10 Ways to Get New Small Business Customers - Part 2
Calling Card
Wherever you go you should always leave your mark be that Monday morning or Sunday afternoon. Always have a business card to hand, or a brochure if necessary.
If you deal with email make sure your signature makes it very clear what you do and where you can be contacted don't worry about overkill. A letterhead is a must, and so is a compliment slip for attaching any number of items.
This is not for the faint hearted or highly strung! Learning to accept constant rejection is an ability far beyond most of us. So, I suggest paying someone else to do it either in-house by a trained employee, or out sourced to a marketing agency. If you have a product and business that can pay £20 - 30 a lead, resulting in ten leads for £200 - £300 you should make a good return on a product costing £800, and further sales will not incur this cost.
Likewise a product costing £400 would not be viable unless you used an in-house employee who also doubles as an office worker the dual role is also a necessity as eight hours a day telesales will result in one less employee working for you!
We seem to have forgotten that newsletters did not derive from the Internet, they were always here. Similar to a mail shot, however, a newsletter is about informing and not selling (well not quite so openly).
Few of us would welcome a newsletter that was designed to get sales, but knowledgeable news is received with interest. I am only too aware that the readers of our newsletter want interesting and relevant knowledge and not information on our products.
Compiling a monthly one page newsletter that you post or email is fairly easy once you get used to the format and content. You would not sit down at the end of a month and think about what to write, you collect information over the entire month you may find you have too much information and that half of next months newsletter is in hand. Look about you for your initial list of mail outs: local papers, directories in library, names from friends, friends of friends, TV, Internet, endless names...
A newsletter says that you are an expert, someone who has an opinion, that you are approachable, that you have answers, that you always strive to find a better way for yourself and your readers - this is why good newsletters reach far and wide, and hopefully repay your time and resource with sales (now I can't drop the hint any more than that :))
They say that buyers have to see an advert 11 times in the paper media, with that reducing to 7 on the Internet, with specialist magazines/journals somewhere in between. This means that most small business owners immediately look at cost not surprisingly! At best, a reasonable advert in a monthly glossy would cost £400 , with an annual cost of about £4,000 after a discount.
As readers want to buy services/products from brand names, the least they expect is to be familiar with your advert. If you are looking at testing in a glossy the minimum period must be three inserts, unless you have a business that sells brand named products and your advert offers great savings, performance etc. Utilizing the notes in 'The Internet' section (below) is an answer to the question of affordability and a way of showing added value in your partnerships.
The Internet
It could be argued that the Internet does not belong in this list as it is time consuming and costly to have even a small degree of success. That said, the Internet can still be a generator of customers (and not a fancy brochure) if using Network Groups with the intent on pushing a number of businesses of mutual and relevant added benefit, and of course sharing the building and marketing costs. An example a plumber, an electrician, a gas fitter and a general builder could create a regional web site that is geared to these four services.
Further, whoever has the greatest share of business can have, pro rata, the biggest share of the expense, as is only fair. The Internet has more opportunities for small business than we currently see and those that have the drive and desire to create a business presence will succeed.
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