It’s easy to drum up excuses on this one. You don’t have time, your customers aren’t on the Internet, you are a referral driven business, you have one channel that’s been working for years, etc. truth is you are leaving business on the table and your brand is suffering.
BE FINDABLE
People deserve to know if your business is right for them.
Your business should be telling its story early, often, everywhere in every way.
To focus those efforts in the right places where your potential customers will see it, you need to understand the path they take to find you. This is what is typically known as the customer journey. Big brands spend a lot of time and money researching their customers to mine these exact insights.
And, at this point, you’ll often hear the marketing experts start to dive deep into the importance developing target personas, which is the ad industries fancy way to boil lots of data down to simple fake examples of people that may shop at your store. This is simply not a reality for a small business.
(Honestly, after working 17+ years at ad agencies, I can’t say it’s worth the time, effort, and investment. Half the time, it’s a convenient story used to prop up ideas that they already came up with on their own outside of the research. I’ll caveat that this may not be the case for everyone, but I’ve seen brilliant ideas come from many places that had nothing to do with this type of research.)
In my opinion, you are better off spending that time talking to your customers, your staff, your business partners, and any outside opinions of people who’s opinions you value. And maybe throw a marketing consultant in there for good measure. But have those people go off on their own and generate ideas and then come back together to generate a list. And I bet you’ll find that you know just as much about your customers as anybody. And that’s the key to unlocking the consumer journey.
Now let’s talk marketing activity.
There are so many free and low-cost places to start telling your brand story that are often overlooked.
There are search listings like Google, business listings for specific industries, review companies like Yelp, social media, your website, and anywhere content is shared for your business. Start by brainstorming all the possible places a customer would possibly go to find a product or service like yours.
Especially if you have just a few locations and rely on foot traffic, think as local as you can with your marketing.
What are the businesses in your neighborhood that you can partner with. Where do the people that you care about spend their time? Are there any local reporters, influencers, or yelpers that you could reach out to? Can you join any local business organizations?
I cannot emphasize this enough. If you are a local business, your biggest advantage is being able to chase down leads based on proximity.
You can network locally, pay less money by advertising in hyper local media, get local referrals and word-of-mouth, etc. The bigger companies must take broader approaches while you can build a more genuine relationship with your local community.
BE RELEVANT
Telling your story is easier if you can tap into communities that share similar values to you or that are more aligned with your service or product.
For example,
If you are a restaurant looking for an accountant, you may connect with an accountant who specializes in restaurants and knows your specific accounting issues. And then you can find ways to connect with that community by creating content or experiences that put you in front of them as an expert in that field.
Sure, it would be nice to know all the customer demographics, psychographics, behaviors, lifestyle choices, media habits, etc. That would be amazing! But let me reemphasize the point that you just need to be thoughtful about who your current customers are, what they have in common, and why they chose you.
The good news is that you can just ask them about themselves in real time. Talking to your actual customers will tell you more than any survey ever could.
If you want to take care of your brand image, it’s simple; be findable everywhere, tell your story, make your story relevant to each customer, listen to the customer, and then listen to the customer some more.
Remember, you don’t get to dictate your brand image. Your customer decides your brand image based on all their experiences with you over time.
So, do everything you can to make sure the image they have in their mind matches the brand truth you set out with.
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