Last night I had the pleasure of visiting Macedon and speaking at, a great business networking night with over 50 businesses in attendance. The topic we discussed was growing your business when you don’t have a lot of cash. In so many cases just by applying some creativity you end up with a better outcome than if you chose a cash based option!
In a nutshell the best way to grow your business is to keep your customers and get them to buy more off you and also to find new customers. There are three things that are important to do.
- Provide Good Customer Service
- Keep in contact with customers and ex-customers
- Find ways to stand out.
You can do this by thinking creatively about ways that you can better service your customers, creative ways and reasons for contacting customers and creative ways to stand out.There was a huge brains trust in the room so last night we all drew on years of experience to come up with this list of suggestions for businesses.
Keeping Customers through great Customer Service
- Offer a free phone service for back up and product support
- Go the extra mile and offer more in terms of service and support
- Follow up your customers to see how they are going i.e. did the treatment work, is the product doing what they expected etc.
- Encourage your customers to contact you first if there is a problem no matter what (and naturally you have to make yourself available)
- Follow through on what you say you are going to do – Under promise and over deliver! Be your word.
- Give customers one person to deal with and make sure all issues are followed up and resolved.
- Get to know your customers and their needs.
- Take time to understand what they are looking for so you can provide the right solution.
- Always smile and acknowledge customers and thank them for their business.
- Meet the needs of your customers.
- Ring customers to see if they need to re-order. Many times they will love you for it as you’ve saved them time.
Finding Customers through Social Media
- Set up a competition for best comment on the page offering a freebie – it can lead to lots of other business.
- Put photos of staff on facebook pages and websites to personalise products
- Create a fan page to separate personal from business (you can now also set up separate pages through Facebook)
- Before and after photos to help sell products
- How to videos on You Tube
- Start out by searching for family and friends on Facebook and get them to join your fan page
Standing Out from the Crowd
- Be a one stop shop – do the lot for your customers
- Work with other businesses in collaboration to offer a unique product or service
- Look for ways to do things differently
- Be big and bold with your branding
Find out more about business events held in the Macedon Ranges.
Contact AP Marketing Works if you want to book Ailsa to speak at your business network event.
