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11 Ways to Make Your Customers Swoon
Sep 8th
Lots of people say that in the world of social media it’s your job to engage with customers. You have to talk to them, be accessible and give them something about yourself to hold on to. I guess that’s true. However, I think businesses have to go even further than that. I think if you want customers to evangelize your brand and be loyal to you, you have to do more than just talk to them – you have to woo them. You have to make your customers swoon.
As a small business owner, how can you get customers to swoon? Here are 11 practical suggestions.
1. Monitor the social networks for people talking about your company. When they’re saying positive stuff, say thank you. When it’s negative, get more details and then say thank you. When they’re asking questions, answer them and say thank you. When you find people talking about your company, respond.
2. Show up places they wouldn’t expect. Your customers have certain places where they hang out on the Web, even outside of Twitter and Facebook. Find their local watering holes and be there when they need you. Don’t hijack their conversation or try to sell your services; just be part of their world and let them know you’re there.
3. Create a blog, write content designed to address customers’ problems. Check your site logs, customer e-mails and/or complaint section to identify your customers’ biggest issues/problems/concerns. Write content that will take these issues away. Solving someone’s problem and making them look good is the best way to make them fall in love with you. Women have known this for years.
4. Plant small surprises. Whether it’s a surprise Thanks For Commenting page for new commenters, a small gift included with their order or chocolate sent on their birthday, offer a small gesture that your customers wouldn’t expect. You’ll rock their world and tie that unexpected experience into their perception of your brand.
5. Start relevant conversations. Whether it’s on your blog, a social media site like Facebook, or in a competitor’s forums, start conversations with qualified experts about topics relevant to your customers. Don’t use these conversations to sell; just share your advice and act as a helpful member of society. If your customers want to know more about how you can help them, they’ll know how to get in touch with you.
6. Guest post on their favorite blogs. You love bacon. And you get really excited when you find other people who love bacon. Why? Because you feel an instant connection with them because you already have something in common. Guest post on your audience’s favorite blogs and show them you love their favorite blogs as much as they do. It will create an affinity that never existed before.
7. Admit you don’t know everything. Woo your customers by asking them questions. Hold polls. Ask for constant feedback. Invite customers in and make them part of your sales process.
8. Be responsive. When someone takes the time to e-mail you, leave a comment or write you a letter, respond. Timely. Always.
9. Write for your audience, not for the search engines. The search engines may bring you traffic, but they don’t bring you customers. To find customers, you need to solve their problems and give them something they can use. That’s what your content should focus on–not on what’s popular or what search the engines want you to write about.
10. Make your blog and website accessible and easy to navigate. Don’t make your customers feel stupid. They’ll leave.
11. Build your own network, but don’t lose sight of your core readers. Go out and build your small business. Grow your network, create relationships and network your way into powerful partnerships. But don’t lose sight of the people you’re trying to reach. They are your core and the people who, at the end of the day, matter most to your business.
Those are some ways I think businesses can woo customers and turn them loyal to your brand. What’s worked for your company? What programs do you have in place to attract and retain customers?
11 Ways to Make Your Customers Swoon
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
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Google Local Shopping Tells Customers You Have It In Stock
Sep 7th
Are you a local small business retailer? If so, Google made an announcement last week that you should pay attention to. Are you listening?
A few months ago Google began experimenting with Google Local Shopping, a service that lets customers find and buy products that are in stock nearby. Whether it’s a certain kind of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream or a special set of headphones, with one search customers can find the retailers in their area that sell exactly what they’re looking for. No more driving endlessly from store to store craving ice cream and hoping stores stay open late enough for you to find it. Huzzah! To encourage the feature, Google has made its help documentation requirements open to the public so that more local retailers can benefit and bring online shoppers directly into their retail stores.
There are a number of steps small business owners will have to go through if they want to get their products listed in Google Local Shopping. Here’s a quick breakdown:
- Step 1: Create a Google Merchant Center account.
- Step 2: Create an online product listing feed. [Here’s how.]
- Step 3: Apply for a separate Google Merchant Center account for your local product listings. Once it’s confirmed that you qualify, Google will send you an invitation link within three days to a new Merchant Center account created for your Local Shopping data.
