Do you have a database of your past, current and prospective customers? Are you recording, monitoring and analysing your customer database? Building a database and studying and reviewing your customers’ records and business relationship with you is one marketing strategy that is not well-utilised.

Do you know who your customers are? Do you have a record of what products or services they regularly purchase? When was their last purchase? What are the purchases they made?  What is the frequency of their purchase? Can you tell whether you’re dealing with a current or past customer? 

Answering the questions above can give you vital information that can boost your business to heights never dreamt of. 

Consider your prospective customers. Have you thought about developing a customer profile that captures your best customers? Know who to target and market your products or services and direct your marketing efforts that way. List them down and plan out a strategy on reaching out to them on a regular basis. 

Know your customers from the past, your current customer and your prospective customer in the future. By knowing exactly whom you have dealt with in the past, who you currently deal with, and who you would like to deal with in the future can dramatically change your business, your profits and your bottom line. 

If you’re not currently using a database to keep track of these and other information of your customers, it’s not too late to start building one. This database can be the gateway to your exponential profits! 

Targeting your marketing efforts to the right people can make or break your entire advertising or marketing campaign. And if you’re a small business, you can’t afford to have that happen too many times. It’ll drive you right out of business! 

Make sure to stay in touch with your past, current and prospective customers, this is one of the best marketing strategies you can do. Do some simple getting-in-touch acts such as:

• Sending greeting cards on special occasions or holidays
• Sending a note long time customers
• Sending a questionnaire or survey
• Inviting customers to launches and promos
• Getting customer feedbacks and letting them know their opinion counts
• Sending newsletters and updates

Do more than the usual to make your customers feel important. Make your current customers feel special, make your past customers feel missed, and make your prospective customers feel wanted.

Build your database and use it to improve customer relationship and increase your sales.

What is your business? Are you an expert in your line of business? Or if not, do you have someone that is an expert in your line of business?

Doing what you do best in your business means offering the best quality that you can offer, whether it’s a product or a service. You might wonder how doing your best in your business can be one of your best marketing strategies… here’s how it works: when people (or customers) experience the ‘best’ of what you have to offer, they will be satisfied enough to do the following:

• Customers will come back for more. This is called customer retention or repeat customer. This is where you will build your business relationship to the next level to keep loyal customers.
• Customers will not consider going to your competition. This is your captured market. There will be businesses out there like yours but these customers make a conscious decision to keep on going to you for your business.
• Customers will talk about how satisfied they are with you. This is free advertising for you. Isn’t this great? Your customer will do the talking for you, about how excellent your product or service is.
• Customers will endorse you to others who are also interested in your business. When asked about a product or service like your business, your customers will have you top of mind, and they will endorse or recommend you outright.
• And it goes on and on… the cycle is endless…

Having said that, now take a hard look at your business and see how you are at doing… Here are a some questions you might want to ask yourself to see where you are:

• Do I have the best quality product or service in what I offer?
• Do I continuously look for opportunities to improve it?
• Are my customers getting the best benefit from my products or services?
• Am I communicating well to my customers? Do I understand their needs – Am I giving value-added service to my customers, beyond what I am already offering them?
• Do my customers look to me for advice and trust my suggestions?
• If I were not the owner, would I buy my products or services? Would I recommend it to friends & relatives?

If you pass this self-examination with flying colors, then you are on your way to exercising one of your best marketing strategies – doing what you do best.

Failure To Let Your Prospects And Customers Know The Unique Benefits They Get From Doing Business With You And Not Your Competitors.

You need a Unique Competitive Advantage, or UCA (or USP). It’s the thing, the reason, the advantage that will make it not only worthwhile but beneficial and advantageous… even desirable for others to do business with you.

Here’s a simple exercise you can do to come up with your UCA:

1. Make a list. Get a piece of paper and write down every advantage you can think of why someone should do business with you. Make a big list of customer satisfaction. Don’t worry about whether or not your competitors offer the same advantages at this stage. Just get the points down on paper. Think in terms of how your business might fit in the following categories:

A. The name of your business.Does it say what you do, and position you in such a way that there can be no mistake? Can there be any doubt what kind of business “Modern Man’s Hair Style” is.  Can you use your business name as an advantage?

