Small Business Dream (SmallBizDream.com) helps business owners get more and better clients increasing profits with less stress with the Small Business Dream Suite of profitability tools.
Spending your hard-earned money on expensive marketing or ad campaigns is out of the question when you have razor-thin profit margins.
And while businesses are beginning to open up, we’re not out of the woods yet and businesses are still reeling from the effects of extended lockdowns and COVID-19 restrictions. But the good news is, we’re starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and businesses are gradually opening up once more.
So how exactly can we market our business and
spend zero dollars in the process? Let’s start with the most obvious one –
accumulating social capital.
Spend Time
Building Your Social Capital
No matter what business you’re in, building relationships is essential. It’s hard to imagine running a business with no thought of gaining people’s trust and maintaining good relationships. How much work you put into building your social capital will determine how successful your business will be.
The great thing is you don’t have to spend much money accumulating social capital than you would making friends as you go about with your day to day activities. And you need not look further than good old social media.
Facebook is particularly interesting – usage is at
a record high. But unlike before, people aren’t just spending time on Facebook ‘social
not-working’; they’re actually using it to find local businesses and checking
on people to know how they are. Local businesses are also cranking up Facebook
posts like never before, promoting their businesses through Facebook Page
invites, shares, and being actively engaged for most of the day.
YouTube time has also increased. We’ve seen this
before COVID-19, but even more so today as people are hungry for good, reliable
content from news to entertainment and everything in between. You can be the
go-to guy by sharing your experiences and expertise. So for instance, if you’re
into food business, talk about how you can save on food by planning your meals
and recycling leftovers so nothing goes to waste.
Offer Something
for Free
If you think about the cost of getting a new
customer, you’ll quickly realize how inexpensive freebies and giveaways can
actually be. Besides, people will remember you more if you’re giving something
out. Things like mugs, T-shirts, umbrellas – they’re not only useful, they
double as a marketing tool by itself. But what if you don’t have money to go
around?
One of the most effective ways which is still true
today is offering ‘gated content’ to your target audience. This could be a free
e-book, whitepaper, research, exclusive access to a live webinar, or a
complimentary item or service which they can avail by signing up to your mailing
list. This often goes along with a CRM and a content marketing strategy. Always
remember to use ‘double opt-ins’, like what we do with our Small Business Dream Sales and
Marketing Automation, in keeping with GDPR laws.
Other options include hosting a ‘mini-contest’ on
social media via Facebook Live or newsfeed posts. Sounds simple, but it
actually worked on many small business with little to no marketing budget.
Check out this blog post on creative ways to run Facebook contests if you
need some ideas and try one yourself.
Content Marketing
As the name suggests, you use content to promote
your business, albeit more subtly compared to using traditional ads. It’s an
age-old practice and comes in many forms from old-school TV shows and soap
operas to blogs and YouTube videos. This requires some dedication on your part to
deliver content consistently and you might also need to learn some SEO so
people can actually see your posts.
It will take a while to rank organically, but
there are workarounds to get more people to know about you quickly. When it
comes to text-based content, guest posts are a great way to get exposure. Some sites
allow you to post a link to your website at the very end. Content marketing always
works best when used with other methods such as social media and email
marketing. Same goes for YouTube content. But on top of this, you’ll need a CRM/sales and marketing
automation to organize and execute your marketing plans.
Joint Venture with
other Businesses
We’ve talked about this in one of our blog posts about joint ventures. The idea is to find complementary businesses with a huge list of people who might be interested in your product or service. In return, they get a percentage on every sale you make. You get the list, they get their share – even Steven.
The biggest draw is you don’t spend on anything until you make the sale, and even so, it’s just your own way of returning the favor on things which would have cost you more, i.e. ads and other marketing expenses. The key is to look for businesses that can benefit from what you have to offer and are not a direct competition to yours.
Restaurants can joint venture with delivery
services and apps like DeliveryBizConnect. Insurance
companies can joint venture with auto and real estate. Even content creators
can become joint venture partners by allowing some type of promotion on their
blog or YouTube channel, kind of like affiliate marketing. So yes, you can
definitely market your business without spending a single dime if you know how to joint venture.
