Success for a small business means watching your pennies. Margins are usually small, sales are often weak, and there is little or no cushion available to absorb a mistake. It is also true that small business owners must not get so caught up in watching pennies that they miss the holes that are leaking dollars….
Read anything offering marketing tips and you will be encouraged to learn who your customers are. You want to understand the demographic make-up as well as their likes and dislikes and, of course, what they buy. Yet, so often that is the end of the effort. Getting the data can be done with registration information,…
Customers like doing business with people they know. As a small-business owner, you can use that to your advantage. Some advantages can include knowing your customers by name. You can learn what products and services they want. If customers have a problem, “talking to the boss” to get an immediate solution is easy for them….
A lot has been written about how market research will help you achieve business success, and many of these claims are true. That connection, however, is not a simple, direct link. Collecting information about your potential market is useful only if you take the next step of analyzing the data. Data analysis yields clues about who…
A common concern among small-business owners is how to increase revenue. Often, they try to do this by finding new customers. That is an expensive way of doing it. On average, it will cost from $20 to $50 to get a new customer. Yet it only costs from $1 to $5 to expand sales to…
If you’re a business owner, which appeals more: spending $20 to capture a new customer or spending $1 to retain an existing customer? These numbers represent broad averages but reflect reality, according to research. This means developing a sustainable business requires focusing first on building customer loyalty. Every business needs to build its customer base,…
When your customers want a product or service your carry, is your store the first place they go? People use habits and routines throughout much of their life. Habits and routines make life easier and free up the brain for other decision-making tasks. We operate much of our lives on autopilot. The autopilot mode can…
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