- Step 4: Accept the new terms of service.
- Step 5: Enable local shopping.
Not every retailer who applies will be accepted into Google’s Local Shopping program; however, there are some things you can do to give your business its best shot at acceptance. Google notes that Product Search quality is a prerequisite for participation, so small business owners will want to make sure they’re submitting an accurate and complete data feed, including unique product identifiers. You also need to have your stores listed on Google Places, so you’ll have to submit and verify your store listings, if you haven’t already done that.
It does seem like a small amount of work to get listed; however, anything you can do to make your products more available and searchable is a good thing. Since Google is requiring that stores have Google Place listings, it will also be interesting to see how products are eventually incorporated on Place pages. Perhaps business owners who have enabled the Local Shopping feature will be able to display their products directly on their Place page or make them searchable for users. We know Google is only going to increase the importance of these pages, so anything you can do to make yours stronger than those of your competitors is a good thing.
Google Local Shopping Tells Customers You Have It In Stock
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
Travel industry uses Facebook and Twitter to reach customers
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5 Ways to Make a Database For Your Customers
Aug 30th
5 Ways to Make a Database For Your Customers
This content from: Duct Tape Marketing
Standard marketing CRM type practice suggests that you should create and supplement a database of customers and prospects with the idea that you build more and more information to use to help build deeper relationships and create additional selling opportunities.
What if you look at database building as a service you provided for your customers? Now, in some cases that might be a good service offering as a profit center, but I’m talking about providing a service that simply allows you to differentiate your business by adding value in ways that your competitors aren’t even thinking about.
RSS, search technology, and a slew of online apps have made the creation and streaming of database kind of content a pretty simple affair.
Below are some examples of the kind of information this way of thinking might produce.
1. The knowledge database
Create a custom RSS subscription database of blogs and news sites your customers would find interesting, either by virtue of information they provided you or based on an industry they should follow. You can set-up an RSS reader or upload and OPML file to the reader of their choice and magically create a hand crafted set of blogs they should follow. OPML files may sound a little techie, but essentially it’s a list of RSS feeds that can be imported to an RSS reader to create lots of subscriptions at one time.
2. The best of class database
Build a list of best of class service providers that can deliver all the products and services you know your customers may need that are unrelated to your actual offerings. Create a database with all of the contact information and notes about each provider. Offer this to your customers as a service to help them find great companies for everything they buy. This strategic partner kind of database is something you should be building and maintaining for your referral and lead generation activities anyway, but take it a step further and make it a formal offering using a tool like Central Desktop to invite your partners to build and maintain their listings, including monthly specials.
3. The real time roundup database
Create custom social media and reputation monitoring databases for your customers that include all brand and competitive mentions in real time streams like Twitter, Facebook, and Media distribution sites and teach your customers how to monitor this database. This may be totally unrelated to your services, but it’s such an essential bit of marketing wisdom that you can create incredible brand loyalty by being the organization that shows them how to do it. Use a tool like Trackur to create your own white label social media monitoring service.
4. The cutting edge B2B database
Create a database of web apps that can help your business customers do more with less using free and low cost tools for things like design, file backup, file storage, file streaming, collaboration, online meetings, CRM, finance and HR. This is another play that can allow your organization to be seen as an online thought leader and go to person for emerging tools. Simply gaining this reputation can open some doors to many other teaching and exposure opportunities in your industry – regardless of what you actually sell. Here’s a nice example – The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
5. The reminder database
What if you offered a service that could help remind each customer of important dates? Give them the opportunity to put all the birthdays, anniversaries and other important dates in their lives into a database with the promise to remind them to take action when the date was coming up. Obviously, this is a no brainer if you also have a product or service to offer as something for that date, such as flowers or gifts, but it also works for just about any business as a way to stay top of mind. The heating and cooling service could offer a monthly home maintenance reminder tied to the season and featuring a different partner each month. The key is to provide value and personalization. You might also get some inspiration from LIfeHacker’s Top 10 Reminder Tools for Forgetful Minds
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View full post on Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing
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750K for Flowtown’s Social Marketing to Existing Customers
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Grow Your Sales and Gain Satisfied Customers Through “Service Innovation”
Aug 21st
Having a problem determining how to deliver your services in a way that consistently satisfies your customers? Maybe the trouble lies in how the solution is framed. A suggestion from Lance Bettencourt, author of Service Innovation: How to Go From Customer Needs to Breakthrough Services, explains an enticing framework of opportunity:
“When conflicts arise in satisfying customers’ outcomes, they should be viewed as opportunities to take a new service delivery approach that challenges conventional industry wisdom.”
