[vc_row][vc_column][vc_row_inner el_class=”col-1-2″ css=”.vc_custom_1482100856278{padding-right: 10px !important;}”][vc_column_inner][vc_raw_html]JTNDaWZyYW1lJTIwY2xhc3MlM0QlMjdzcHJvdXR2aWRlby1wbGF5ZXIlMjclMjBzcmMlM0QlMjdodHRwcyUzQSUyRiUyRnZpZGVvcy5zcHJvdXR2aWRlby5jb20lMkZlbWJlZCUyRmQ0OWNkOGI2MWYxZGU2YzM1YyUyRjAxZTE5NTM5NGU4NTMyOWElM0ZwbGF5ZXJUaGVtZSUzRGRhcmslMjZhbXAlM0JwbGF5ZXJDb2xvciUzRDAwMDAwMCUyNyUyMHdpZHRoJTNEJTI3NjMwJTI3JTIwaGVpZ2h0JTNEJTI3MjgwJTI3JTIwZnJhbWVib3JkZXIlM0QlMjcwJTI3JTIwYWxsb3dmdWxsc2NyZWVuJTNFJTNDJTJGaWZyYW1lJTNF[/vc_raw_html][vc_empty_space height=”10px”][/vc_column_inner][/vc_row_inner][vc_column_text]The end of the year and the start of a new one is one of my favorite times to reflect, look ahead and get things in order for an amazing year ahead.
As the co-owner of several small businesses, I know that no business owner wants to find himself or herself on the trailing side of the trend-setting process: you spend all of your time trying to catch up, but by the time you do, the market has moved on. You need to be looking in advance, so you can be one of those trend-setters.
I‘ve been thinking about this a lot these past few weeks – especially looking at where marketing trends are coming from and are heading. Business owners are especially sensitive to market changes, so this is important stuff to know!
Here are some points to keep in mind as you develop your business and marketing strategies:
1. Tiny markets – yup, it‘s all about the depth, not the size
Small business owners often don‘t have the big marketing budgets of corporate giants like Mercedes or Nike or Gucci. But you can actually turn this to your advantage because, unlike these global corporations, you don‘t really want your ads to be shown to everyone, everywhere. There is absolutely no reason to waste your precious marketing dollars on ads that are being shown to people who don‘t care about your business or product!
With all of the data being collected about every one of us, it‘s so easy to target your exact audience: reaching the type of people who are likely to purchase from you. For example, Facebook tracks your every move – from what you ‘like‘, to who you engage with, to what you purchase, to where you travel, to who you are attracted to (kidding!)… scary for some, but that‘s just our reality. This makes it very easy to be specific about who you want to have your content advertisements directed to. Make sure you take advantage of this! You will get a much higher return on your investment, that is, if you know who your absolutely favorite customers are.
2. Social proof and peer-recommendations
How many stars have you got? How many people have left a review? We walk around staring at our phones, constantly looking at businesses‘ (and people‘s) rankings and that‘s not something that‘s going away in the next few days! Swipe left, swipe right.
It used to be that communication between businesses and their prospects or customers was very one-way: basically the companies plugging their product to their customers. In fact, some businesses still behave that way to their own detriment. But now, thanks to the internet, a dialogue has opened up and transparency has never been more transparent!
Today, customers communicate back with that company and provide feedback. Even more importantly, though, is the fact that consumers can talk to each other, providing reviews and recommendations.
Increasingly, people are making their purchase decisions based upon reviews. Think TripAdvisor and Yelp – not to mention the merchandising giants Amazon and eBay. There is more transparency than there‘s ever been before. No longer can sub-standard companies hide behind their big advertising budgets!
The reviews that will work best for you are those that appear on other “third-party” sites. Multiple reviews with four or five stars on Amazon or Yelp will raise consumer trust in your product or service far more than any positive (but unverifiable) comments you‘ve posted on your own site by “Betty from Wisconsin” or whoever, although those can certainly carry weight too (please don‘t fake them!). Make an effort to ask your customers to post reviews. Even screenshots of reviews on Facebook or any other site on your own materials can be very powerful.
3. Transparency
Even if consumers don‘t yet do all of their purchasing online, they still do most (if not all!) of their research online. Your potential customers can research and price-compare pretty much any product or service in a matter of few minutes. Unless they live on a lonely island without internet and live off coconuts (sounds like heaven)!