B. Exclusive niche or target market.Are you trying to be all things to all people? Or do you occupy and dominate (or have the potential to dominate) a certain market? The tighter a group you can cater to the more control you’ll have and the more opportunity you can have to dominate and control it.

C. Expertise.Do you have some type of specialised understanding of a particular market so you can become a recognised expert? If you do, people will look to you for help and expertise they can’t get elsewhere and you’ll have a big advantage.

D. Guarantee.A customer guarantee can be used as a massive unique competitive advantage. Think of the big stores that offer guarantees. It works for them to get customer satisfaction and it will work for you too!

E. Market positioning. How are you seen in your market? How do you stack up against the competition? What’s your market’s perception of you versus other competing businesses? Domino’s didn’t go head to head with other pizza shops trying to make a better pizza – they went after quick, in-home delivery and completely dominated the market.

F. Price. How do your prices compare to your competitors? Do you have the lowest prices for your products, and operate as a “discount” operation? Or, do you take a higher price-point position and operate at a more “exclusive” level? Either can be an advantage depending on how you position your business and the products and services you sell around it.

These are just a few of the areas you may want to consider as your unique competitive advantage. There are many more, but this will get your thinking started.

Take the time to develop your own unique competitive advantage and the results will be more leads, more prospects, more customer satisfaction, more sales and more revenue, and you will grow your business quickly.

Failure To Let Your Prospects And Customers Know The Unique Benefits They Get From Doing Business With You And Not Your Competitors.

“Why should I do business with you, instead of all the other options I have?”is a question that goes through your prospect’s minds before they choose to do business with you, and through each of your customer’s minds before they return to buy from you again.

And, it’s a question you must take the time to formulate an answer to. Without an answer, you become like every other business who sells the same products or services. It doesn’t matter what is being offered, your prospects and customers can go almost anywhere and find the exact same (or very similar) products or services offered for the same price, or perhaps for even less money than what you charge.

Think about your own situation. Why do you do shop at the same stores or eat at the same restaurants over and over? It may not be one single thing that influences you, but rather a combination of several factors. It’s likely the businesses you continue to support give you something special. Something unique. Something you just can’t get anywhere else. It’s that uniqueness that keeps you coming back over and over again and which build customer loyalty and customer retention.

If you want people to do business with you rather than your competition Customer retention , it’s imperative you have something to offer that your competition doesn’t have. Preferably something your competition can’t offer that sets you and your products or services apart from everyone else in your type of business.

That’s what’s known as your Unique Competitive Advantage, or UCA often referred to as a “USP” (Unique Selling Proposition),

No matter what you choose to use as your unique factor, it’s one of the most critical, yet most often overlooked marketing tools in business today.

Without a clearly defined and unique factor that differentiates you or sets you apart from everyone else who offers the same (or similar) products or services with Customer retention, your business will be no different than any other your clients or prospects will encounter, and there will be no reason for them to do business with you rather than your competitors, other than price. And the last thing you want in business is to only exist because you have the lowest price.

Marketing Is THE Major Key To Success In Your Business!

Sadly most people who start a business are not aware of some of the most important factors that contribute to, and ensure their success. It’s not easy to grow your business, and have high customer satisfaction.

Despite what many think, designing, creating, building, and growing a successful and profitable business that holds a dominant position in the market doesn’t only require hard work, frustration, and enormous costs.

We all know there’s more competition than ever before, in nearly every industry and profession you care to name. Not just from local bricks and mortar type business, but increasingly from web based or international operations.

However, there is also more opportunity to grow your business, especially for business owners who understand a few basic and fundamental concepts. It does not matter what your business, there are just a handful of things you need to know to gain a competitive advantage in your marketplace and have high customer satisfaction.

And if you master just three of these most important things, you’ll be able to write your ticket to success.

Almost every day, in the greatest and most prosperous times the world has ever known, a huge number of businesses close their doors, never to do business again. Many reasons or excuses are tabled but bottom line is for a business to even be a business, it has to have more customer satisfaction to exchange their money for your products and services.

You can have all the funding in the world, you can have great management skills, and you can even have a tremendous entrepreneurial mind, but unless and until you have someone to purchase your products and services in sufficient numbers, you’ll never have a successful business,  and you’ll only generate an average income, at best.