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For Small Businesses: Search or Referral?

January 31, 2016 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

Take a good look at your business. Where do you get your customers?

Maybe, they find you. They’re already looking for the product you make or the service you offer. They look it up online, check out your website, and give you a call.

If your customers find you, you want to be easily found. So, you want to work on getting good reviews on Yelp and Craigslist. And you should optimize your website to show up high on the list when potential customers Google you.

But maybe, they get introduced. Your best customers often come through referrals from other satisfied customers!

What can you do to ensure great referrals? It’s not search engine optimization. (They’ve been introduced, so they already know your name!)

  1. Give great customer service.
  2. Stay in touch with customers after they buy (through email, blogging, and social media).
  3. Continue teaching them how they can solve their problems.
  4. Ask for referrals. (Surprisingly easy to forget!)
  5. Use your website to show new customers how you can help them. Remember, it’s not about you, it’s about them!

You need to decide: do I want to be found, or do I want to be introduced? Then, put your marketing budget there.

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Beyond Your Logo, by Elaine Fogel: a review

January 7, 2016 by Dennis Fischman 1 Comment

Elaine FogelYou can’t turn over a rock these days without finding someone talking about “branding.” Most of them make it a mystery. In Beyond Your Logo: 7 Brand Ideas That Matter Most For Small Business Success, Elaine Fogel makes it simple.

If you are just starting out, this book will help you organize your business so that your every move says something about you that your customers like. It’s not just your marketing. Customer service, personnel practices, business ethics and small business social responsibility, and communications strategy all add up to the total picture your customers have of you. Do you want loyal customers? Elaine shows you just how to win their loyalty.

If your business is already a going concern, you should still read this book–for the helpful reminders and for the exhaustive lists of actions you can take to improve. Open the book to any page and you’ll find tips like these:

  • 9 steps toward managing customer complaints
  • 38 specialties within marketing and branding
  • 20 questions you can ask customers and employees to gain insight into how well your business is doing

Nonprofit organizations can also learn from this book. By remembering that your “customers” include both your funders and your clients, you can translate Elaine’s advice into your own terms and use it for your work. (You will find that the book already defines a lot of the jargon for you: all you have to do is ask yourself, “How would I say that in nonprofit?”)

Canadian readers will benefit from Elaine’s bi-national identity. She makes sure to tell you when something applies in the U.S. but not in Canada, and vice versa.

If there is one weakness to the book, it’s that it relies too much on definitions, statistics, and list, and it doesn’t tell enough stories. I loved reading about the dairy farmers, Dane and Travis Boersma, who started Dutch Bros. Coffee. Reading their creed, I understood much better what it means to be customer-centric. I could wish for more moments like that in the book.

Overall, however, I would recommend this book to small business owners and managers of community-based organizations. And after you read the book, go to Elaine Fogel’s blog for more nuts-and-bolts advice, every week.

 

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How to Lose Even Your Fanatical Followers

December 17, 2015 by Dennis Fischman Leave a Comment

unfollowYou would have to say that my wife, Rona Fischman, is a Dan Fogelberg fanatic.

When I met her in 1986, she had all of his albums on cassette. Once she got a CD player, she replaced those cassettes with CD’s. then she put them on her iPod. And when the man died, in December 2007, it ruined her New Year.

But Rona is thinking seriously about un-following the Dan Fogelberg page on Facebook. Why?

Simple: it’s doing too much selling.

The Dan Fogelberg page is pushing Rona to check out the website, to buy a Christmas album on Amazon, to go to Peoria for a benefit concert.

It’s too much for Rona. And she’s a diehard fan. (Let’s face it, who else would follow a dead songwriter on Facebook in the first place?)

My advice to the Dan Fogelberg page is also my advice to your nonprofit. Give first. Give again. Give some more. Share things that your followers will value seven, eight, or nine times. Then if you must sell, sell. If you must ask, ask. But rarely.

People come to Facebook to spend time with their friends. If you want them to consider you a friend, give, don’t sell.

Here’s a gift from Dan Fogelberg to all of us. Enjoy the turning of the year!

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