A little strategizing with your business planning could actually help you manage the new business startups. The key reason that I stress new business startups is such that you could start everything new and afresh but if you already have an existing business up, you could make the necessary adjustments to grow it effectively. Here are some of the key timeless small business marketing strategies that never fail to work.

What Is Your Key USP? – Unique Selling Proposition, That Is…

Brand your product into that perception niche that you wish to dominate you’re your authentic Unique Selling Proposition. Stand out from the mundane, shine bright with your USP, make and fulfil your promise to customers. If your USP is 1 hour delivery time within a 40 mile radius, then you should honour that promise, else your reputation will go down the drain. If your promise is to ensure that children who attend your tutoring classes will achieve at least one “A” grade for one subject within three months, you jolly well make sure that the children achieve what you promise the parents.

Customer Retention vs Customer Acquisition – Which Should You Choose?

Which is a cheaper option, customer retention or customer acquisition? The answer is obvious of course, it is Customer retention. Did you know that it costs about six times more to attract a new customer as it would to keep and milk an existing one? And research has shown that the success probability of selling to a new customer is 1 out of 16 as compared to that of 2.2 when selling to existing customers.

Yes, you would have to spend 6 times more money for new customer acquisition, money which could literally be spent on growing and building your existing customer base as well as forging more lucrative joint ventures with complimentary business partnerships. Of course with new business startups, you will surely need to spend on customer acquisition strategies in order to grow your customer list. The key to customer retention is relationship building with them to establish trust and credibility.

Cross-selling and Up-selling – How and When Should You Do It?

Cross selling and Upselling have become very successful as small business marketing strategies these days. Of course for new business startups you will need to spend time growing your customer lists, build bonding rapport with them before you start to sell to them. Indeed, it might be easier to cross sell to existing clientele in this environment of economic downturn as existing customers are already familiar with you and more trust has been built.

That said however, you should be very sure that you are not overtly pushy with your upsells as upsells mean selling more expensive items to your list. You need to know your clientele profiles sufficiently well in order to achieve your selling objectives, yet keep them loyal at the same time. From a needs perspective, customers must have a compelling need or want for your product to buy it. And your task is to invoke that desire to possess the product by expounding on the USP which meets their needs.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series of New Business Startups – Timeless Small Business Marketing Strategies That Always Work. Yes, starting your own small business may not be as difficult as you are led to believe.

Check out Small Business Marketing Strategies for more information here.

Lack of Focus Can Kill Your Business Eventually

While it is great to be diversifying your business into alternative markets, especially in these times of opportunities when everyone is strapped of money and buying a new product line or new business is comparatively less expensive than a couple of years back, overleveraging and over-diversifying will have dire consequence to your business. You might face financial, manpower as well as operational constraints which are common signs of over-diversification.

Flexible Strategies For Easy Adaptability

For every business, you should have a vision and mission in mind. They are there to provide you and your employees with the end in mind and help you move toward the objectives with clarity. While the vision often cast in stone, your small business marketing strategies should be easily adapted to the situation as changes according to the market forces. This is also why I always advice my clients that they should review their business plans and marketing plans on an annual basis.

Run Market Tests To Help You Make The Right Business Decisions

Even with the right business and marketing approach, you can run into demand and supply issues when starting your own small business. Hence, the advice is to produce less at the beginning, select one or a few channels to distribution your product and always run market tests. Repeat the tests if you have multiple market segments. Collect the market data, analyse before you decide to scale up the production. For a new start-up producing your own new products, they are often at the introductory stage whereby more than 65% of products die away.

Perfect The Art Of Delegation

Learn to empower your employees and let them run the show, if your set-up is not a one-man-show. Begin delegating as much as possible and this will accord you more time, energy and resource to concentrate on strategising your business from a top down perspective. This is the number one key criteria of any successful and efficient entrepreneur.

For more information on Starting Your Own Small Business? Ignore These Key Tips At Your Own Peril, check out part 1 here.

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In the realm of small business, there are unspoken rules that form an invisible framework, one that you will function within which you will thrive if you thread with caution and perseverance, cleverly working around financial as well as operational constraints.

Below are some key action tips you should adopt when starting your own small business.

Does Your Product Solve A Real Problem?

