Local marketing strategies today don’t look like the ones from 10 years ago. It’s not just print and broadcast anymore, and good thing because it’s expensive and becoming less effective each year. Technology brings us exciting new ways to engage existing and new customers. But how do we know about them and which to choose when we’re so busy running our business? For every small business revenue is waiting in 2 categories, additional revenue from existing customers, and additional revenue from new customers.
These can help you identify the fastest way for your business to make more money.
5 R’s of local business marketing
- Retention: Existing Customers Revenue
- Reactivation: Existing Customers Revenue
- Referrals: New Customers Revenue
- Reputation: New Customers Revenue
- Ranking: New Customers Revenue
There is technology available for business building marketing campaigns for each one of these R’s. Over the next five weeks I’m going to dedicate a blog post to each one of those five R’s, but in the meantime here’s a quick overview of the opportunity each represents for the small business marketer.
Retention: This R is all about keeping the customers you already have coming back for more. In an increasingly competitive marketplace the business that treats their existing customers like royalty is the business that is more successful. Good examples of campaigns in the retention area are loyalty campaigns, that can mean repeat customer coupons and discount codes. E-mail marketing, text marketing and social media marketing are all great platforms for delivering loyalty value to existing customers. The great news is, these technologies don’t cost much to use!
Reactivation: This R is about mining your customer list for the ones that have not come to see you for a while. Sometimes all it takes is a reminder that you are there for them, to bring them back. Other times you may not have realized that they were disappointed and just stopped coming. If you reach out to them and ask them what you have to do to get them to come back, they will usually tell you which gives you an opportunity to please them and make them a customer once again.
These first two R’s represent very low hanging fruit for every business. But the truth is, the average business owner doesn’t know how to go about a simple approach to retention and reactivation campaigns.
Retention and reactivation local marketing campaigns are among the least expensive things to do.
Referrals: The best kind of customer for any small business is a referral from another customer. Referrals represent some of the lowest fruit on the tree for every business, so it makes you wonder why most businesses are so bad at asking for referrals! It simply that they don’t know how, don’t have the systems in place to make it easy and therefore never get around to it. The key to referral campaigns is to measure the process not the outcome. An example of measuring the process is having your customer facing employees keep track of every customer they asked for a referral. A simple log sheet can be used to do this. The point is if you require employees to ask, give them the means to keep track of that and they ask enough times, a certain percentage of those requests will yield a referral. But if you don’t ask, you’ll never get the referrals.
Reputation: Reputation marketing is making sure that you are proactively asking your customers for feedback, and ultimately a review that is published online. In case you haven’t noticed the first thing that an existing or potential customer sees when searching for your business or service is reviews about your business or service. If you don’t have any, and your competition does. They win you lose! The small business that builds, manages and markets a five-star reputation in today’s marketplace is the local business leader of tomorrow! Learn what they’re saying about you online in this free report.
Ranking: The Ranking R is about taking the steps necessary to ensure that your business is found on the first page of Google among your competitors. Oftentimes too much emphasis is put on ranking, when marketing dollars could be much better spent in the other 4 areas first. The right decision is going to have everything to do with the size of your market, and the search volume for your product and service in your town. Learn where you rank compared to your competitors with our free report here
At Tech Effective we specialize in cutting-edge strategies for local marketing.
