If you think advertising when you think about promoting your business, you might be surprised to hear that I recommend you change the way you’re thinking. If you’re thinking word-of-mouth you’re getting warmer, but how do you generate it?
Sure big successful brands like Apple spend millions on campaigns that capture the imagination and get people talking, but most of us don’t have the budgets to deliver the kind of campaigns that Apple does. If you are running a small to medium size business your marketing will only be successful if you target the way you promote and create reasons for your customers to talk about their positive experiences. Let’s face it people love to talk and encouraging word of mouth is by far the most effective way to get the word out. It will build your customer base and beats broadcasting hands down for all but the largest organizations.
To share some insight on what you need to do to spread the word I have put together 10 suggestions that will help you to generate positive customer experiences to promote your business.
1. Know Your Customer
The more you know about the people you are building your business around the better chance you have of successfully meeting their needs. Think of your business as service, how can you be something they can’t do without. Customer loyalty will always be the cornerstone of your business and will depend on how much you know about them, how to reach them and where they go to find what you offer.
This knowledge will effect all your interactions with your customers and will shape your business and the way they see you.
2. Personal Recommendations
Without doubt the sharing of our experiences is a fundamental human expression and one which you can use to make your business a success. Some experts believe that personal recommendations are the only form of persuasion that people respond to anymore. If you set this as your ultimate goal it will shape the way you communicate with everyone you come into contact with.
You can use it as a focal point to measure how well your business is doing and even a way your employees should conduct themselves. If your employees are focussed on excellent service and the needs of the customer they too will become ambassadors for your business and share with their friends how dedicated you are to excellence.
3. The Physical Experience
If you have a business where the customers come to you, make every detail of the experience you create for them part of the story they tell. Cleanliness and organization do not have to cost you money only thought and preparation. Think of all the senses and make sure your store or office looks and smells wonderful. You are trying to illicit a response from your customer, so spend time thinking how you would feel walking into your place of business for the first time.
If you visit your customers make sure your physical appearance tells them how particular you have been to give a good impression. Make your business cards and stationery professional, clean and fresh if your primary interactions are via correspondence. If your customers buy from your web site make sure the way your site works shows how much you care about what they think of you. Just enough is never enough!
4. Setting Customer Expectations
Building customer trust is all about fulfilling on their expectations each and every time they interact with you. It includes the product quality and consistency, the price and pricing policy and the overall experience they have when buying from you.
I recently had an experience with an accountant who after doing my taxes the first year doubled their fees when I returned. No explanation no real difference in the work they had to do. I had recommended them to a friend after my first experience but had to send them an email to warn them after I received the second bill. They failed to manage my expectations and now I would warn anyone who asked me for a recommendation again.
The way you price your products is very important, make it simple, make it visible and please make it consistent.
If you position your products as high end don’t promote slash pricing reductions. Make your sales exclusive and by invite only. Serve wine and appetizers and make it at the end of the day when you can invite your customers to drop in after work.
5. Using The Grapevine
Even in today’s large and complex society you would be surprised how inter connected we still are. If you treat your employees or suppliers badly the news will spread like wildfire. Conversely if you treat them better than your competitors and understand that those who work with you talk about their experiences even more than your customers do, your employees will become an important part of spreading the word.
I once joined a company who took all their employees to Maui every year for 4 days of relaxation. Now as an end of year bonus this was not that costly, but what it said about the company and how they valued their employees spoke volumes. I think I told everyone I met about my move and their employee vacation and all were blown away and wished they worked for them too.
Make your employees ambassadors for the way you do business and you can reach more people than you would ever believe. If just one employee tells 10 friends and they tell 10 of theirs by the time the experience has been passed on a third time you have already reached 1000 people. If you consider that most people have over 400 acquaintances they interact with you can reach more than 150,000 people in no time at all.
We all know how people love to gossip and a negative experience like taking 60-90 days to pay a supplier will spread like wild fire and taint the way people see you.
