How to Attract and Keep Better Customers

Maintaining a solid customer base is a never ending job for a small business owner. The following points are aimed at keeping you on the right track.

Focus On The Long Term

Designate well defined periods of time on a given day to concentrate on long term strategy. Instead of worrying about where your business needs to be next week, envision instead where you need to be next year. Create an ideal “dream” scenario for your business, everything from what kind of clients you want to have to how much money you want to make. During this exercise, do not worry about what your competitors are doing and focus on your own business goals. Only concern yourself on how to give as much value to your clients as possible. This exercise is not a joke. Dreaming is not just dreaming. It is visualizing your success. This type of visualization exercise will serve as an important guide post and will not just start increasing the size of your business, but also the adaptability of your business as well.

Market Your Company As Well As Your Products

This is an important factor that many companies overlook. Selling a great product is one thing but you should also very carefully consider that good PR and marketing can help to spread positive awareness about your company. This in turn will create the fertile soil needed for new business leads. Perhaps you might want to invest in putting a few ads in some related and appropriate trade publications. A great public relations tactic can be to participate in charities such as Habitat for Humanity or cancer research fundraisers. This type of charity PR also has personal and spiritual fringe benefits that do not need to be elaborated on.

Keep Pace with Changes in Your Industry

It’s critical to recognize that no industry stays the same and neither should your business. Advances in technology and changing economic conditions are all powerful drivers for change in every industry. Keep your finger on the pulse of your clients by reading business journals, going to trade shows, and subscribing to subject relevant RSS feeds that report on the latest developments. Keep in mind that keeping pace with your industry involves doing your homework on not just your own industry but on your client’s industry as well.

Remember Your Customers at Holiday Time

This folksy bit of advice relates back to the previous marketing PR point. Do not underestimate the power of having personalized Christmas cards and or Christmas party invitations. Do not be afraid to get creative and be unique. A colleague of mine once sent out personalized , self inking rubber stamps to his clients. Each rubber stamp featured the name of the business it was addressed to. My colleague even went through the trouble of having each company’s logo put on each stamp. So in this case the client did not just receive a Christmas card, but a highly functional and fun “stocking stuffer” in the form of a personalized, self inking business stamp. The stamps ended up being so popular that, after running some analytics, I am convinced it boosted the businesses bottom line by almost ten percent.