Showcase Your
Work
Part of your portfolio should include your most
notable works as well as testimonials from your previous clients. Just by
looking at your works and hearing what others have to say about you almost
instantly wins people’s trust. One of the most popular ways is to create a LinkedIn account
for your business. It functions as your virtual business card and
is a great networking tool.
Another popular option is to use free website
builders and CMS like Wix and WordPress where people can marvel at your work.
Note: just by having a professional-looking website is a statement in itself.
It speaks a lot about you and your business and why they should trust you.
You can get testimonials and user recommendations for free and they are extremely powerful in promoting your business. They provide context to your product or service. They make your business more relatable because people are able to put themselves on the shoes with those who share the same problems and experiences as theirs.
Testimonials should be posted on your website, Google Reviews, Facebook and Yelp if appropriate.
Ask for Free
Small Business Advice
We want to reach out and talk with you through our
FREE 45-minute business
consultation where we can discuss some solutions to get you
through the pandemic.
We layout every possible means to keep you in business, whether it’s through LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, email series, sales funnels, landing pages or business directories.
Today
we’ll talk about LinkedIn, and how almost any business can use LinkedIn to
increase their sales and not tick people off in the process.
LinkedIn and Facebook are the two big ones that we use. LinkedIn is required in most businesses, particularly in North America. I didn’t start using LinkedIn ’til only about five or six years ago. At first I was like, “What the heck is LinkedIn? How’s that going to help me? Isn’t that just really for putting your resume up online and people follow what you do?” That was the question I had. So, I started looking into LinkedIn and developing a LinkedIn profile.
How Important Is Social Credibility in
Business?
I
realized how important it was to add credibility to who you are in business. I’ve
seen a lot of good profiles and bad profiles (profiles with pictures of their
dog instead of their actual picture, pictures that were cropped out from a
group photo, pictures that are out of focus or have a really bad background,
pictures that are not professional-looking, etc.).
LinkedIn
is not Facebook. It’s not for posting what you had for breakfast or for dinner.
If I’m going to be looking for people I want to do business with, I’m not going
to Facebook, first; I’m going to LinkedIn.
Collect Data at a Networking Event in 3
Simple Steps
There’s
a neat little system you could do at a live networking event using LinkedIn to
capture the whole room’s data. Here’s how it works:
One of the things I learned by me starting just from scratch over the past five or six years is there’s a way that you could get everybody in LinkedIn if they have the app. It’s really important that you download the LinkedIn app to your phone.
2. Be in control of the room. Find an opportunity to ‘control’ the room
and get a chance to get the microphone to tell everybody to open up LinkedIn.
At the very bottom of the LinkedIn app there are five icons. The first one
looks like a little house. The second one is two people sitting side-by-side
(that’s the one that you want to click). When you click that button, most of
you in your LinkedIn app will have a little blue circle appear on your bottom
right corner of your screen.
3. Find other users in the room.
That little blue circle has a picture of a person with a plus button. Clicking that little blue button opens up three menu items on your phone. The very first one says, ‘find nearby’—that’s exactly what it’s going to do. Turn it on, and now everybody that is in the room that is on this page in LinkedIn will appear so that you can connect and talk with them right there in the app.
They
need to make sure they’re doing it on the app, they’ve enabled Bluetooth, and
they need to enable their location services—couple of things they have to do, but
LinkedIn will let them do that right off the bat and you can use this to
connect with an entire room in seconds. It’s really interesting because it
works off of a Bluetooth mesh, so it’s not even a matter of it only meets
people as far away as your phone’s Bluetooth circumference. It actually goes to
the farthest guys in the room’s phone. We’ve been at events where we actually
picked up on someone that was at a train station a good mile from where we
were. So, it’s really, really fantastic technology, but it only works if you’re
‘in control’ of the room.