Bettencourt has crafted a fine book for service business owners seeking steps to address those opportunities. An experienced strategy adviser for Strategyn who has consulted for Microsoft, TD Bank and Abbott Medical Optics, Bettencourt provides a strategy development framework that business owners can easily understand and use to implement new services and operational ideas.
The Truth About How Your Customers View Your Services
Bettencourt approaches service innovation by declaring the four truths of services. These truths describes the kinds of existing services from the point of view of the customers’ benefit:
- Customers hire products and services for completing a job.
- Customers hire solutions to accomplish distinct steps in getting an entire job done.
- Customers use outcomes to evaluate success in getting a job done.
- Customers have distinct needs that arise related to the “consumption” of a solution.
These approaches, assert Bettencourt, mean that “a company is forced to think about service innovation from multiple valuable perspectives,”adding that the approaches can overlap yet still yield economic results. He cites IBM’s revenue growth from $10 billion in 1990 to $50 billion as an example of benefiting from innovation discovery.
From there, Bettencourt identifies the four approaches to service innovation that a company can pursue to develop opportunities:
- Core Job – a specific job requested by customers
- Service Delivery — how customers obtain the benefits of a service
- Supplemental Service — a service that helps customers gain more value from a product to complete a specific job
- New Service — an introduction of a new service
To help readers further understand, he treats the first three approaches in their own separate chapters. This allows readers to understand the supporting steps to defining the opportunities. Chapter Three, for example, examines a core job through formal questions such as “What must the customer do to successfully conclude the job?” and “What problems related to getting the job done must be resolved on occasion?” These questions are asked in a formal job map, a means to discover opportunities to improve service delivery.
I liked the book’s readability, and I particularly liked the job map processes. There is a map for each kind of service opportunity outlined, and the aforementioned formal questions appear for each step outline. Supporting comments are ready to offer “ah-has!” such as the following comment on the question, “What service needs or inputs must the customer define or communicate to ensure success obtaining service or benefits?”:
“Even for simple services, a service provider can add value by helping customers to define their needs. To be successful, the customer wants to have the right inputs available for making decisions, not overlook any relevant needs, limit the costs of defining needs, and define the needs in a manner that can translate into decisions concerning service options. To ensure that its customers get an optimized treatment plan for their lawn, for example, Scotts LawnService uncover a lawn’s unique challenges through a detailed analysis of soil types, shade and sun exposure, types of weeds and varying levels of grass density.”
Tables and charts also summarize the suggestions well. Figure 1-2 shows the flow chart for developing a successful service strategy, for example, while Table 7-1 lays out options for service delivery. You do not need to be the scale of IBM to use this methodology.
I thoroughly enjoyed Service Innovation because its concepts allow readers to take actions that can increase customer value and identify the opportunities for results. Service Innovation broadened my view of what I can look for to improve service to my customers.
An Outstanding Service Book You May Not Want to Share
Why, you ask?
It’s that good of an idea generator.
And given the number of small service businesses (they contribute 80 percent of the national GDP, according to Bettencourt), developing new ways to service customers is a worthwhile endeavor. This book flies in the face of those who cry out that customers are important yet never show exactly the way to really deliver. Service Innovation has the right framework to execute innovative ways to deliver services. The book quotes strategy guru Michael Porter, “…trade-offs are the essence of strategy. You just want to make the right ones.” Service Innovation will show the way.
Grow Your Sales and Gain Satisfied Customers Through “Service Innovation”
View full post on Small Business News, Tips, Advice – Small Business Trends
