Small Business Marketing

Small business marketing methods in Birmingham change daily so how does a local business work out what they should be doing?

Does Yellow Pages still work in Birmingham?

For some demographic businesses, it still delivers results!

Everyone knows that Yellow Pages continues to reduce in size.  For many small businesses this was devastating as they didn’t know of any other way to market their goods or services.

Thesedays small local business owners, whose main role in life is to control the business, find themselves in a confusing state as they are continually bombarded with sales people who will:

• Get them ranked on page one of Google
• Produce amazing results and leads using Google Adwords
• Have their office produce an amazing website and video at hugely discounted prices that will have customers calling daily
• Optimise a Facebook Fan page but all your clients are on Facebook and social media is the traffic source

And you wonder why local business owners are so frustrated and perplexed!

In spite all of this what remains is the fact that whilst technology evolves at an incredible rate, the process of marketing remains the same.

What am I on about?

Business Marketing in Birmingham – What Is Local Marketing?

Small local businesses simply don’t understand what marketing is and definitely underestimate the profit to be made from their own database.

Let me expand on this point.

The role of marketing is getting potential clients to know, like and trust you so that when they are ready to commit they choose your products or services.

They choose you because they initially made contact via your website, Facebook, Twitter , an online directory, etc. (the various paths to your door) and after they made that opening contact you stayed in contact using emails or Facebook posts and all the other ways you can stay in touch.

Perhaps you could think of it like this.

Not everyone who walks into a shop is going to buy that day. Perhaps they are window shopping.

It is at this time that you start the marketing process and build the know, like and trust factor.

What is fantastic about marketing online is that you can build the know, like and trust factor on auto-pilot when you have collated the potential customers email address or induced them to ‘LIKE’ your Facebook fan page.

Understand that if businesses put in the effort to put systems into place the path of prospect to buying customer becomes easy.

Businesses Marketing – Small Businesses and Simple Database

What is really sad is that the majority of business owners in Birmingham will not have a ‘back end’ system in place.

Your ‘back end ‘ is the most profitable part of any business and applies to every single business.

’Back end’ … What am I on about?

The back end system to which I refer is your customer contact database and the automated system you build into your business to continually market to these red hot customers.

Now this may sound simple and ‘I knew that’! But if that’s true, why is it so many businesses treat existing clients so poorly?

Think about this.

You work hard to get 500 visitors to your website.

50 sign up to receive your email, newsletter or whatever.

After all of this 1 out of the original 500 prospects buys and becomes a new client.

Then you try to drive the next 500 people to your website!

Hold on guys … this person who just purchased has shown they know, like and trust you but you now ignore them looking for fresh customers.

The only reason local business owners treat customers this way is because of a lack of a system!

Take a look at this typical business and how easy it would be to implement a system.

A plumber is called out to an emergency call, a leak, a boiler breakdown, anything. Once he has completed the work the plumber points out to the customer that they can save 25% of today’s call out cost if they join his fantastic value for money monthly maintenance contract.

Delighted with his work today they take up the offer and he now has a new monthly paying client.

Their personal information are added to his database and the system he has set up automatically sends out an email 1 week later to the new clients asking if they would leave a testimonial on his Google Places listing, or Qype, Yell, Free Index. So he now starts building up real testimonials, automatically.

His database system automatically sends out an email in May with a special offer to existing clients who want an external tap fitting.

You get the picture?

Build a back end and the money takes care of itself.

As a local business, marketing to prospects in Birmingham, what are you doing to maximize your profits from people who have already indicated they know, like and trust you?

Small Business Marketing Birmingham