Digital Business

Four keys to attracting customers

I wrote some time ago an article called ‘How to Win – Focus and Speed‘ which was about strategy in business. I use it all the time in my business life and it does work. I read an article today by John Sviolka which reminded of that approach in business planning which talks about an online voucher company in the USA which has differentiated itself very clearly from its competition by doing  just that.

It has been so successful that it has accumulated 675,000 subscribing customers to its service since November 2008 and it is growing them at a rate of 40% to 50% per month. It has a very clear proposition and it works. The lessons it teaches in this competitive market are clear and can be used by any consumer facing business.

Read the article here. You won’t regret it.

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How does your business feel?

A few businesses appear as though they are instant winners. Some take a while to build themselves up to success. Some start with a great idea but burn out quickly as the idea does not translate itself into a commercially viable product or service (I remember meeting someone in a pub in the late ’90′s who was setting up dotcom company which was delivering a clean shirt, pants, socks, a razor and toothbrush to a customer’s office after a night on the town).

I spent some time with a business this evening which had got the ingredients right on its product. One of the keys for this business to get right was how it felt when you walked in through the front door. It felt right. It felt relaxed, welcoming, warm but not hot. It smelt right and you felt as though you were completely welcome. The business is a spa, The Grange Spa, in Lincolnshire.

It is an oasis in this very rural county. The nearest competition is about an hour away. The couple that own it, Matt & Emma Craven, are warm and welcoming. Behind their friendly exteriors are sharp marketing minds that know exactly who they are aiming at as ideal customers. Matt told me precise socio-demographic characteristics of each segment of the population they are targeting.

They started in April 2009 and “footfall” is starting to increase through their doors, finally. It’s tough but it is starting to work. Clients were walking in as we spoke having treatments, using the gym and swimming in their gorgeous pool. Matt uses Twitter and Facebook to help him reach out to potential clients.

But, these social media tools are not necessarily being used by some of their ideal customers. Nevertheless, many of their prospective customers network socially albeit not through the internet but at book clubs. Women with children in their mid to late thirties.

So, Matt and I got chatting about the possibility of combining their spa with women’s book clubs. The spa has beautiful furniture and private areas where a women’s book club could meet to talk about this month’s book, chat and then spend an hour using the spa. We then talked about the joy of using Google Chrome which is when Emma seemed to switch off for some reason.

But more, importantly, take a look at The Grange Spa’s web site and see for yourself at what this oasis offers and how it feels. If you get a chance, swing by and say hello to Matt, Emma or any of their friendly staff to sense for yourself just how good their business feels. If you have your own business, then ask yourself how it feels. Does it feel right? If not, make some changes. It’s important for your customers.

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Social Media is brutal but worth its weight in gold

If you ever wanted to understand the importance of social media but were too afraid to ask, then watching this program – The Hotel Inspector on the UK’s fifth channel, ‘Five’ would have been a fine lesson in its power.

The Hotel Inspector is one ‘Alex Polizzi’ who is described as “no nonsense” although she’s no Gordon Ramsey in her type of frankness despite the odd ‘F word’. Alex Polizzi’s first task in the series was dealing with a ‘The Crown Inn’ in Lewes, Sussex. I had a certain nostalgia for the place because I used to go to school in the town up to the age of sixteen and ‘The Crown’ was where I occasionally went with friends when we were trying to persuade the barman that we were eighteen and we did have enough money for a pint.

Getting back to the point, the hotel was simply filthy, slovenly and uncared for by the owner. It was losing guests at the same speed as it was growing bugs in the bathrooms and it lost its ‘three star status’ with the local tourist board (On a side point, I think the tourist board needs to rethink it’s star system. If The Crown dropped from three to two stars, God help anyone whose establishment has two stars).

The key point of the programme was that guests were leaving their comments about the hotel not with the owners but on ‘TripAdvisor‘, the web based hotel review site. The owner of the hotel, Karen Lloyd, was dismissive about people who left their reviews on it – “Haven’t they got better things to do with their time?“. But the fact remained that the negative reviews were the truth about her business and reviews from previous customers are taken seriously by would-be guests.

As I write, the reviews about The Crown show the following results:

Out of twenty-two reviews, fourteen of them were couples.