Things to Keep In Mind
1. Ask for permission
My
recommendation is, if you’re going to try to do this tip during your 30-second
or your one-minute personal introduction in a room, make sure you have the
organizer or the main speaker’s permission, because if you go fire up something
like this and the speaker wanted to keep the data only for him, you could
really, really frustrate someone and probably not be welcomed back to their
events again. So, make sure you get permission.
If
you’re worried about ‘giving away your data,’ it’s actually the opposite. What
we found is everywhere we’ve done this, the tone of the event changes to, “Wow,
this is one of the best events I’ve been to. I got some really, really helpful
tips that I can take away and use in my business.” We talked about it at a big
event, but it also works if you’re just sitting around a boardroom with a bunch
of people and you all want to connect real quick. It’s extremely fast compared
to any other way of connecting with people.
2. Make People Want to Connect with You
We have
some networking events that we go to every week. When I stand up to do my forty
seconds, they know what I’m going to do. They’ve already got their phones out,
they’re already on LinkedIn, they’re all ready to go and get in the room
because they know the power of being able to connect. You become the ‘hero’
that everybody connects to with, and you know that the speaker is going to
forgive the fact that you take one minute and forty seconds instead of your
allotted forty seconds because it does take a little time to get everybody to
turn it on and get interacting with you.
You need
to be animated when introducing this cool tip. Stand up and get everybody to
hold up their hand. When I do it I tell everybody, “How would you like to
connect with everyone in the room, raise your hand. Hold your phone up. I want
you to use your phones right now. Get your phone in your hand. Everybody, put
LinkedIn on your phone. Open your LinkedIn app. Raise your hand when you’ve got
LinkedIn on your phones.” Make it interactive. Step by step, tell them exactly how to do
it to get in there and then connect.
Now, if
you’re not going to send somebody a message, don’t do it. Just connecting with
somebody doesn’t do you any good. At least reach out and say, “Hey, what did
you think at the event tonight?” Do something, say something, and make
that connection. This helps you remember where you met them. So, for instance,
if you copy and paste it to everyone you’re connected with and you get good
engagement right away, you’ll be able to see where you met them when you open
them up in the future.
Why Small Businesses Should Use LinkedIn
So how
can a business owner actually start increasing his sales from the comfort of
his bathrobe, over the morning coffee with a LinkedIn system that allows people
to literally sharp-shoot the best people as far as their ideal client, tracking,
how much work’s involved, and what the flow of the messages are? You create the
engagement instead of just being another person that sends you the 9-page
introduction the minute you connect to them.
What
many smaller businesses don’t have is a big budget. Same with small businesses,
say, a restaurant that’s not busy for three hours in a day, or someone who owns
a clothing store, or a hair salon. Here’s something you can do with a free LinkedIn
account. You don’t even need premium or Navigator. You do it with free and you could
target demographics.
The
great thing about LinkedIn is you can go and you can only search, say, for CEOs
in Vancouver, you can search for anybody that has a certain thing in their
description somewhere in their profile, like a title or a job description, skills—any
of these things can all be searched for in LinkedIn.
Let’s
say you’re a travel business—cruises and all. You could search for certain
areas and search for certain likes and skills. You could search for people that
are in the right demographic area like people that are most likely traveling. A
teacher maybe? They get their summers off and they’ve got the holiday time. They
probably save up for a vacation. Maybe that’s your perfect kind of client.
Be sure
to put some thought into this step, because if you target the wrong people it’s
not going to work. So, you do need to think outside the box a little bit in trying
to define what demographic of people through what LinkedIn allows you to select
(and it shows you all the things you can select from) would lead you to your
people. So, it’s a really important part of your system that doesn’t even
really get written down other than ‘go look for the kind of people you’re
looking for.’ Defining that and figuring out how to search for them is half the
battle.
Once
you’ve done that, my system is simple. You’re going to reach out to and attempt
to connect with 10 people a day. Consistency is key, and you do it the first
thing in the morning. First thing with your morning coffee or your morning
breakfast, have your computer out, your LinkedIn out, and attempt to connect
with ten people in your demographic.
