I’m shocked at how many small businesses dump big bucks into new marketing initiatives targeting new customers without first verifying and leveraging the satisfaction of their current customers.
Truth is, if you take REALLY good care of your current clients they essentially do the majority of your marketing for you if you only let them. All you have to do is show them that you honestly care about them.
This can be accomplished in many ways depending on what kind of enterprise you have and no single way fits all business.
Good examples and useful tools for strong client relations are:
- Personal sales follow up
- A simple thank you
- Survey
- Product or service review
- Offer or gift including future discount
- Social media
- Help desks and online chat
This list could have another 50 examples depending on the size and structure of your enterprise.
Often a business really doesn’t want to hear where they fail or come up short in the eyes of their client or customer. Often, if you don’t provide your clients with an outlet to vent their frustrations they feel compelled to find other outlets like: Google, Yelp, Trip Advisor, Open Table, BBB and more. This kind of feedback takes you by surprise like a broken pipe or crashed hard drive. They are similar in that the damage can run deep and be costly to repair.
That’s why we usually ask what type of customer followup and incentives you offer when we get asked to come up with new and innovative marketing strategies to grow business. It costs WAY MORE TO ATTRACT NEW CUSTOMERS THAN TO RETAIN EXISTING CUSTOMERS.
So before you are looking for marketing magic take an honest analysis at what you do to both address the good and bad with your existing clients.
If you make it easy for your clients to give you feedback, you will get it. Often this feedback will make you a better company and when you are rewarded with matching or surpassing their expectations you can leverage that into future business from both your current client as well as their friends and associates.
