What to Keep and What It Means Now
At the Social Media Masters Summit, I spoke about three crucial business growth strategies.
- Make an irresistible offer. Remove things that customers don’t want. Enhance and expand what they love. Then find ways to add in extraordinary value that only you can provide.
- Grow products and services as you grow (and get to know) your customer base. Review. Revise. Repackage. Be on a continual cycle of offering something new for old customers and something revised or repackaged to new customers. Avoid dying by offering old product to old customers for too long. Avoid the huge risk and expense of building something new for a whole new market — dividing your resources while trying to attract people to something new.
- Value loyal customers. We never recover the lost of replacing one who deserts the fold. The loss of revenue over time is high and noticeable. When it is combined with the opportunity loss, the cost of acquiring a new customer, and the negative word of mouth (the average deserter tells three friends) the impact is huge.
I also spoke about three key insights we need to fully leverage the speed and reach of the social web …
- Solution is the new location. Once it was important to be at the corner of State and Main. Now it’s important to be at the top of a search engine when people type in a problem they’re looking to solve.
- The attention economy requires a clear message sent to a clearly defined customer group. The social web makes it easier to amplify our message and to reach out to the ideal customers and partners we want to attract. In geographically limited marketplace, we could claim to serve a less-clarified market, because the community was limited. The loss of limits leaves a lack of definition in a position to be entirely overlooked. The value proposition for a specific niche is what makes us different from all other competitor’s on the web.
- Narrowing a niche widens opportunity. Geography no longer limits our community and customer base. A clear narrow niche works like a laser beam to focus attention on what we offer and our best value proposition for the ideal customers that we’re trying to attract.
No wonder the social web has become such a revolution. Once a brick and mortar store could count on a limited number ideal customers and be required to offer products and services beyond their needs to less ideal customers just to survive. The freedom of the Internet offers us an opportunity to choose the exact ideal customer base we want to serve. We can hone and tailor our products and offers to reach out with intention, knowing that the world market has far more customers of that description than any single geographic location ever could.
It’s the beauty of direct mail with out the cost of the catalogs … without the long development time between offers and seasons.
What businesses do you see demonstrating that they understand the reach of Internet? Not many I bet.
How are you leveraging the opportunity that the social web represents?
–ME “Liz” Strauss
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