Do Customers Know Your Microbusiness? Are You Sure?
by Jason Keith: Trent Hamm recently penned a wonderful piece on OpenForum that
highlighted a real life story about a small restaurant in his hometown. While the outcome wasn’t uplifting, the lessons learned from the story are vital. And it’s a story that’s recounted all too often amongst micro business owners. Essentially Hamm explains how a local sandwich shop his wife wandered into one day had to close just three weeks later. The reason? No one in town knew about the business, even though they thought people did.
Now, we’ve highlighted how important marketing is for micro businesses is in the past, but this story highlights a more important topic: why it’s paramount that your local community knows you, and CONTINUES to know you. We’ve found that the typical microbusiness spends on average $500 on marketing during the year. But where those marketing dollars actually go is vital to your success.
As Hamm points out, a simple flyer around town would have done wonders for this business, but I think it goes beyond that. I would encourage micro businesses to focus only on customers within their town with their marketing efforts to start, build up a customer base and expand from there. But the lesson is, never forget about those first customers that came in the door. You can never assume they remember you, they have to be encouraged to remember you. Marketing is about consistent touchpoints, so making the most out of that small budget is vital.
A small buy loyal customer base can sustain your business. In fact, we’ve found that our average micro business customer typically has less than 60 customers of their own, on average. And 45% have 20 or fewer regular customers. So make sure they are the happy ones, and if you can expand from there, great.
What have you done to ensure prospects in your town know about your micro business? Should you be doing more?
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- Local Small Business Administration’s Untried Business Resources
