The holy grail of a small business is having loyal customers, those who come back time and time again to do business with you and who refer other new customers to you. The tricky part is figuring out how to create this loyal base. Discounts and coupons won’t make it happen. Customers who are constantly looking for the lowest price will always be fickle, floating from store to store depending on who has the lowest price on a given day.

As you should know by now, word-of-mouth is the best advertising.

In today’s business environment, reputation management is more important than ever. Word-of-mouth has always been the most effective tool for advertising, but it can also be the extremely detrimental if it’s negative.

This is a problem that has been compounded exponentially in the information age. If a customer wasn’t happy with your business 30 years ago, the negative impact was generally contained within their close-knit friends and family, although it could still spread throughout the community.

With online review services like Yelp and Angie’s List rising in popularity today, a negative experience, unchecked, can spread to thousands or millions of people within hours.

At Swipely, we speak with hundreds of restaurant owners and marketers every week, and explore the thousands of social media sites they manage. It’s clear that everyone’s spending time on online marketing. But most don’t have a system in place to connect those marketing efforts back to offline sales.

There’s a better way!

Learn how to unlock the big data already running through your restaurant.

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While it’s no surprise that 90% of consumers trust reviews from their peers, you might be surprised to know that 70% trust online reviews. Maybe that’s why the folks over at Amy’s Baking Company Bakery went crazy recently after an influx of negative online reviews this week. They were featured in an episode of Hell’s Kitchen on Monday night and got dumped by Gordon Ramsay for not cooperating. The internet went crazy, and so did they.

In related news, the research shows just how important it is to run a clean restaurant, reminding us how the mexican chain of Chi-Chi’s went out of business after their famous Hepatitis A outbreak.

Twitter is still a bit of a hidden gem when it comes to social media marketing. It’s not exactly hidden, but lots of small businesses shy away from it in favor of Facebook because they think that’s where the action is.

But for those who use it and love Twitter, it’s one of their favorite, most effective marketing tools. The ability to really connect one-to-one with customers is its main benefit over Facebook which is really a one-to-many platform most of the time.

Sundays are traditionally nights that you close early, and Monday is hardly a business day at all, often closed completely at some restaurants.

And when it’s just you running the business, it’s pretty hard to come up with a good reason to stay open late. If people like you, they’ll come when you’re good and ready, right?

But for those who are expanding, or do business in college towns, late-night customers are big business.

Bonnie Riggs, a restaurant-industry analyst at NPD Group says that late-night hours appeal to the younger folks.

In her book 6 Steps to Free Publicity, Marcia Yudkin tells a story of the grand opening for a local hardware store in Grand Junction, Texas, population 2,500. The owner calls all of the newspapers in Texas, sends a press release to ABC, NBC and CBS affiliate stations from El Paso to Texarkana, and National Public Radio Austin.

Nobody seems to care, and they don’t get a single bite on their news story. Why? Because the news doesn’t match the need.

Do you ever wonder why a lot of prices for retail products end in 99 cents? It is called psychological pricing and any prices ending in 9′s are considered “charm prices”.

These 9-based prices are based on a theory which states that consumers read prices from left to right and even when a decimal value of up to two places is very close to the next rounded value, consumers tend to associate the price with the last rounded value. Hence, when you list a price “$3.99”, consumers associate it with spending $3 as opposed to $4 even though the latter is a more accurate value.