Mobile, local and loyal - small business customers

Local, mobile and loyalty.Deals for real people

Many people are saying that the daily-deals sites like Groupon are struggling, especially after they turned down a once in a lifetime $6BN opportunity to be acquired by Google and had to drop a proposed IPO. The reason I believe is that consumers are maturing, or maybe just reverting to human nature. We shop, eat and enjoy ourselves more when we don't have to travel halfway across the country to do so. Daily deals give the impression of offering local offers, but local just means Massachusetts or Ireland, not Boston or Dublin. People are getting tired of this and so the announcement today by theadmenu.com about a new local online service [also see the Irish Press Releases site] is really interesting. I've been working with theadmenu.com for a little while now, so this makes it even better!

If you run a small business, a shop, restaurant, bar, hair salon, car dealership or lunchtime deli, you know that your customers typically come live or work close by. They are local.  Since you have the type of business where the number of feet through the door is proportional to the amount of business you do, you know that you need to catch the attention of people on the move. Your potential customers are mobile.

The thing that many small businesses struggle with is persuading customers to come back again and again. Your most profitable customers are not one-offs, they provide repeat business and so you need loyalty. Beyond one on one exceptional customer service, loyalty is hard to promote. But we all know that there is big business in loyalty, since every big brand store, every airline, even the railways have loyalty programs. The question is how can smaller businesses get in on this?

TheAdMenu, the new service I've been working with, is based in Dublin, Ireland and aims to address "local, mobile and loyalty" for local businesses. It is quite simply a mobile-friendly website that uses the location services of smartphones (also known as GPS, geolocation, satnav, etc) to help customers find the services they want in the local area, at the best price possible. And it then takes the one-off special offers, and helps customers and businesses benefit from loyalty, by making it easy for business to provide repeat promotions to existing customers, and customers to find out what deals or new services their favorite shops are offering.

Mobile sites, like the cities that will be represented by theadmenu.com should be targeted at their local audience, not just a way to try and sell the same old stuff to bored commuters across the country with iPhone or Android in hand. With Consected mobile sites technology, I'm proud to be helping TheAdMenu deliver simple loyalty programs to local business that want to attract and retain mobile customers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com

Being mobile is having a location

Location matters, even online. We are social creatures. We love interaction with real people. We don't just "like", we love people that we have conversations with (even on Twitter and Facebook). This human nature extends to "being local". It is not just for reducing a carbon footprint that people are interested in local businesses. We like our communities, and we love the businesses that serve them well. Yeah, we can all jump in the car and drive for an hour to the big box store. But there is a warm feeling that comes from chatting to a local shop owner before buying something, then stopping for a coffee at the local cafe, or a pint at the pub. So how on earth does this work when you are online?

It is alright to have an online personality. OK, its better than alright, it is essential, if you want to be part of the social media conversations that people crave. So if you have a personality online, why can't you have a location too? Everybody recognizes that your presence is faked if you appear to be online 24 hours a day. Instead you are somebody real if you are in a location that finally recognized it was time for the sun to set and you to go offline. That is only one way to have the appearance of "location". If you truly are a local business, one that requires people to inhale the aroma of your coffee as they sit and enjoy sipping it, or discussing the merits of this widget over that one when fixing a blocked drain, then you need to go a step or two further. 

As a local business, having a website is essential, even though 99.999% of the world's population will find it irrelevant. But you do want your online presence to be relevant to 100% of your local population and visitors who might want to make use of your services. For this, your website needs to do three things:

1) help people find you

2) help people learn more about how you can help them

3) help people remember you

Maybe you'll be surprised that being local to people online is easy. In fact, you can be closer to potential customers than perhaps you would like to be in reality: nestled in their pockets and purses. Yep, you need to be on the smartphone that people resort to when they didn't plan well enough before leaving the house so they can find your address, in Google mobile search results when they are looking for a place for lunch, or finding out how to fix that blocked drain from somebody who knows. Being mobile is having a location close to your customers, whether they search for you or scan your local newspaper ad with a QR Code. Having a website just isn't enough.

With a mobile friendly website, people can find you when they are close to you and ready to buy (there are some trick to this that make it work even better). They can learn what you have to offer when they have found you. And if you are smart they can remember you by a quick click to Like their Facebook page, follow them on Twitter or join your email newsletter. Because the best customer is the one who is local and comes back again and again. Being mobile gives your location and online personality a meaning, and gets you more of the best customers.

A post from the Improving It blog

Let us help you improve your business today. Visit www.consected.com