Small and medium businesses can’t afford splashy advertising campaigns on TV and billboards that large corporations can, so their marketing strategies need to be smarter.
The most popular of the smart marketing strategies today is about building customer “stickiness”. Making your customer return to you for repeated service. Staying engaged with him/her. Online, you’d do this by creating, say, a Twitter account with updates about new deals,coupons and discounts [1]. Or staying in touch through a company blog. Or having your customers sign up for a regular newsletter (so old school). Or building an iPhone application (so hot!)
Stickiness is often held up as the best way to market a small business. But the basic assumption of stickiness is that you want your customers to return repeatedly. What if your business just isn’t like that? What if you’re a user-car evaluation service? Or an apartment broker? Regardless of how much they love you or your service, stickiness is no use with them.
Your marketing strategy then needs to focus on referability: getting existing customers refer you to other potential customers. Offline, you could offer your customer, as part of the deal close, a choice of one piece of merchandise: a t-shirt, a key-chain, a cap, a set of stickers, whatever. Online, you could build a Facebook application that your customers could display on their page. For the apartment broker business, the application could have you enter your location, size of apartment, approximate rent and display snaps of sample apartments, with directions to call you. You get the idea. If your customer is satisfied, he/she will be glad to help you with this.
Your business needs to choose between stickiness and referability. And it’s not an either/or choice. Sticky customers are also likely to refer you to their friends. Also, customers that care enough to refer you will come back to you. But the focus of your marketing strategy must be one or the other.
[1] Dell is doing this pretty well. It’s not a small business, but the principle remains the same.