• Four say it is excellent
• Three say it is very good
• None say it is average
• Two say it is poor
• Thirteen say it is terrible

The reality of the web and social media is that whatever you do in business nowadays, if you don’t get it right, there is nowhere to hide. The feedback you receive as a business owner today is immediate, honest if not brutal, and worth it’s weight in gold. Whether your business is large or small, you will soon know if you are doing a good job of it or not.

In the past, you would be asked to fill in feedback by the hotel owner on a piece of paper with no way of knowing if the hotel cared a jot about your feedback. Good hotels and businesses would follow up your feedback. Most would not. That’s history and now the reticent British public has a way to vent their frustration, disappointment and delight with ease.

To be fair, the owner did turn the hotel around and regained her third star which is much to her credit. The morale of the story, nevertheless, is that social media and the web are now driving up the quality in the market of many products and services. If you don’t take the feedback seriously then your competition and prospective customers will do.

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Here is a recent recording of Will on William Wright’s BBC Radio Lincolnshire drive time ‘techie’ slot talking rich Internet applications and the QR codes.

Rich Internet applications have been around for a while but they are becoming more prominent as companies start to realise the benefits that they offer to help their customers make better informed decisions about their products before buying them. 

QR codes are appearing more regularly on products such as drinks bottles and advertisements to encourage people to try their products or to enter competitions. You take a picture of the QR code using special software on your mobile which connects to the camera on your phone.  

Have a listen to this recording if you want to hear more about these technologies. If you have any questions, email me: will@digi-business.co.uk. 

  
Download now or listen on posterous

Will speaking on BBC Radio – Rich Internet Application.mp3 (14658 KB)

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Think inside the box first

How many times have you been asked to think “outside the box” at work or on a training course?  Countless times, no doubt. It is a cliché now although it remains a good practice for problem solving. But when you are finding new clients the one thing you need to do is to find out about your prospects or customers and their challenges or opportunities. You have to get to know them, to ‘think inside their box’, so that you get to know what it feels like from their position. 

An example of this from my military experience was learning about an Army officer serving in Northern Ireland who had become the most successful platoon commander to that point in finding caches of terrorist weapons. He and his platoon became experts in finding where the IRA hid their weapons. The officer thought like the enemy and began to understand their methods and soon cracked their modus operandi and forced them to rethink how they hid their weapons.

And today, in a regular business breakfast networking I attend, I heard one business who was thinking inside their customer’s boxes. His business supplied telecom services to small businesses which is a fiercely competitive market. Many of his competitors had far greater resources to market themselves, with slick sales teams and slick marketing. But his competitors failed to live up to their promises of what they would provide and constantly called their customers and prospects to sell them more products even though they had failed them. 

He understood this and some of his competitor’s customers were at the networking meeting and told us how they had been treated. His business revolved around being straight and honest with his customers. He simplified and lowered their telecoms bills and regularly checked whether their solution was working. He found new customers by networking, relating to his customers and by doing what he said he would do. 

And this is where larger business are going to face major problems from now on. Because marketing is no longer about slick brochures and coiffured salesmen. It’s about being useful to your customers and prospects and providing them with an experience that will make them believe you and come back for more. Giving away some of your expertise for free through your blog, web site, through Twitter or at a networking event are just a few simple ways to win against fierce competitors with deeper pockets but less ability to understand the customers. 

So, before you start thinking outside the box, do some thinking inside the box. It will give you a competitive edge without costing you an arm and a leg.

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Within twelve hours of being on Londonderry, I was in one of the British Military bases in the city with my platoon. It was early 1991 and I had flown out to take over from a fellow officer who was needed for preparations the Army was making to commence the first Gulf War. I had been through training for an earlier tour to South Armagh but this tour was on the streets and not in the fields.

We sprinted through the gates of the base onto the streets and within a minute a bomb went off some 500 metres away. Our drills kicked in and we made our way towards the area to cordon it off. It turned out that it was a small bomb but we still had to do the drills and provide a safety zone to keep people out so the bomb disposal team could come in and make the location safe and clear any other potential bombs.