Too many products out there in the marketing nowadays are created with hope that they will sell without doing proper demand and supply market needs analysis. In fact, most of them are created within the confines of the business offices behind closed doors where countless so-called product/market development managers simply conjure up the needs based on their own perception. The simple and better approach is to ask the man in the streets via face to face as well as online surveys and focus groups to ascertain real needs so that you can produce REAL products that help solve REAL problems. This is doing justice to your consumers as well as your business.

No or Little Competition May Not Indicate A Lucrative Business

Do not rush to jump onto the bandwagon when you are investing into new business. Evaluating your potential competition should be key to your decision-making. Never assume that since there is little competition, the business will be lucrative. In fact, check out the potential demand using the afore-mentioned survey methods and you might just realised that there is just not enough demand or real problems which warrants a product or business.

Branding Vs The Me-Too Mentality

How your brand stands up to the perception of value and quality depends greatly on how you position your company, brands, and of course, your products. And it all starts at the onset with the conception of your business plan and marketing plan. If you adopt a differentiation approach to your products, then steer clear from the me-too mindset else your branding might eventually lose its identity.

Ensure that your branding is unique with the right unique selling points targeted at the right market segments. Remember that in order to achieve your brand positioning, your unique selling points must have derived from the product’s sustainable competitive advantage. And do take note that service support can make or break the market reputation of a business.

Know Your Numbers

To embark upon any project at all, you need money, plain and simple. Any business will have an operating budget, whether it is a few hundred dollars for a new start-up or a few million dollars for huge businesses. Ensure that you manage the finances astutely, and plough back your profits to enhance your cash flow for expansion purposes. If you in dire need of cash to fund a potentially lucrative venture, you may wish to check out for grants or financing support from the related institutions.

Stay tuned for part 2 of this series of Starting Your Own Small Business. For other business information, check out customer retention vs customer acquisition, business plans, and small business marketing strategies.

Today in part 2 of Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies, we focus on sales tactics to foster growth in your business. The key to keeping great customer retention is to keep regular contact with your clientele and prospects via email, phone call and even twitter. Below are some tips for your reference.

Support Claims with Authentic Research and Real Examples

Making unsupported claims about your product is the fastest way to drive away your customers. You should back up your claims with research, case studies and real examples to highlight the USP or unique selling points of your products. Real examples are the most convincing testimonials to enhance sales.

Real Customer Testimonials As a Sale Lead Generation Tactic

Real Customer Testimonials is a very important tactic to lead generate for new sales. The credibility is much higher when other real customers speaks well of your product and allow you to quote them in your sales and publicity materials. Compared to making your own products claims, this is indeed more credible and convincing to the potential buyers, especially when they are return buyers who are familiar with your company and your customers. Work into your public relations and after sales feedback process to set up an easy process to generate testimonials. For every satisfied customer, request a testimonial for future use. Most will be willing to provide you with the information, especially when your public relations officer would be using them in your newsletter and giving your customers free publicity exposure. Get customers’ permission to use the testimonials in your small business marketing strategies and tactics like corporate website, sales brochures and direct mailers, email etc.

Dare To Ask … For Referrals, That Is

If you trust the company you keep and trust the customers you have, there should be no problem in asking for referrals from your existing customers. Again, work out a lead generation process to ask for referrals, preferably at the end of the sales process or together with the request for testimonials. You would be surprised how simply by asking, you will be rewarded handsomely financially.

100% Guaranteed or Your Money Back

The above phrase looks very familiar to most of us. But read it again, this time from the perspective of your customer – the buyer. Reading it from this whole new standpoint would give the phrase a whole new meaning too. Providing a money back refund guarantee is the best vouch for quality and helps to reduce buyer’s remorse, especially when you are selling high ticketed items. The key to good customer relationship is to ensure that you process refunds fast and hassle free, Remember that you build trust by standing by your words and keeping a good reputation within the industry and amongst your customers are critical to building long term relationships.

If you brainstorm deeper, you will be able to innovate even more into Small Business Marketing Strategies for customer retention. What is more critical is the implementation and follow through of your promise to deliver, exceed customer expectations, and WOW them into a long term business relationship.

As Trust is the Foundation and key to any sustaining relationship between two parties, and this is ever so true with business relationships. With trust comes confidence in your product and services, thereby meaning that you are more inclined to generate more future revenue from them over the long term. Below are the Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies and tips on building trust for great long term customer relationships

Position Yourself and Your Business As The Must Have Resource

Information, be it generic or specific to your products and services can be critical to the final buying decision of the customer. Provide information which are accurate, timely and useful to your clients. For the less internet savvy clients, you may wish to set up a monthly newsletter to be sent to all by snail mail.

