(Newswire.net — December 30, 2014) Nottingham, UK — The competitive landscape for all organisations has changed dramatically over the last several years, and will continue to change at an unprecedented pace.
Why? The continued development and distribution of technology has radically changed the way consumers are buying, how they hear about products and services, how they research them, and how they make a final purchase decision. There are three main drivers of this change that are impacting your business and will continue to impact your profits in the coming year. You need to be aware of them. You need to leverage them. They are search, social and the really big one mobile.
Alright, readers, let’s have a show of hands:
• How many of you search online before deciding what businesses to buy from?
• How many of you choose a company based on the recommendations you heard from friends over social media?
• How many of you carry a smartphone with you at all times? We all do
And again, these trends are only accelerating. As much as we might wish they’d go away and let us continue with business as usual … the search/social/mobile paradigm is not going anywhere. It’s here to stay. The important thing now is to ask the hard questions and seek out the answers—even if they shake things up a bit:
How do these changes impact the way consumers interact with my business?
• How do these changes impact my business’s growth?
• How do these changes impact the way I approach the marketing of my business?
Our experience shows that there are four key marketing systems that need to be optimised in order to maximise growth in today’s wired, always-on and hyper-competitive marketplace. The marketing systems we’re about to present aren’t even new! They’re proven concepts that have been tested, re-tested and tested again in the marketplace. Now sure, some of the tactics have changed, but the strategies themselves haven’t.
These are the four things EVERY business needs to plan for and optimise to maximise their growth potential. Data shows, and my experience proves, that each of these can account for about 25% growth on their own, and combined have a compounding effect that can ignite growth to over 100%. Let me introduce you to the 4R’s. Reputation, Reach, Resell and Referral.
Firstly Reputation – What are you doing to proactively manage, protect and monetise your most valuable asset, your reputation? The stakes are so high these days because it’s never been so easy for consumers to research a local company before they buy. Whether it is positive or negative in tone, most of the content about your business that is available online is not even being created by you anymore!
Consumers are critics and publishers now. They all carry tiny “printing presses” in their pockets! And what’s more alarming is that recent studies show that 90% of consumers online trust recommendations from people they know, while 70% trust opinions of unknown users.
Secondly Reach – What are you doing to ensure that more people know about you today than yesterday?
If you’re not meeting new people and telling them about your products and services, you’re not developing a pipeline of potential new customers and you are going to see fewer sales in the future as a result. Obvious I know but do you have a systematic method for continually growing your customer base? Most local businesses do not.
Thirdly Resell – What are you doing to upsell, cross sell and repeat sell to maximise the lifetime value of your customer base? It makes more sense (both financially and from an efficiency standpoint) to fully capitalise on your existing customer base than to be constantly on the hunt for new customers. Despite having easy access to new and cool tools, most local businesses are leaving money on the table because they’re not maximising the resell potential of each customer.
And Finally Referral – What are you doing to use your successful relationships to create new, organic opportunities so that you can spend less and make more? It’s well known that if you just leave it up to people to do referrals for you, very few will, even if they are very happy with you. You have to make it very easy, almost effortless, for your happy customers to refer your business if you really want to maximise the referrals you generate from them. And the best part is that studies show that referrals make great customers. According to a case study noted in the Harvard Business Review, customers that come from referrals are, on average, about 18% more likely than others to stay with a company and they generate 16% more in profits!
So, how can we address some of these things? Let me share some ideas… I obviously can’t give you all of them in the space of this article, but let me share a few:
• Control your own reviews with your own review site
• Create a separate mobile site for your business that is optimised for mobile
• Reach more people more cost-effectively and with greater targeting using Facebook, Google or YouTube ads
Is your business being left behind?
Now, if you fall into the category of businesses that are not proactively working with these technology changes and marketing systems, you are only going to see things get worse over time. These changes, though recent, are now a permanent part of the competitive landscape. The gap between the businesses that “get it” and those that don’t is widening at an accelerating pace. Do you have someone that is helping your business in these areas? Or are you kidding yourself into thinking that you are going to try to do this by yourself or with the very part-time effort of one of your employees that has no marketing background?
That’s not going to cut it. If you’d like more information on the 4R’s you can get a copy of the short report by clicking here
—
About Adodo Consultancy Services Limited
The technology may change but every business communication is ultimately aimed at achieving one thing, a happy profitable customer. Whether it’s through your phone system, on your mobile or smartphone, through the internet, social networking or business networking, the objective is the same – get or keep a customer, client or patient. As a communication consultancy providing complete business solutions for the past 20 years, we are ready to listen to your requirements. Over that time we’ve built up quite a reputation for customer service and that’s why we are now so passionate about reputation marketing. In the end every time you communicate, your reputation is on the line. That’s why we ensure that all our solutions are world class. And through the Adodo Community Initiative we bring it right back home, helping those you wish to support.