So, first of all, make sure that your business has a clean slate and a great reputation. You do this by giving a toss about your customers, developing fantastic products or providing exceptional services – because people are going to find those reviews I was just talking about, and you want them to be good. If you don‘t stand out, no one is even going to make contact with you! (I have met so many business owners who think that ‘marketing doesn‘t work‘ or that are relying on ‘word-of-mouth‘ – when really they haven‘t done much yet to be seen. Word-of-mouth by the way is not a marketing strategy, it‘s a result of you blowing your customers‘ minds).
Make sure the information people are searching for on your site is easy to find, your website is easy to navigate and you are readily contactable. Don‘t hide your phone number or email address. If you don‘t like to be on the phone (I‘m the first to admit that I‘m not a phone person, I hardly call my best friends or family), then hire someone who loves to talk to people.
Your potential customers have come to your website, and that‘s the first step. But if you are making it hard for them to find the information they are looking for, they‘ll lose attention and go somewhere else.
4. Branding like a badass
Branding itself is nothing new – but through 2017, branding will continue to play a major role in getting your business noticed in the first place, as well as making it stick in people‘s minds. I‘ve seen so many cases where businesses finally took branding seriously, worked with our design agency TheBusinessHood.com or another branding pro to rebrand and suddenly their perception in the market completely changed. This rings especially true for products. Think about when you go to the supermarkets and stand in front of shelf filled with body lotion, which one are you going to pick? Which one stands out? Which one looks amazing?
Companies that invest in branding generally get a much higher ROI on their marketing investments. Branding is not simply pumping money into advertisements or getting a logo designed. It is thoughtful decision-making about how you want to present your business to the world: your brand promises, your brand values, your core essence. In fact, this is so crucial that I‘ve written a whole post about this.
5. Humanising your marketing
In today‘s world, people (especially millenials) are turning more and more to brands that have a personality. Something beyond the product itself. Something they can relate to.
Let me give you an example. Here are two competing companies that you are probably already familiar with: British Airways and the Virgin Airlines group.
Both are major airlines providing flights around the world. They provide nearly identical services at similar prices. Their safety records are both great. Even the routes they offer are nearly the same! So why would a traveller choose one over the other?
Their brand personality, which is reflected in the customer experience. Customers will gravitate towards the brand personality that they can relate to – that ties to their own self-perception.
British Airways has cultivated an image of being conservative, reliable, and safety-conscious. Virgin, on the other hand, exudes a personality of being hip and fun and edgy. So BA attracts one demographic: corporate travellers, business professionals, families. And Virgin attracts another: the younger crowd, entrepreneurs and artists, travellers who are out to party and have a good time. There will always be a cross-over, but you know what I mean.
It‘s important to understand that your business is about more than just the product. In particular, the younger demographic is looking far beyond the product itself: they value style and impact and association. Humanize your marketing by looking at the purpose and meaning of your products to your target clientele, because your business is bigger than just the products or services you sell.
6. Building communities
Community-building is another millenials (wasn‘t it only gen-y a minute ago!)- phenomenon. Humans (well, at least most of us) are born with the need to belong: to a family, a club, a church, a bikie gang. These communities endure (sometimes for centuries!) because their members feel that they are part of something meaningful. However, since we can now live much of our life from a mobile phone without ever leaving the house, many humans have become disconnected and are left with a sense of wanting to belong to something.
To win in 2017 and beyond, you as a small business need to use this concept to your advantage: make a conscious effort to build community and get people together. These days, many community groups are organized online, such as a Facebook group, or a monthly newsletter (that really is news, not just advertising). However, community can be created offline too: for example, the running store that organizes a free weekly community run, or the health food store that hosts a free monthly guest speaker or the yoga studio that has open days. Think about how you can build a community, online or off, that engages the types of people you want to attract and who would also relate to your brand.
7. Generosity is the new black
How do you provide more value? Either by dropping your price, or by improving the quality of the product or experience that you offer. Please do not do the first one! Focus on the second option, most of the time!
Most small businesses cannot afford to be lower-cost providers (that‘s where the industry giants, who can afford to profit from the economies of scale, come in). Rather, you have to create more value by finding your niche: becoming the quality provider that customers who are dissatisfied with the bulk or discount experience will seek out. As a small business, you can create value by offering the unique experience only you can give.
How to do this? Well, for a start, many of the things I‘ve outlined above, such as finding your micro-niche and providing a high-quality experience will generate you the five-star reviews that will draw new customers in – even if your price is a little bit higher.