We have this availability in Small Business Dream, enabling users to track it all in the software, but you can do it manually with a spreadsheet. There’s lots of ways to do it. We just happen to have a tool that makes it really efficient. In other words, we’re giving you a great system but we just think it’s better if you use our tool.
The 10-a-day Rule — and Why It’s So
Effective
I’ve
used the system for years, taught the system to people in different businesses
to be able to use it effectively, and what I found is that most people don’t
have a lot of time. So, if I can show you how to use it in just 10 minutes a
day to connect with 10 new people every day and then do the follow-up, they’ll
give that a shot. I could find 10 minutes in the morning before I head off to
work. You do need to find the time to follow up as well, so this will take up
to an hour a day, throughout the day, but at 10 a day you can handle this
follow up.
You’re going
to get some follow ups and some questions back. If you do 50, you’re going to
get a lot more questions back, but then you’re going to have even more
follow-ups. Next thing you know, you’re into eight hours every third Friday
just because that’s how things start to fall. So, spreading it out will keep it
much more consistent, easier to maintain and easier to keep up to date with.
Ten is a magic number. That means you would attempt to connect with every day, 300 people every month (that means you’re working weekends, or, just do twice as much on Friday). Out of the 300 people, only about 25% are going to accept your connection, and out of those 75 people that accept your connection, only about 25% of them are actually going to engage with you. So, only about 15 or 20 people will actually turn into a conversation. And out of that, only 25 percent will turn into a possible conversation. So, four or five, and maybe only one will end up being the customer.
Create a Sales Funnel to Boost Online
Engagement
Of
course, you can increase your odds to a degree with things like a lead magnet
where there’s a free giveaway (if it’s relevant to them), or a free call. A lot
of it will depend on what tools you have in place to create the maximum amount
of engagement. So, having a simple lead magnet funnel where you can collect
their data outside of LinkedIn and with the right giveaway or giveaways, you
might be able to increase that and create engagement a little bit more because
you’re offering help. Don’t give them something they don’t need. Send them to a
lead magnet funnel type scenario if what you had you knew could benefit them
without a cost. So, it’s not a salesy thing; it’s a true benefit.
If you go to 88ur.com/craigbook, it will take you to a sales funnel that will allow you to put in your name, your email and click a button, and you’ll be able to download my book. You’ll be able to learn the whole system step by step on how to increase your sales quite rapidly again. If you have the time and you can do 20 a day and you’re ready for the ‘snowball effects,’ you can do it faster. If you have an employee who’s underutilized, it doesn’t have to be you.
Once
you’ve actually written all of the follow ups, directions and the content that you
want to use through your follow up, you literally assign this to a personal assistant.
You can assign it to your daughter, to your son, to your friend’s daughter. It
doesn’t have to be you until things get serious. When they get serious your
assistant, or whoever is operating the controls for you, would then just reach
out and say, “Hey, you need to intervene with this person because they’re
ready to talk.” The great thing about my system is it’s not confined to
LinkedIn.
I wrote specifically for LinkedIn, but you can do the exact same system in Facebook. It’s not as easy to target and find people in your demographic without ads on Facebook (Facebook really doesn’t want you reaching out and doing stuff). But with simple ad campaigns or reaching out to your friends, it could work. So, there’s definitely ways to be able to do that.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately,
at the end of the day, the way my LinkedIn system works is not to rely on
LinkedIn. You need to pick up your phone and talk to people you need to as
quickly as possible, making a real genuine engagement and have a conversation.
You don’t want to talk for hours. Also, try to get out of LinkedIn because a
lot of people don’t have notifications on in LinkedIn. Some only check it once
every three or four days, so quickly in your process, you want to try to
capture their contact details whether it be phone number, email, etc.
Another
way to contact them outside of LinkedIn is by trying to build your list. Build
your Linkedin list into your actual money-making list. It’s essentially your
goal. Consistency is everything on LinkedIn. If you’re brand new, the magic
number to get started to get to a number of connections is 500. You’ll see in
your profile how many connections you have whether it’s under 500, and then it
goes 500 plus. You could have a thousand. That way people will connect with you
better, you’ll find your connection rate will increase the more connections you
have.