The next stage is the part of the ninety-nine percent of boredom that all troops experienced in Northern Ireland when you are out on the streets for twelve hours or more while the bomb disposal team do their jobs. Trying to keep alert is tough, so you move your teams around in the area to keep them sharp. You make sure that they are supplied with hot food and tea to keep them happy. And all the time you are there, you are not somewhere else. And that’s what the terrorists know.

The next thing we saw, some eight hours after the bomb, were the phosphorescent tracers of rounds streaming through the air towards one of the watchtowers in another base in the city. The IRA were using an M60 machine gun and they had been very clever. They sucked us into setting up a cordon around the bomb while they set up their real target.

And that’s why they say respect your enemy because they are not stupid. This is why you are trained not to set patterns in the Army so that you minimise the chance of walking into their traps. And this is a lesson for anyone in business too.

Last week I was with two people who run their own business making weights for balloons. Their manufacturing business is an industry where there is little marketing carried out by their competitors. Most web sites are dull and most of their business is carried out through orders sent by fax and there are no distinct brands. 

But the business owners I met want to grow their business and they wanted to start doing it by developing their brand and using the Internet to reach new customers and sell more to their existing customers. Their competitors are setting patterns and doing business in the way that they have always done business. My clients have recognised that they need to use their competitors complacency to their advantage and out-market them. 

So, respect your enemy or your competitors. Get to know the patterns they are setting and disrupt them. And be prepared to set off on a path of continuous change and innovation to stay ahead and keep them on their toes.

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A village circular dropped through the door this morning saying ‘Save Our Shop.’ It is not news. The shop has been under pressure for some time to keep going. The owner recently lost his Post Office income when the Royal Mail, in a ludicrous manner, changed the service from one which was based in his shop to one which is an ‘outreach service’ based in his shop for which he just receives a commission on postal work. He has campaigned tirelessly to keep his Post Office income without success. 

Now, according to the circular from the ‘Friends’ of the Post Office, his income has halved over the last six months which has affected his ability to stock the shelves of the shop. Once this happens in a shop, it is a difficult spiral of descent to reverse. Customers enter the village shop to buy a ‘basic’ product but find that it is not there so they go somewhere else to buy it. If this happens on several occasions, then customers don’t bother to come back because they assume their village shop does not stock it anymore.

I don’t like to kick a man when he’s down. Running a business is tough. You can see that he is not a happy man whenever you go into his shop. He looks drawn and tired. But, he does not help himself. When you enter the shop he is usually listening to his MP3 player. The children get short shrift when they buy sweets. It is not a nice atmosphere to be in when you enter the shop. As the circular said, the shop “is the centre of village life.” But that’s the problem. It is not the centre of village life at all and here lies the problem.

The cliche ‘Retail is Detail’ is true. If you run a pub or a shop, the landlord or landlady or shopkeeper are equally as important as the products and environment in the shop or pub. If the landlord lacks ‘people skills’ then people don’t feel welcome. They can put up with the products being slightly more expensive or not quite the right brand if they enjoy the overall experience of going into the pub.

Several years ago in Oxfordshire, our village shop was going through exactly the same descent into closure as the village shop here. The shopkeeper tried to bring more business by offering a pizza service to the village but he shut his shop at 5-30 which was no good for people who wanted a pizza for supper who were just getting back from work. He complained every time you went in there about how bad business was so you felt as though your small purchase of bread, milk and a newspaper was unappreciated. 

However, a mile down the road was a village shop which was more expensive than our village shop and the supermarkets but the owner was so jolly and always asked how your family was that you did not mind paying a bit more for the goods.

But the worst thing about the desperate pleas for business in the parish newsletter and the circular are that people will only respond to them for a short time and only if they see a change for the better in the place. In the long run, the shop needs to market itself more effectively than just appealing for charity. If it is the ‘centre of village’ then it has to feel like a place in which you would like to spend a little time. The shop needs to use the parish newsletter to send out positive news such as special offers to attract customers to the shop and not as a ‘begging bowl.’ But above all, the owner needs to make you feel good about visiting the establishment. 

Nobody is owed a living. People will buy from people they want to buy from. And these days, shoppers are very sophisticated and they have choice. For a business which faces massive competition from national stores, whether it is a shop or a pub, then their main selling point is the people that own and run them. And if customers don’t feel as though they are getting a good service from their local businesses then they will just buy the cheaper option from a faceless national business.

