NewsBusiness

A guest post from business and marketing consultant and coach Sigrid de Kaste.

Love them or hate them, clients and customers are what makes a business. And it seems that many business owners are getting worried they might be left without in these tough economic times.

At a recent networking event the number one fear was the decline in achieving to get new clients and the decline in the average size of the work or order for the client or customer.

While for some businesses a certain value seen in their services has kept prices steady previously, the current experience seems to be that businesses are undercutting each other in the attempt to get new customers and more business.

Dropping prices to get customers and market share cannot be a sustainable strategy. It never has been. All it creates are Businesses built on credit and margins far too small to be sustainable.  Lowering prices is not the answer to getting more customers. In fact, price isn’t as important as many people think. Only 15% of people switched companies because of a cheaper price or better deal. Think carefully about this before discounting. Remember, if a business has a 20% mark up and discounts by only 10%, they have to sell twice as much to make the same profit. And let’s face it, a 10% discount isn’t going to double your sales is it?

That strategy is what I would call: SELLING your product or service. And that is hard work and expensive. Why? Because the type of customer or client attracted by low prices will always be looking for the lowest price. This in turn means the business has to not only drop prices and put up with low margins, little profit, but will also have to continue to spend on getting new customers.

Wouldn’t you prefer to have the customer simply come and WANT to buy what you have on offer?

Now think about it, who is there who’s already doing that? Yes, your existing customers of course! And here is how easy it can be to get customers to buy rather than selling to them:

Servicing existing clients and customers better
Client surveys provide you with information on how your clients and customers feel about the level of service and the type of products you provide. They tell you what you’re doing right and wrong so you can improve and pre-empt any possibility of a client becoming disgruntled choosing to go to the competition. A high level of customer satisfaction almost guarantees loyalty and wanting to buy from you.

Getting more from existing clients and customers
Ever had a client or customer say “I didn’t know you did that”, or “ I didn’t know you have that product”? Most businesses have. Yet not many actually do something about it. But think, how easy is it to offer further product and services to already happy customers? In fact, think about how the simple question: “Would you like fries with that, medium or large?” achieves substantial extra sales. Without selling.

Happy clients and customers expand your business for you
When you have happy, satisfied clients and customers, how often do they bring friends and relatives to also buy from you? By devising and implementing a referral system you can take control over this aspect and create a flow of new clients and customers on a small budget.

There you have it, three ways to more clients and customers who will buy more without you having to sell more! And when they are happy customers, it’s easy to love them!

Sigrid de Kaste
Professional Business Consulting, Marketing and Coaching
www.sigriddekaste.com

Let’s face it. We’re in a recession. It doesn’t matter how much you say that you reject the recession or that you’re not going to let it affect your business, it doesn’t alter the fact that we’re in a recession.

Now I’m not advocating giving up and walking away or just letting your business drift – in fact quite the opposite – now is a great time to grow your business (and dramatically). The only thing is we have to realise that our customers and potential customers will in the main have a different mindset now – one where they are more cautious and less willing to spend money. But life must go on – everyone still needs to eat, have somewhere to live, and if you sell to other businesses – all businesses must continue to buy those products and services they need to buy to stay in business.

But as businesspeople we need to recognise that we’re operating in a different environment now.

Talking to business owners it’s clear that marketing and advertising strategies that worked before the recession aren’t working that well any more – most advertising just isn’t pulling in customers the way it used to. Same for direct mail and cold calling, either in person or on the phone.

So what should a business be doing to counteract this?

Step 1
If you’re not doing so already – start measuring the success of your marketing and immediately stop anything that you can’t prove is working.

Step 2
Take a step back and work out who your “perfect customer” is. Try to visualise that person right down to what they look like, what they wear, where they live. Then try to start thinking the way they do – how do they go about deciding what to buy? Once you start thinking this way, you can start to work out if they will respond to marketing strategies you have in place. Ask yourself – would you respond to your own marketing? (honestly)

Step 3
Once you have a clear idea of your perfect customer, it is easier then to work out what marketing mechanisms will not only reach them, but also persuade them to consider your product or service. This is not the same as putting your sales message in front of them – it goes way beyond this.

Pure sales messages don’t work very well any more. Those that still do are – for example – in emergency situations (eg need a plumber) or buying from a business that you’ve bought from before. Others messages don’t.

We live in a world where people can research almost anything in seconds on the internet. Where 99% of all marketing messages are filtered out. There is only one thing that can bypass this. Word-of-mouth marketing.

Now word-of-mouth is fantastic – it’s just that relying on real word-of-mouth marketing can be painfully slow – even if you’ve got a great product or service. So you need to investigate other marketing mechanisms similar to word-of-mouth marketing – where someone who people trust (and who doesn’t have a vested financial interest in a sale) says nice things about your business – to lots of people at once. Where do you find people who do this every day? In the media!

There you have it – this whole article has really been about opening your eyes to the power of the media! And the power of publicity as a marketing tool.

You might think it’s too hard to get mentions in the media. But you’re wrong. It’s not easy, but if you take the right approach it doesn’t have to be hard either.

To be successful long term you need to adopt a ‘public relations’ approach to all your marketing on a continuous basis – ‘PR marketing’ if you like. Getting media coverage once is not going to cut it as a marketing strategy. We’re talking about aiming to get regular coverage in relevant media over a period of time.

It’s also very important that – when you do get the media coverage – you tell all those people who already know about you, that you were featured in the magazine/newspaper/tv show etc – they may have missed the item. So make sure that you email your “list” and refer to the coverage on your website. If you don’t blow your own trumpet no one else will!

Of course there’s a lot more to recession marketing and ‘PR marketing’ than this, but this is a great start!