Also,
make sure that you send a custom message when you ask to connect with somebody.
Don’t use any of the LinkedIn default stuff. That’s what the lazy people do and
that’s why it doesn’t work. If you download a copy of my book, I show you some
things that I use that are really popular, that work well, to be able to
increase the engagement. If you can turn that out of the 300, increase it from
25% to just 35% accepting your friends in LinkedIn requests, to 50%, that would
be great.
I now
typically get around 75% of the people that I asked to engage and connect with
me; they accept my connection. Why? Because I have over 6,000 connections on
LinkedIn right now, and I’ve done that organically with people, not through any
system, but it’s my own system—nothing automated, one person at a time, connecting
with the right people to build my businesses.
If you’re interested in learning how to increase your sales quickly with LinkedIn, go to 88ur.com/craigbook. If you do decide you need software to help you do it more efficiently, Smallbizdream can help.
The biggest challenge facing small businesses is how they can get more customers and maximize their return on investments.
Fortunately, we can easily find ways to improve customer acquisition without having to spend a lot of money on traditional outbound marketing strategies. It only takes a little bit of creativity and trying out new ideas.
There are two main ways – offline and online. We will talk about both ways here.
Promote Your Business Offline
Everybody is online so why not try the personal touch. A lot of customers still like and require the personal touch.
Some offline customer engagements are as effective as a marketing strategy today as it was 100 years ago when the majority of businesses didn’t have a website. These include:
going to networking events
taking your business outdoors
sponsorship & giveaways
Meeting up with people in a friendly, non-selling environment like networking events increases your exposure without spending too much on paid ads. However, to be successful, you have to present your business in light of the customer’s needs, pain points and how your products and services can provide a solution to these problems.
The idea is to go and help people, and to show how your company can create value for them. It may not always lead to an immediate sale, but it can help grow your network and develop good relationships with potential buyers and customers.
Whenever possible, bring along something that reminds them about your business. It could be your business card, key holder, bunker ring, or any small gizmos you can carry along. I always carry bunker rings with me to networking events. Why? Because my potential customers will stick my bunker rings on their phones and every time they glance at their device, it will remind them of me.
Another way to help you with customer acquisition is to take your business outdoors by having your own space during special occasions or community events where people can find your company, products, or services. Talk with the organizers and make some arrangements to have your own booth set up.
Event organizers might also look for sponsors to reduce the overall cost of running the event. You can take this opportunity to have your company name or logo displayed in conspicuous areas for a few hundred dollars’ worth of donation.
Once you have talked to them and exchanged business cards, then it’s a good idea to put them into an online follow-up series so they don’t forget about you.
If you want them to get to your sales funnel, you can use Small Business Dream’s Customer Acquisition tools and have your landing page address or QR code printed on your Sales Funnel Card.
Most importantly, always make an effort to follow up with them as soon as you can.
Take Your Business Online
Promoting your business online is a sure way to improve customer acquisition using cost-effective marketing tools over the Internet. However, it’s tough to get noticed. Some of the best ways to increase customer awareness about your business include having a blog or website, a social media account, and a sales funnel.
Your blog or website can serve many uses for your business. It helps educate people about the benefits of using your product or service, provide useful information about the subject they’re looking on, and can be used for earning residual income through affiliate links, Google AdSense, etc. But most importantly, it helps maintain people’s interest and lead them closer to your goal – to get more customers.
Social media can also be used in customer acquisition, but because marketers have been using social media the wrong way, business owners have started to lose interest in it. They don’t have a system to follow up with fans and followers in a realistic way. Most of them aren’t even real, so business owners end up using auto-responders (‘robot secretaries’) the whole time. Most businesses don’t think strategically when it comes to social media but use a shotgun blast approach, hoping to catch somebody or something.
