Loyalty

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.

In today’s global economy where the Internet is the new shopping mall, it’s easy to understand how a small, local business owner could easily get discouraged. It can be overwhelming thinking about trying to compete with the price-slashing that big box stores and online retailers offer.

So how is the main street business to survive and thrive in the face of this big-money competition? The truth is that if focused on the right things, it’s actually the small business that has the advantage in many ways.

Who are you?

When I come to your restaurant, or shop in your store, will I meet you?

When you call your lasagna “famous”, who made it so famous? Where did the recipe come from? Was it your great grandmother? Was it your father? Was it you?

Who are you, really? How hard did you work to get where you are?

These are all points in the story that a new guest who walks in your doors can benefit from knowing.

The first time I ever took a restaurant app seriously was a few months ago during a family get-together at Outback Steakhouse. And although the Outback Steakhouse app is decent (you can find locations, place an order, etcetera) it was their Tablemates app that got me. The table tent provoked me and the rest of our group to do some synchronized app-downloading. The benefit? Table games. Using the app, everyone at our tables could play games with each other while waiting for our food.

Google+ Hangouts have been referred to as a best kept secret in loyalty marketing, but it’s no secret that they can help businesses in many ways. Google+ Hangouts is a free video chatting service from Google where you can have one-on-one and one-to-many group chats with up to ten people.

The word chat doesn’t exactly imply business but yet lots of big businesses have been using it for customer service and marketing. Richard Binhammer, director of social media and community at Dell says, ”we have used hangouts for customer support, to showcase new or other product features, and to connect with customers about various matters that they have indicated an interest in.

Fake social media reviews can become a small business owner’s worst nightmare.  Websites such as Yelp, Google Places, or even Facebook, can mar a good reputation at the click of a button.

The advancement of social media has resulted in a host of creative ways to damage a business name and the internet has become the arsenal for competitors, disgruntled employees and former employees.

Business technology research firm Gartner, Inc. suggests that by 2014, up to 15 percent of online social media reviews will be fake, and it’s a two-way street.

When we published our last article on how to make gluten-free diners feel safe, we got a lot of love for it from the gluten-free community. The misunderstanding about going gluten-free as a fad diet, versus a means to combat a serious disease is a major roadblock for sufferers of Celiac Disease.

In order to push the movement even further, I asked Amanda Mahoney, a gluten-free blogger who suffers from Celiac disease to come back for some additional insights.

Dealing with lazy employees is a mix of tough love and the acceptance that you might be the problem

Lazy employee? Fire ‘em!

That’s what the traditional response is when telling someone about your less-than-enthusiastic employees. But someone said this to me recently during a discussion about how to motivate lazy employees:

“Not every slacker is really a slacker, sometimes they’re just bored. And if they’re bored, the manager should challenge them with new, interesting tasks. You can’t be bored when your task-list is full.”

It’s true, you made an investment in someone, signed all the paperwork, dotted all the i’s.