What is the goal of business?
Goal of business is finding new customer and keeping them in. Profit is the result.
Many people think that local businesses especially small businesses have nothing tricky to apply. I have a shop, have products; people will automatically go around it and buy.
But that’s not true. Customer doesn’t come. You need to bring them in unless you have a high brand value.
Many of you already know that I have started a new venture with some of my friends. The venture name is Frozen Treat. It’s a coffee shop cum fastfood. It’s just around one and half month old but in this short journey I have implemented few tricks and few of them actually worked.
In this post I am actually going to write on them.
1# Avoided FB Promotion, Started Check in Discount:
You know this is the era of facebook. Whenever a new business starts, people think about facebook page and followed by facebook ads. And they are not wrong anymore because it has huge opportunity.
But I thought little different. At first I tried to make the existing customer happy by providing them check-in discount so that I can get their friends while providing discount. It really worked. We got some phone calls and customers who visited us by seeing their friends’ check-in.
Remember, these days people not only eat for eating, a good amount of them eat for capturing photo. Or in other word without capturing photo they don’t get the full taste. I am one of them. I have an album on food photography. So facebook check-in discount can further influence them to capture a photo and share it. And I can predict at least 30% of their facebook friends are from that area. So it’s a win-win situation.
2# Briefed Our USP:
We know, most of the juice bar used readymade ice to minimize cost and hassle. But a good amount of customers are not happy with that. We have decided to make ice ourselves and we use purified water to make them.
That’s great, right?
But we need to highlight it to our customer to inform them. We didn’t go with any written statement just because we are getting chance to brief it ourselves. We briefed it to every customer personally and it worked. It earned some trust from them and at the end we earned some orders as well.
We can’t ignore the power of mouth. Each happy customer is a big marketing tool for us.
So you need to brief your USP, you can’t leave that for the guest to guess. You need to take the approach yourself.
3# Took Advantage of Facebook Live:
Although we have gone live just for one time but it worked! The very next day we found few customers who have seen our live video and they found it interesting. We already hosted two small parties in our tiny shop. This was a big challenge for us and we did it with perfection.
We are still new and we don’t have much experience to share things. But we can share how it is going to work. Right now we are trying three different strategies to bring customer and up selling. I will share those tricks at the beginning of coming year.In the meantime I will have some more experience to share.
Here is the live video you can check.
4# Lighting:
As it is a local business you can’t avoid the people who are walking around your shop. You need to do something by which you can grab their attention. Lighting is one of them. In our business, our main business time starts from evening so we focused on lighting. In our small 80 sqft shop, we have 18 different lights in total. It created an awesome environment. We are also going to plant some trees outside our shop with some lightings.
5# Sound System:
We also set up a small sound system. We play it to grab attention of those who haven’t noticed the lighting and look around our shop. It also worked! We found so many people who were actually about to leave our shop without being noticed but suddenly they turned back, visited the shop and bought from us.
6# Weekly Deal:
This is the upcoming plan. We already bought couple of X banners to show our weekly offers. Designing work is going on. I think X banner is the best way to show the offer, because the size will be big and we can carry it easily. I have tried this trick to few of my US clients to help them get more customers.
There are lots more tricks we are going to apply like FREE gift, membership card, promotional materials and even advertising. After testing those things I will either update this blog post or will write a new one to share the outcome. I am sure you will get the similar result in your local business if you apply the similar tricks. I will love to hear your feedback. And don’t forget to connect with me on social channels and subscribe to my email newsletter to get more growth hacking trick. Let’s grow together.