Small Business Dream is an inexpensive tool that helps business owners manage their social media contacts more efficiently with their Social Connect, and the Social Series in the Action List. Social Connect gives them the option to curate and import fans and followers to their contact list.
Since we don’t want our customer database to be stuffed with unwanted (fake, pseudonymous, or artificial) contacts, we need to screen them out of the social contact list, and leave the ones who show genuine interest to learn more about the company. This would allow sales people to work on the Action List’s Social Series more efficiently and get real results from using social media to get more customers online.
Sales funnel is a very useful tool in customer acquisition when used with offline and other online methods. With Small Business Dream, business owners can easily create their own sales funnel like a pro without having to learn HTML, CSS, or JavaScript, and use the link for their Social Series and opt-in subscriptions online. They can also use the link offline through Sales Funnel Cards, tent cards, signboards, or directly through an iPad or tablet set up to the sales funnel in-store.
Build a Customer Base to Promote Your Business
Your first customers constitute the core of your business from which you can grow more customers. Coming up with a loyalty program, customer specials, customer referrals, offering discounts, and commissions, can help accelerate your business.
Although it might cost you a little bit of profit, you’ll have greater gains in the long run as your business gains momentum. Looking at it from an angle, think of it as being a part of your marketing expenses. But instead of them going to paid advertisements, they go directly to your customers who will benefit from them. The result is a happy customer base who will talk about their experience with your company to other people, and your business becoming an instant success.
Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.
Businesses are always upgrading their strategies to increase ROI. The buyer persona epitomizes their constant efforts to stay relevant with their customers by creating an idealized customer to guide their marketing efforts.
The shift from generalized, stereotypical advertising to individualized customer engagement is one the most important milestones that changed the way companies and businesses market themselves to world.
Buyer Persona vs. Stereotype
Buyer persona is coined from the word ‘persona’, often associated with psychology and literature. When applied to business, it means an ideal customer with the most desirable traits suitable for marketing.
This ‘model customer’ serves as the basis for the company’s design, production, and marketing efforts from which they can generate income. Different industries can have several buyer personas, each having unique, individual characteristics that mirror their real-life equivalents.
A common misconception about the buyer persona is the old practice of stereotyping customers popular among traditional businesses. They would try to fit every customer into a category based on assumptions and generalizations.
The fundamental difference between a buyer persona and a stereotype is the understanding of the circumstances that revolve around the customer – his work, lifestyle, education, hobbies, expertise, expectations, buying habits, etc.
A stereotype barely scratches the surface and provides an incomplete picture of your target market, while a buyer persona goes deeper by creating a life-like representation of your ideal customers based on facts and research.
The Buyer Persona’s Role in Business
Marketing efforts gravitate on the customer’s ever-changing needs embodied by the buyer persona. Without a proper understanding of the customers, all efforts from production, marketing, and sales are irrelevant.
A well-researched buyer persona protects their investments by guiding them on what products or services – with their many variants and slight nuances – to provide their customers and how they can successfully market them across different channels.
Creating a Buyer Persona
The first step in creating an all-inclusive buyer persona is to collect every available information from customers through research, surveys and interviews .
Sources include demographic information of a particular area, CRM data, emails, social media, and Google Analytics. These data will serve as the building blocks of the ideal customer’s ‘DNA’.
Coming up with an accurate representation of the ideal costumer takes time. In some instances, it is necessary to create two or more personas if data points to more than just one type of customer.
What to Include
Business firms compile different information from various sources and creates a unified picture of their imaginary customer. The following information will help you throughout the process.
Demographic information • Age bracket • Gender • Country/Nationality • Language
Personal information • Educational attainment • Profession/Occupation • Civil Status • Income Level
Customer information • Buying History • Buying Motivation • Buying Preference • Average Spending
Specific Skills and Interests
Acquiring firsthand information can take time because it involves actual conversation with people and encouraging them to participate in surveys.
Social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter is a treasure trove when it comes to personal information, skills, and interests about your customers. Some companies collect information about their fans and followers as part of their marketing strategy.
If your company doesn’t have a Facebook or Twitter account, consider social media marketing as a way of gathering relevant information about your target market.
