small business’ current customers are only good for occasionally buying your products or services, it’s time to readjust your expectations and start leveraging their value for greater prosperity and growth.

1.  Turn them into sales prospectors for your business

Those satisfied customers going in and out of your front door everyday—or clicking to and then away from your website—could be some of your best salespeople, if only you would ask them. But far too many businesses simply forget or intentionally avoid systematically asking for customer referrals. Even the simple, passive act of putting up a sign in your office or on your website that says, “If you like our widgets, please tell a friend!” rarely occurs at most small businesses.

During research on this topic for his recent book, The Referral Engine, author and “Duct Tape Marketing” guru John Jantsch conducted an informal survey of thousands of small businesses. From his results, he found that more than 63 percent of the small companies he surveyed received a majority of their business from referrals, yet nearly 80 percent of those same businesses acknowledged that they had no system in place to consistently generate such referrals. “If you don’t feel strongly enough about the value you or your products deliver to expect that your clients will voluntarily make an effort to see that others receive it,” Jantsch writes in his book, then it’s time to “get to work on creating a brilliant system that’s focused on getting results for your customers.” Doing so might be the difference between getting or losing a majority of your future business.

 

2.  Enlist them into your advertising and marketing plan

With the advent of social media, the playing field has significantly leveled when it comes to extending a small business’ brand. Encouraging happy customers to “like” your business on Facebook or re-tweet product offers and updates you post on Twitter means you can unleash a digital army of marketers for little or no money. But it does require time and careful effort to build these relationships properly. A dormant Facebook wall or, conversely, a constant barrage of unengaging Twitter posts will quickly burn up any word-of-mouth goodwill between you and your customers.

Investing in and fostering these fans of your business eventually pays dividends, according to this recent survey by social media consultant Syncapse. Its results estimated that the average annualized value of a Facebook fan to a business was roughly $138 and that each fan spends an additional $72 on products they “like” online versus those they don’t. What’s more, the Syncapse study found Facebook fans are 28% more likely than non-fans to stick with a brand and also 41% more likely to recommend that brand’s products to others. That’s a powerful way to extend your reach and feed the referral engine.

 

3.  Tap their knowledge of your business as a source of innovation and R & D

Entrepreneurs, so focused on rolling out their new product or their latest service, routinely fail to take into account the input of the end user—the customer. But by seeking out your customer’s advice and suggestions—before, during, and after a rollout—a small business owner can often avoid a disastrous product launch, refine their existing platforms, and add successful new companion services to their offerings.

 

Indeed, it pays to think of your existing customers as kind of a never-ending focus group. You may think you know why your customers are purchasing, but unless you ask them you may never know the real reasons. By distributing a steady stream of customer surveys—whether it’s in person, by mail, or online—you can arm your business with a rich database of information about everything from sales frequency to price points to marketing effectiveness to packaging and shipping preferences. Even if you find out that you do have an accurate read on why your customers like your current products or services, it’s worth taking the extra step to find out what else they might like or want to see you provide them. And once you do, be willing to enlist your loyal customers’ help in trying out, or beta testing, these new offerings before you execute a full launch. Such a gesture will convey the trust you have in them and will further cement their loyalty to your company, while, at the same time, your business will reap the real-life, unbiased opinions of the marketplace, making your new endeavor more profitable.

 

4.   Transform them into a vendor or subcontractor of your business by discovering what mutually beneficial talents they possess

Stare at a financial spreadsheet for too long and it’s easy to start viewing your business’s customers as little more than lines on a graph or numbers in a table. That one-dimensional approach fails to consider the talents or skills that your customers possess, talents and skills that just may benefit your business, if only you knew about them. So if your retail business is looking for permanent back-office help like, say, an accountant to do your books, or even someone to handle a temporary project, like a freelance graphic artist to design new promotional materials for your business, it’s a good idea to put out the word to your customers first, both in your store and on Facebook. While you probably won’t find an exact match each and every time, you’re still likely to get at least a few good references.

Mining your existing customers for vendor or subcontractor help has an additional benefit—it opens up the possibility of bartering for those products or services, an old-fashioned business tactic that is making a comeback in an era of near universal belt-tightening. Most of the more popular small business barter exchanges, like ITEX, BarterQuest, and NuBarter work by matching up pairs of entrepreneurs and other businesses or individuals, based on correlating wants and offerings. Because these barter exchanges involve larger networks, they have the advantage of offering a more expansive menu of products or services available for barter. However, thanks to their larger size, they almost always match up barter partners that are unfamiliar with one another and, therefore, some risk is involved in the process, even if the exchanges are careful to put policies in place to mitigate that. But bartering with your customers means dealing with someone with whom your small business already has an established relationship, making questions about reliability much less of a concern.

