The internet is a leveling influence on business. It means that potential customers can learn about your small business just as easily as they can learn about bigger competitors. And if you market yourself smartly, you can attract more customers than larger competitors.
In this article, I’ll show you how.
The world has changed, and that makes traditional ways of promoting your business less effective. Nobody wants to listen to you tooting your own horn. But they *do* want to have their questions answered. And if you answer their questions, they’ll trust you.
Trust is thus the goal of marketing. Long-term relationships are much more beneficial for *both* parties than a transaction is.
So what’s the best way to build trust with potential customers?
Instead of promoting yourself, teach your readers. The best way to reach your readers is to post articles to your blog (which you can set up on Blogger or WordPress). When you consistently post articles that teach, people will become curious about who you are and what you do, and will seek to learn what you do. This is much more valuable to you and your customers than “targeting” your customers with “campaigns” that have your “message” (is this business, or war?!)
When you teach, your articles are more likely to be passed on to potential customers, more likely to be found and ranked highly by Google (which means more potential customers to your site for months or even years), and people who read them are more likely to trust you as an expert in your field.
Here’s an example. If you were looking for a massage therapist and found one who wrote about the difference between deep tissue and shiatsu, what the advantages of thai massage are, and how to lessen shoulder and neck pain when working at a computer all day, wouldn’t you be more inclined to trust them over one who just had a static website?
The benefit of teaching people about what you love doing is that you have a natural passion and ability to talk about it. You’re not promoting yourself directly, but you’re building something even more valuable than a transaction – you’re building relationships with hundreds or thousands of potential new clients.
In other words, when you teach, you’re marketing yourself in a smart way that will build returns for your business for a long, long time.
What about you? Have you found teaching to be beneficial to your business? What have you found to be effective or not so much?
Using Twitter to Find Customers for your Small Business | The EasyCal Blog // Feb 9, 2010 at 10:26 am
[...] When someone asks about getting a massage in San Francisco or an eyebrow wax in Calgary, you have an opportunity to pitch yourself. You probably want to be careful with this one. A direct pitch for your service can come off pretty aggressively. A much better approach is to teach your customers. [...]
This is all very well, but then the client has to come to you for the service. What is the point of teaching thousands of people, when the likelihood is that none of them will live or work nearly close enough to make a trip worthwhile?
hi colin,
if a potential customer is already on your website, odds are they’ve arrived while looking for a practitioner to perform a specific service.
if they’re poking around your website trying to determine whether you’re the right practitioner for them, having videos or articles teaching them stuff gives you *immense* credibility over the practitioner who doesn’t.
and, you haven’t lost anything if you ALSO have 1000s of people arrive who will never become customers. in fact, you help them out too by probably helping them solve a problem (otherwise they wouldn’t have come to watch the video you created or read article you posted, right?)
an example may help. i was looking for a chiropractor in vancouver, and ran across http://www.drcarlacupido.com through a google search. i checked out her media and blog to see if she knew her stuff:
http://www.drcarlacupido.com/media
she seemed super knowledgeable, so i booked an appointment and she, as expected, turned out to be an awesome chiro.
without those vids and articles she’s not helping me understand why i should choose *her* over anybody else.