Note: People are now using the internet to protest about bad business practises. Employers who treat their workers badly are exposed on job posting sites like craigslist and a quick google search will show you how many sites there are dedicated to revealing bad employers and companies to avoid doing business with.
6. Put Your Cards On The Table
Too many businesses and business people think that it’s best to reveal as little as possible about how they do business, from their profits to the way their products are made. Openness leads to trust and customer trust is the pathway to success for any business. The prevailing public perception is that most businesses watch out for their own interests and ignore those of their customers. Promoting openness in your business practises will counter this perception and differentiate you from your competition.
The idea of openness can even be applied to your physical environment which some restaurants have embraced, where you can see your food being prepared and in some cases you can watch the chefs prepare food from the sidewalk as you walk by.
7. Educate Your Customers
If you are going to use positive recommendations to promote your business you may have to educate your customers. If people don’t know what it is you do or what products or services you offer how can they recommend you to their friends.
You will need to decide who you are going to educate and what you are going to tell them. Clearly defining what it is you do can be a challenge and frankly most small business owners don’t spend enough time thinking about how they express this simple idea.
When someone asks you what it is you do, what do you say? Statements like ‘what don’t I do’ and ‘I’m an entrepreneur’ say very little, and at the very least you lose the opportunity to spread the word. Every business owner should have a pre-prepared statement that explains what their business does. This statement needs to be easy to understand and reflect the customers needs. It also helps if you think of this statement as how your customers will explain what you do to their friends. Make it as emotive as possible but most of all make it believable. Try describing what you do in less that 50 words on a post card.
You may not realize it but what you do touches different groups of people in different ways. How you describe it to each group should take this into account. For example a business that offers cooking classes touches aspiring chefs, single men and women who want to entertain, couples who want to enjoy cooking together and housewives who are bored cooking the same old food.
How you explain what you offer will be different for each of these audiences. Identifying who your target audiences are and how your business touches them will not only make you think from your customers point of view but will also give you new ideas on how to promote your business in a targeted way.
8. Let Them Know How Good You Are
It goes without saying that if you want personal recommendations you need to live the idea of making every interaction as positive as possible for your customers even when errors occur.
Errors happen. Customers come in all shapes and sizes some easy going and some not so much. How you handle a customer problem will define you more than any amount of positive interactions. Think of it as an opportunity to make your mark. Make sure you and your employees have an agreed way to deal with issues. Starbucks had a great way of dealing with errors, before a situation could ever get out of hand a coupon for a free speciality coffee was thrust into your hand. The customer might not always be right but encouraging them to come back at your expense means you don’t lose their custom.
Sharing the good work you do with others is also needed. There are three main ways you can let your audience know how good you are:
- Tell them yourself
- Help them judge for themselves
- Show them proof.
Tell them Yourself
Once you have gone through the exercise of describing what you do, you can start letting people know how much effort you put into making it the best possible. Share with them the details of how much time you have put into creating your product or service. From the Grandmother’s secret recipe to how well you research the best practises of the industry you work in. The way you differentiate yourself from your competitors will help your customers define your brand and will effect the way they tell others. Do you use a special process, do you price check your products weekly against your competitors and publish the results.
Help them judge for themselves
Many businesses have an established trade organization that sets standards or a consumer body that has determined the best practise for delivering a product or service. You can help your customer to view your business using these criteria and tell them how well you compare. Ask yourself how easy do you make it for your customers to evaluate your business.
Referrals from your peers is another very successful way to help your customers judge what you do. If you provide your cup cakes to a well known restaurant in your area, celebrate it. If your designs are being used by a celebrity that everyone knows communicate it to your audience. If your book on parenting techniques has been reviewed by a well known child phycologist ask them to write a review. Every industry has its leading figures if you can get them to evaluate what you do, use it to inform your audience.
Show them proof
Does your particular field require extensive education? Can the work you do be entered into a national competition? Has your community chosen you as ‘the best’ at what you do. Make sure you communicate and display these achievements to your customers as it tells them that others are backing you up in the claims you make for your company.