 

5.   Provide more ways for them to pay for what you offer

Small businesses looking for better ways to turn their current customers into greater cash flow should think beyond getting paid at the point of purchase. Instead, develop creative ways to bring in revenue more consistently, through mechanisms like subscriptions, automatic bill pay, and even layaway.

 

“The last 10 years have seen a dramatic increase in companies using the subscription model to offer everything from music, movies, and textbooks to even cars for a monthly fee,” explained Tien Tzuo in a VentureBeat column last summer. Tzuo, CEO of the online billing company Zuora, points to the recent rollout of Apple’s iPhone 3G as an example of why savvy subscription pricing beats one-shot-sales thinking in the long run. “When the iPhone 3G was introduced, AT&T dropped the price of the iPhone by $100 and simultaneously raised monthly fees by $10. In doing so, they were able to sell more iPhones (lower entry fee) but earn more money over the life of the two-year contract.”

 

By building up your customer’s paying “habits,” you’re also building up their loyalty to your business and making it less likely they will stop buying altogether or move on to a competitor. And by linking automatic bill pay capability to a subscription model, you’re less likely to deal with late or missed payments, meaning your business can enjoy greater consistency in terms of cash flow. If your business sells big-ticket items that aren’t a good fit for a subscription model, help your customers avoid dealing with missed or late payments on their credit cards by offering them a layaway plan. Layaway, which is also experiencing a resurgence in the marketplace, gives your business a few weeks or months of steady revenue while turning one big sale into a series of smaller transactions. Here again, your business is getting paid outside the point of final sale, but is also making it increasingly comfortable for a customer to think of him or herself as a repeat customer.

 

6.  Convert them from mere customers to trusted employees

Just as when you invited your customers to work with your business as a vendor or freelancer, don’t overlook asking them to work for your business when you need to hire more staff. Loyal customers make for a great initial pool of job candidates for several reasons: They’re familiar with your products or services, they likely know your staff if not you as well, and they already like what you do enough to spend their money with your business. That you won’t have to engage in a lengthy and expensive job search is yet another advantage to hiring from your customers.

 

Of course, simply hanging a “Help Wanted” sign above your cash register or on your front door is a good start to this process, but don’t forget to post the same sign on your business’s online doorways, like your company website and Facebook page. Why? Because those online friends of your business aren’t just interested in your next product launch or discount offer; increasingly they are looking at your company’s social media sites for news about hiring. In fact, according to this CareerBuilder survey from last August, an online job posting is now the No. 1 thing—cited by 35 percent of respondents—someone visiting your business’s social media site wants to see. That kind of interest can turn a valued customer into an even more precious commodity—a good employee.

September 13, 2011 Today's Business, , , , , , , , , 6 Read more >

Marketing on a Shoestring: How To Achieve a Big Impact With a Small Budget

small business woman in a storeby Reed Richardson.

It’s an age-old predicament for small business entrepreneurs: Sure, you may have built a fabulous new product or developed the next killer app, but if you don’t also do a good job of marketing it to customers, your small  business can still end up failing. So, how can small, local businesses, a majority of which spend less than $2,500 a year on marketing according to a recent Merchant Circle survey, overcome this problem? The first step, say many marketing experts, begins with a change of mindset.

Put Marketing First in Your Mind as a Small Business

“For most small business owners, marketing is viewed at best as a nice add-on or at worst as some kind of foreign science whose secrets are locked away in an ivory tower somewhere, writes John Jantsch in his popular book Duct Tape Marketing. “Small business marketers need a totally different definition of marketing—one that’s honest, relevant, and more like real life.”

To get a sense of how this new definition plays out, Jantsch has developed a handy graphic about the purchasing process, something he calls the Marketing Hourglass. In a recent blog post about his Marketing Hourglass’s seven steps, Jantsch notes that “the most fundamental shift of all in marketing is the need to logically and systematically move prospects along the path of know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, and refer—this is the entire game these days.” He adds that “any business that fills each of these seven touchpoints will be well on its way to finding and keeping customers.”

Pull-Quote.jpgProfile Your Target Customer
One common mistake among inexperienced marketers involves rushing ahead without a clear idea of which customers your small business is trying to reach in the first place. “Often, my small business students try to begin with tactical decisions, like whether they should put an ad in a newspaper,” explains Glynns Thomas, a small business marketing instructor who teaches an online course entitled “Small Business Marketing on a Shoestring.” “Instead, I try to pull them back a bit and get them to define their target market. By thinking about their strategic foundation first, that will then feed what kind of tactics to use later.”

Skipping this crucial step, Thomas adds, means a small business is likely to end up with a scatter-shot small business marketing plan—a Yellow Pages ad here, an email campaign there—that doesn’t tie together and nets little in the way of return on investment. “Small businesses really have to paint the picture of who their ideal customer is, where they can be found, and how they behave, and get really specific about it,” she explains. “If you try to market too broadly to, say, 1,000 people, you may only get 10 sales, whereas if you focus on 100 really well-matched potential customers, you may actually net 50 sales. It’s kind of counter-intuitive, but by going smaller, you can actually get more in the long run.”