But there is also the generosity factor. If you look like you‘re only in business to make a buck, people will see through you. However, if you show that you genuinely care, by being generous in any which way, you will create an aura of trust, and prospective clients will develop confidence in you. Being generous and sharing your value on social media via blog posts, free information, free trials etc., is a way to show your awesomeness to the world. Plus value attracts money not the other way round. Why would you choose to be mediocre when you can be outstanding?
8. Personalizing, I‘m not just a number
This is where small business owners really have the advantage over those big corporations: you have a smaller customer base, which means you can personalize your interactions with your customers, not to say that large corporates can‘t do this, they often just don‘t bother.
An obvious example of this is your email list: using software to address each recipient by name, so your message doesn‘t look like some large and impersonal mail-out (large companies do this too, obviously). If you want to get a little fancier, you can impress your clients by remembering their likes and preferences and only serve them information they really want. One of my dear friends, André Chaperon, is extremely good at this. He has created a client database that is so segmented that people only get what they really want – what interests them. Hence he has built a really good relationship with his people and they trust him. Not only are they unlikely to unsubscribe from his list – but when he recommends something, they buy.
You can also personalize your service and customer relationships with your VIP clients the old-fashioned way: by getting to know them, and remembering them. Once you know their tastes and interests, it‘s not so hard to find a very special and personalized gift to send their way, such as a book on golfing, or a bottle of wine, or a ticket to a show – something that shows that you value them (while keeping you in their thoughts). We have a dedicated team member here at Basic Bananas, Steph, who is in charge of finding personal gifts for clients, she rocks at it (she might even have found one or two gifts for my family, shhhh).
Oh and don‘t forget the good old handwritten postcards.
9. Engaging the customer
Remember that I mentioned how communication between businesses and their customers used to be one-way, but that now social media has turned this into a dialogue? Well, you can take this idea a step further by working to engage your customers (or potential customers) with your business and your products.
The aim is to get your customers to actually do something with your company or product – to interact. There are so many ways you can do this – let me give you a few examples:
Threadless, a Chicago-based T-shirt company, engages their customers by having them vote on T-shirt designs. They run an open-ended design competition, where anyone can enter a design, and then their fanbase votes on them. These keep the company‘s relationship on-going, and keeps their customers returning to their site (and viewing and purchasing their products). As of this writing, a whopping 400,000 designs have been submitted and over 8,000 of them have been voted in and printed. That‘s some pretty good customer engagement!
Adobe partnered with an ad agency in Sweden to create a real-time Photoshop “prank” on unsuspecting people waiting at bus stops. At bus stops, you ask? Well yes – you know those digital advertising screens that you find at many bus stops? The people waiting at the stops were filmed with a hidden camera from across the street, and a Photoshop expert placed them into the digital screen images in real time – and then filmed their reactions! You, too, can become one of the more than 25 million (so far!) people who have seen the 2 minute video by watching it here. The value of the free PR for Adobe Photoshop from this viral video has been estimated at 12 million Euros – not bad for a single day‘s effort by a couple of guys.
Ikea is another company that engages their customers through the whole in-store experience – from their inviting furniture displays, to the in-house restaurant with its hallmark Swedish meatballs, to the children‘s play area. A visit to an Ikea store is not like shopping at any other housewares store – it‘s more like a visit to Disney World. Ikea has made their stores into an interactive experience, a place that a family might go to for a day (and you have to be prepared to walk for miles through countless living rooms and dining rooms!).
These are a just very few examples. There are literally thousands of ways that you can engage your customers, whether online or through contests or through showroom design or more. Think about what suits your business.
10. Premium, please
You hear a lot of people saying that “everyone wants more for less.” But that‘s not actually true. There will always be a market for people who are happy to pay a premium for a VIP experience.
And this is where you can really excel compared to the giant corporations and big-box outlets. While you might not be able to compete on price you can provide a customized experience. The question you need to ask yourself is not ‘What do I want to sell?” but rather “What do they want to buy?” Then, instead of offering a huge range of products (which is both costly and hard to manage) look at what products you can create that “they” want, and that you can do better or more uniquely than any of your competitors. Then customize your product line accordingly.
Thanks for being an amazing business owner!
I‘m really excited to see what 2017 brings. I have a feeling it‘s going to be a great one. Just make sure you focus on being generous, providing an amazing product or customer service, and embracing the awesome technology and innovation coming at us!
Franziska Iseli, co-founder of BasicBananas.com, TheBusinessHood.com, Oceanlovers.com[/vc_column_text][vc_row_inner][vc_column_inner width=”1/2″][vc_empty_space][vc_column_text]
Your Turn
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