You can also learn about their specific interests through your landing pages and opt-in subscriptions to your weekly or monthly newsletters. These data can be acquired more easily using ‘call to action’ (CTA) links or buttons within the page or email.
When it comes to customer records of previous and current customers, nothing comes close to CRM customer data because it allows businesses to stay up-to-date with its constant supply of data from day to day transactions.
Look for the Right CRM Service to Guide You
Small Business Dream offers a suite of tools which include customer acquisition, sales funnel, and sales and marketing automation for small business owners like you.
Learn more on how Small Business Dream can help you with your marketing efforts by visiting our website at www.smallbizdream.com.
When a customer comes in to buy certain goods or use a particular service, smart companies keep track of the customer’s buying habits to guide them with decision-making and predicting customer orders and purchases.
From the standpoint of a buying customer, he may notice something different from time to time, like why a certain brand is strangely low in numbers and why other brands are taking up the space that was left out.
A lot of businesses use predictive analysis to know what customers would likely buy in the future based on the current trends, i.e. what most customers are actually buying and how frequent.
However, it’s not as simple as overstocking your shelves with merchandise just because they are frequently sold. It requires careful analysis and taking every possibility into consideration.
The Role of Customer Relationship Management in Business
Customer Relationship Management tools (CRM) came in response to the rapidly-growing business industries. Back then, we only had spreadsheets and repositories to store and analyze data.
Nowadays, we have integrated, collaborative software tailored specifically for businesses. These applications are capable of handling incredible amounts of data and performing complex calculations to provide business owners with real-time analysis of their sales and marketing strategy.
Companies like KFC and McDonalds have been employing CRM tools for quite some time . Even the government uses CRM in some ways because it provides a more realistic and practical way to address the needs of its citizens.
Using CRM to Predict the Future
Making predictions is not as simple as it sounds. We need to factor in specific details like who usually bought them, specific time of the year, how much, how often, and the list goes on.
So how do smart companies make their projections based on customer data?
Analyzing customer data
Each time a customer checks out with his loyalty card, customer data goes right into the data centers or servers for processing. Without the proper tools to analyze and interpret these data, they’re nothing more than just a useless pile of customer information. CRM transforms these data into a usable format business owners could easily understand.
Loyalty and point cards are so popular with businesses nowadays. Your wallet is probably stuffed with them. If you have a loyalty card for your grocery store then the chain store is tracking every purchase you make and putting it into their CRM.
Narrowing down potential customers and repeat customers
Some of your prospects can become your regular buyers and loyal customers over time. Such information about your customer can serve as your basis when making your projections about sales.
If a brand of soap gets sold more frequently to a certain group of customers, your CRM can provide some answers and help you understand why this trend will continue on or if it’s just a short-term success.
Maintaining contact with the customers
CRM keeps track of your customers’ buying habits, interests, preferences, lifestyle, and other relevant information about them. Some even have features that remind users to follow-up with customers in a timely manner such as Small Business Dream’s Action List.
One of the best ways to maintain good relationship with your customers is to show how much you value them . Thanking them through Facebook, Twitter, email or SMS for making your company a part of their experience can go a long way.
Understanding past and current trends
Hindsight is said to have a 20/20 vision. CRM goes further by allowing you to ‘see’ the future. Telecom industries provide a classic example of how changing trends can make or break a company.
During the heyday of telecom companies like Nokia, mobile phones are regarded mainly as communication devices. Nokia had too much focus on their product line, all the while ignoring the competition and what the customers want for their mobile phones at that time.
By the time they realized it, they were on the verge of losing the market. They were too late. The once mighty telecom giant crumbled under its own weight and disappeared from the scene. The moral of the story? Don’t ignore the trends. Keep your eyes open and find out what is it that you’re missing out on.
Customer relationship management allows businesses to cut through the noise and “see the forest for the trees.” Learn how CRM applications like Small Business Dream can make a difference for your small business.
To find out more about Small Business Dream visit our website at www.smallbizdream.com