Whenever possible, include a blog section to your company and product websites and provide constant updates and useful information to clients. Email them whenever you have fresh content that you think they might be interested in. You can provide free physical or online training on how to use your products and services or conduct webinars.

Adopt A High Touch Strategy

Content can come in the form of articles, video or audio. When you write articles and publish them on your website, article directories as well as complementing product websites, you are establishing yourself as an expert who knows about the subject in depth and will to share pertinent information thereby helping you to build trust and loyalty.

Keeping constantly at the top of mind is very important to your business. Successful businesses often adopt a high touch strategy which embraces the concept of regular and consistent contact with potential and existing customers to facilitate interest and high mindshare. Your tools of communication include email, snail mail, phone, newsletters etc. You can even do surveys, polls, online or paper based focus groups to generate feedback for product and service enhancements.

To build trust and long term relationships with customers literally means that you whole heartedly avail yourself and your business to their needs, being accessible at most times and always listening to feedback for product and service improvements. This is essentially one of the key success factors of Customer Retention Small Business Marketing Strategies.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series.

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In this looming economic downturn, you would think that there is little you could do with your existing client base. Well think again. It is all about understanding your clients’ needs and meeting them exceeding their expectations. You have been in business for a while now with a list of existing, potential and dormant clients. What can you do to further the potential revenue from the list? Yes, you merge, purge and keep selling to your repeats.

Customer Retention vs Customer Acquisition

The cost of customer acquisition versus customer retention could reach as high as 700%, according to a report by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company as below:

• Acquiring a new customer can cost 6 to 7 times more than retaining an existing customer
• Over a 5 year period customer attrition rates could reach as high as 50% if databases are left dormant
• Businesses which boosted customer retention rates by as little as 5% saw increases in their profits ranging from 5% to a whopping 95%.

Regardless of whether your business nature is B2C or B2B, there are critical steps which you must execute whenever you run your direct marketing campaigns. This applies for both online and offline direct marketing campaigns. I shall skip the basics and we shall proceed to delve deeper into your databases.

Repeat Buyers – Make Them Sticky for Life

What at Repeat Buyers? They are your loyal customers who continue to use your services by virtue of the fact that you provide a specific product or service which they need, they are used to and that which is not available elsewhere. You may have exceed their expectations by a superior product or service, over delivered on your product value proposition or provided additional value add to them in a special way. You might also have given them privilege pricing which is unmatched elsewhere. Or your delievery channels are good match for their needs. In all aspects, you must have impressed your repeat clients well to keep them coming back for more. And there are ways you could further capitalize on them.

These repeat customers are what you might deem as Cash Cows as in the BCG Matrix, which require little maintenance cost, and consistently repeat revenue over time. You need to analyze the greatest “hook” your product or service have on them, which could be anything from the above stated.

Milk The Cash Cows, Build Relationships, Help Them To Help You

“Milk” them well by continuing to delivering your services over and above expectations. You may launch a special marketing campaign specific for loyal customers and package your most popular offerings using bundled pricing.

For B2C businesses, consider organizing “Loyalty Rewards Nights” and have them invite their friends and families, or have a quarterly “Bring a Buddy” Special Seminar. For B2B businesses, organize Business Partner’s Nite where business partners bring along their extended business associates for networking purposes or Golf Charity Outing for fostering relationships.

How ever your approach, you need to keep building relationships with this segment and provide them with genuine help in support of furthering Their business objectives. Essentially, you need to help them to help you grow your business. This way, good word-of-mouth & “testimonial” will bring you much more sustaining revenue over time.

Why Did You Stop Buying? – Reviving Your Dormant Customers

As for the Dormant Customers who have been one time buyers, run a “Survey Gift Pack” and ask them why they have not bought from you again. This is the customer segment which could well turn into your Cash Cows if you only listened to them. You might be surprised to find what they have to say about your product or service. Keep an open mind and take criticism constructively. Past experience is that further product development and refinement arise from customer feedback giving rise to new lease of life to the product life cycle.

Check out more good reads, visit Product Life Cycle Rejuvenation