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Image by forcevive via Flickr

 

‘Mobile mania’ is abundant. Everyone is excited about it in the publishing world. Books on mobile phones, learning on mobiles (aka ‘m-learning’), broadband on mobiles. You name it, everyone wants everything on their mobile and wants their mobile to do everything, according to the mobile handset manufacturers and network providers.

Of course, network operators want to grow their revenues from data charges because their revenue from voice is being eaten away by competition and regulations. Cynical? Me?

Some interesting meetings recently with publishers have also revealed much the same excitement from them about mobile learning and books on mobiles. I have previously written about eBooks on mobiles and my views on that are clear. Learning through a mobile phone is another topic of interest to debate.

The number of people who own a mobile in Africa and Asia is generally greater than the number who own a laptop or PC. That’s not a surprise and mobile networks are enabling commerce in developing countries in ways which have not been possible before their arrival. For example, a fisherman off the west coast of Africa can call several ports to check where there is a lack of fish so that he can get the best price for his catch.

In India, where I spent six weeks with 3 Mobile in October 2008, 3G networks will soon arrive enabling greater potential for commerce and information transfer to more people. In the ‘West’, eBooks is the fastest growing category on the iTunes App Store. Publishers are getting excited, understandably. 

I believe that these numbers hide some truths, however. In the training business where I have spent the last 12 years of my career selling and marketing elearning, books, classroom training and distance learning, one of the most tricky items to sell and to show value for the benefit is elearning. Publishers sew seeds by giving away some elearning courses for free to gain interest, usage and to help install any plug-ins needed to run the elearning on PC’s and laptops. The publishers then get excited about how many people have downloaded the free elearning and cite it as evidence that people want to the stuff.

Of course, the question they rarely answer is how many people who downloaded the free course actually completed it? There was never an answer.  So, the implication is that people get the free course, look at it for a bit and then lose enthusiasm for completing the course. People are buying eBooks for their iPhones, for sure. They seem to be willing to pay more than for games and they are very keen to pay less than US$1 for them. But, what type of books are they buying in which subjects? 

Also, there is the challenge of infrastructure to support mobile learning. As web developers, we test sites we build for customers on several different operating systems and browsers. In the mobile world, there are something in the region of half a million combinations of operating systems and mobile web browsers. There are specialist content management systems (CMS) which are designed to handle this challenge, but you then have to start running two CMS’s to reach your mobile and PC customers.

Furthermore, what are the data charges that customers in Africa who want learning materials are willing to pay? Also, many customers in Africa and Asia are likely to be on pre-pay plans which means their connection with the network is likely to be intermittent. 

I think publishers need to slow down before they start committing to mobile learning and concentrate their resources carefully on providing more robust learning options for their customers such as rich Internet applications first. Mobile learning will become more achievable as a business proposition, but I believe it is just a nice way to deliver small bites of learning, news and information to encourage customers to take advantage of resources which are near to them. 

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Knowing what a client wants to achieve is a basic need for an agency developing digital solutions. Yet, this is very often difficult to achieve in the fast moving world of digital design and development.

It is tough enough sometimes translating a designers web site design into something which a web developer can make work behind the scenes in a web solution.

A client may not be able to give their objectives for several reasons. For instance, they may not want to reveal their budget for what they are asking you to do so that you don’t bill up to their budget for something that might be achieved more cheaply.

Or the client may have a whole string of ideas which they would like to have included in their project which, in fact, is a ‘wish list’ rather than a brief and they are looking for some guidance on how to make it work.

It could be that the client does not know what they want to achieve but they are being forced into a position where they feel they need to catch up because their competition is ahead of it.

In the end, our job as an agency is to understand a clients’ objectives for their project. Of course, we can build their ‘wish list’ but it generally makes for a bad project which takes a long time to build, it may not do what they hoped for, it may cost them a lot of money and time, as well as causing business relationships to break down.

Finding a client’s objectives makes our job so much easier. For example, an agency will need to know how much revenue they would like to generate. Or how many people they want to reach, money they wish to save and so on.

And it takes trust from the client that we will keep their objectives confidential. It is all about trust. Trust takes time to build (as well as a few contracts!). But, objectives are the basis for delivering a good project for a client.

Get beyond wish lists and get to objectives.

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