What is the best way to increase revenue
There are 3 ways to increase revenue:(1)sell more things, (2)more often, to (3)more customers. Two out of three of those are about your existing customers. Small Business Owners tend to jump straight to advertising when they want to make more money, but that is the expensive route. It costs 5-7x as much to sell to a new customer as it does to sell to an existing customer.
Focus more attention on existing customers to increase your revenue. Your best customers look for ways to buy more from you, more often. Focus even more closely on your best customers.
All of this is built on the assumption that your service is amazing and that it delights your customers. If not, that is your place for your biggest impact work. If you want to increase your revenue make your existing customers even happier.
How do you define a great customer?
A great customer is easy. They like what you offer and they happily pay your full price. You know who they are because you smile when you see them, or when they show up on your phone or your inbox.
This is important because an ill-fitting customer takes too much time and costs you money. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can make an ill-fitting customer happy and they will eventually become a great customer. Trust your gut in this. If you feel happy working with a customer to make her happy, she is a great customer. If you feel resentful as you try to satisfy her whims, she is not a great customer for you.
How do you find more of your best customers?
Talk about your best customers, tell their stories. Talk about the success they are having with your service. It is exactly that success that will attract other similar customers. Don’t advertise, don’t market. Tell stories.
Your best customers talk about you. Help them do that. Give them words to use and give them a platform to talk about their experience. Make it easy for them to tell your story.
How do you get enough customers in a small population base?
It’s a numbers game. The more tightly you niche, the smaller the percentage of the population you attract. Your instinct will be to expand your niche. This is a mistake. The tighter your niche the easier it is to attract the best customers, the better you get at what you do and the more you can charge. When you try to be all things for more people, you become nothing for anyone. In order to appeal to more people, you have to make your services more generic.
Let’s be clear, it makes more sense to offer more services to the same customers, than to try and offer more customers a wider array of services. There is a difference between a tightly focused array of services that appeal to a small group of people and a set of services that you think will appeal to a wider variety of people.
The other way to look at it is to expand your boundaries to include a wider population from which to draw. That works best the more tightly niched you are. While simply building a better mouse trap won’t have people beating a path to your door, it takes a better mouse trap to get people to make their way to you.
I’ve done my customer Avatar. Now what?
An Avatar is a made up person. As we make them up, we not only make up the demographic and psychographic info, we make up where they hang out, what message will appeal to them and why they buy from us. An Avatar won’t help you get real answers. For that, you have to talk to real people.
Ask your best customer how they found you, what attracted them, what they like about your service and why they stay with you. Use that information to find other customers just like them.
Always start with your best customers. You can experiment and expand your efforts from that starting point.
Are you saying I don’t have to market?
Marketing, at it’s core is telling your story. All the rest of it is tactics about getting your message ‘out’ and heard. You’ve heard of AIDA: get their Attention, spark Interest, incite Desire, and get them to take Action. As a small business owner you don’t have enough money to get their attention so you are halted at step 1. You need a pretty big budget to push your message out there and have it heard.
This thinking is so last century. Pull marketing is the way to go rather than that old push marketing. Pull marketing is about becoming a magnet or a beacon for the exact people who need what you offer. Your perfect customers are already looking for you, your job is to make it easy for them to find you.
I’m sitting in the Riverdale Perk Cafe in a neighbourhood new to me. My first time here. The pull is that they have wifi and coffee, a plug and place to set up And they are a block away from the apartment where I am staying – the apartment full of sleeping people. The barista welcomed me in, helped me set up and made me feel comfortable here. I will be back and I will tell others (like you).
How does that translate into a location independent service business you ask? Your neighbourhood can be as big or as little as you make it. It can be virtual.
Hang out and share your message where your best peeps hangout.
Don’t I have to be careful about my brand?
I hear from Business Owners that they have their logo, know the best colours and font to use to reflect their style, they work hard to make all their advertising consistent; but people still don’t seem to understand what they do and what their business is about.
Your brand is who you are, not the image you present. As small business owners we don’t have the luxury of being able to hide behind our advertising image. We live and breathe and work our brand. It’s not your brand that attracts people, it is how you run your business. It’s the story you tell with every interaction.