One low-cost tactic that Thomas favors involves marketing partnerships. As an example, she cites the experience of one of her students, the owner of a Greek restaurant located in a shopping mall’s food court. To expand beyond the primary customer base of mall foot traffic, Thomas suggested that the restaurant—whose menu focuses heavily on freshly prepared ingredients—partner with a nearby gym that has a similar, health-conscious clientele. In return for offering an initial discount to the gym’s members, the restaurant gained the ability to run a free ad in the gym’s monthly member newsletter, giving it hundreds of exposures to a like-minded audience. “It’s all about finding other businesses that are complementary to your mission without being competitive.”
Match Message to Market and Don’t Forget to “Sell the Hole”

Once you’ve identified your small business’s key customer constituencies, then it’s time to craft a small business marketing message that fits your market and also speaks to its needs. This doesn’t have to be a complicated or expensive process, says small business marketing consultant Bob Wiltse, but if you don’t address both the former and the latter in your pitch, you’ll likely get little bang for your buck.

“A big mistake I see from a lot of small businesses is that they need to stop selling their product and start selling what their product can do for their customers,” explains Wiltse, who also writes a small business marketing blog called 390 Main Street. “For example, if your business is manufacturing power drills, don’t sell customers on the drill, sell them on the hole it makes. After all, that’s what the customers really want to use the drill for anyway. Likewise, if your company website just offers me a list of products without telling me why they’re better than your competitors, you’ve just commoditized yourself and left me little choice but to compare your products to others based on the only other piece of data I have, which is price.”
To boost your marketing profile and draw in more potential customers to your company website, you should consider a number of best practices, like adding embedded videos—for things like product demonstrations—and search engine optimizing (SEO) your website’s text content. If done right, these steps can be a very effective way of drawing people in through online search sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing and then keeping them there once they arrive. What’s more, these steps are not so complicated that, given some time and dedication, a small business owner can’t handle it by him or herself. (For a more detailed look at SEO, check out our article on the topic.) Even better, free tools like Google Analytics can track this search traffic and see who is visiting your website, where they’re coming from, and what they’re looking at once they get there. This data can then be used to refine your target market even more and further hone your sales message.
New marketing tools like these are increasingly popular, but not universally known, Wiltse says, and so he says he often sees frustrated small business customers come into his office saying the same thing: “Everything I used to do isn’t working anymore.” For example, he points out that buying a costly, static ad in a Yellow Pages directory may have a diminishing return in an increasingly digital world and that many small companies would be better off establishing an online presence on local business search sites like Yelp, Yahoo Local, and Google Places. (In a perhaps telling move, the Yellow Pages Association recently changed its name to the Local Search Association.)
These local search sites typically charge nothing for their basic listing service. What’s more, they offer a much more dynamic and interactive platform, allowing small businesses to provide more detail about their products and services while letting customers share reviews about their purchasing experience. And as smartphones and mobile tablets become increasingly popular conduits for finding businesses, having a robust local search presence online will become even more important. (For a good first step in checking your business’s current local search status, Wiltse recommends using the listing consolidator getlisted.org.)
Use Social Media to Keep ’Em Coming Back (and Bring Their Friends)

Once you’ve sold a customer, enticing them to repeat their business and refer your business to others becomes the final step in the marketing process. And when it comes to maintaining and strengthening your existing customer relationships, social media has proven to be a revolutionary platform. “Social media makes it so much easier to stay in contact with customers and keep your business top of mind,” Thomas notes, adding that its interconnected nature and “share” features makes asking for customer referrals much easier (and less uncomfortable). But, she cautions, building out your business’s social media presence should still be done with due diligence.

“I always recommend to small business owners that they start off small, with one or maybe two social media platforms, like starting a Facebook fan page and maybe a Twitter account for their business. And even before you formally set them up, I suggest they use the sites for a few months to get a sense of how they work and what people’s expectations are,” Thomas explains. During this trial period, she suggests that entrepreneurs create a list of several dozen sample Facebook posts or tweets that would be both appropriate and interesting. These will be the templates for future posts once their business social media is up and running.

“Often, I get small business owners who’ve already started with social media coming to me saying ‘I have no idea what to post,’” Thomas says. “That can lead to trouble because the whole idea of small businesses using social media is to engage with your customers, not just to tell them, ‘Buy my stuff!’” This kind of hard selling can be a turnoff, no matter what the media platform or message and it runs counter to the whole point of effective, shoestring marketing, Thomas notes. “When your target market and message are defined well, they meet the right person at the right time, and when that happens, marketing is no longer intrusive or annoying, it’s helpful, and that’s exactly what you want.”

August 22, 2011 apple capital, , , 17 Read more >