9. Making It Easy to Find you and Get In Touch
If your business has local customers making your premises easy to find is often overlooked. Your web site is the perfect place to provide your visitors with a map showing the landmarks near you. If possible use google maps embedded in your contact page so they can quickly get directions from their specific location. With the onslaught of spam we all get, many businesses have made contacting them more difficult than is ideal. Invest some time in understanding the spam filters on your email software so the majority of spam is taken out of the equation. Implementing Captcha(link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) on your contact form can also help, but beware although this is designed to ensure a person not an automated script is sending the mail, it is often difficult for a real person to work out what they need to type in.
Make sure your phone number, email address and web site are clearly visible on all your materials. I would even suggest they are part of the header or footer of your site so that they appear on every page not just on the contact page.
On your contact page, don’t make the the mistake of requiring too much information. A name and a way of contacting them is all you need. Also remember most will give you a free email address they use like gmail or hotmail so they do not have to give their home email. Consider asking for a phone number as a requirement if calling them back is needed, but remember, require too much and they will not bother.
Spend some time thinking about where you would look to find a business like yours, better yet make a point of asking customers if you’re having difficulty. Listing your business in every directory would take you forever and might do you more harm than good. List with the places you would look first both off and online and limit it to 10. Yes people do still look in the telephone books, but it may not make your top ten list.
10. Do Something Every Month
I warn you now even though I titled this ‘do something every month’ I’m going to ask you to do a plan. A marketing plan is not something to be overly intimidated by. It is simply taking all the suggestions above and turn them into actions, something you can do every month.
In order for your plan to be effective you will need to know who you will be marketing to. If you don’t already have a list of customers, suppliers, friends and community or industry leaders who can help you spread the word, now is the time to make one.
Buying a list might sound like a good idea to you, but for personal recommendations you want the members of your list to all be people who have been influenced by the way you do business.
What you are doing here is creating a compelling reason why people on your list might share the news you are giving them with the people they know. If you sell fabric and your customers are designers or ammatuer dressmakers there is a good chance they know other dressmakers and designers. The key to spreading the word is to create an action they will want to talk about. Actions come in three general types:
- Direct Action
- Supporting Action
- Peer Action
Direct Action
Events are a great direct action that help spread the word and so is sampling, both of which your contact can invite others to share the experience with.
Be generous to your customers you can often find inexpensive ways to thank your customers for their custom. Giving them a gift either by mail or as you come into contact with them is another direct action. A sandwich store might give away a sandwich bag to all its customers on a specific day. A plumber might fix any dripping taps a customer might have when he visits for free.
You can even share an event with other businesses in your community that attract the same customers. When someone buys from you they get 20% off your partner business and vice versa. This broadens the reach of your direct action beyond your own list.
Product demonstrations are also an effective direct action you can adopt and often are the only way a customer can experience the benefits first hand before they buy.
Classes are another direct action that can be very effective. Apple offers free classes to people who buy their products so they fully understand how to benefit from the features. A restaurant could organize a class with the chef showing how he makes their signature dish. If you sell furniture and part of your business is selling to interior decorators, you could invite one of the manufactures to showcase how to use sample finishes in their presentations.
Support Action
Apart from direct action you can also use supporting actions, where you provide your customers with an event, demonstration or class in a supporting interest. For example a wine store putting on a cheese tasting event or an accountant organizing a bookkeeping software demonstration. These actions support your customers and show how vital your business is.
Peer Action
Getting together with other business people in your community is a very effective way of spreading the word, creating events that achieve this can be very rewarding. This kind of event is a great way to educate your fellow business owners on what you do and help them to recommend you to their customers. It is also an opportunity to forge discount partnerships as mentioned earlier.
Create a list of actions with at least 12 different promotions and put them in a calendar. It makes sense that some events will be seasonal so this is where you can plan your action to coincide with your customers needs.
Now you have an entire year of marketing decided upon and you can decide on a budget for each and start things rolling. You can even start taking your promotions up to your customers and before long you will have customers asking about the actions you have organized. Who knows if they go well the local media will be down to your business interviewing you for their customers.