I was speaking to a group of small business owners the other day about their local marketing.
Towards the end of the training after we spoke about a couple simple strategies for bypassing the resistance of local prospects using social media, I was asked a question by one of the business owners…..
“Whats the Fastest Way to Increase My Profit for my Small Business With My Local Marketing?”
Now to be candid, sometimes it’s hard to just keep my speaker hat on and not bring the audience member up on stage and start diving into their business from a consultative point of view.
But unfortunately, since we didn’t have time for me to learn all the ins and outs of their business and since I wanted to make sure everyone that was in the room got value from the talk, I gave an answer that I know you will get tangible, profitable value from if you apply this to your local marketing of your small business.
2 very fast, simple ways to increase The Profit of your Local Small Business Marketing
If you have an existing business with a strong unique value proposition and your existing business is closing sales, and you don’t want to go find new customers to buy from you.
one of the easiest ways to increase profits is to…
Add an up-sell at the time of purchase.
No risk in a new investment for local marketing, just a simple question that will increase your profit if you do it correctly.
If the product or service up-sell is complimentary to the product or service you’re selling as your lead purchase, and you offer the up-sell using the right words and your price of the up-sell isn’t more than 60% more than what your customer is purchasing, you should have around 20-37% of your customers buy the up-sell.
Hmmm… 30% of your customers buying something that is worth 60% more than what they’re already buying….That’s not a bad bump in profit! As a side note, this will work in the business-to-business local marketing world as well as the b-to-c marketing world.
Re-activating past local customers
Re-activating old local customers with a simple offer is another easy way to increase profits. Because if you do your job well (and I am sure you do) your customers already trust, know and like you.
Most customer re-activation programs I have seen average 16-30% buying response with something as simple as a few emails, a couple calls or some letters in the mail.
The best local media(s) to use to re-activate your old customers depends on your market.
But if you have been in business for any length of time, a 16-30% surge in purchases wouldn’t be bad, would it?
And if you tap on the up-sell we talked about earlier, you’re not only re-activating old customers to the tune of 16-30%.
But you’re also getting 20-37% of those old customers to purchase your up-sell at a 60% increase in price above your original offer.
There is always a way to get the result you want with your local marketing. It just takes finding a formula for growing your small business that has (recently) proven itself to be effective then thinking it though and testing it with your own local marketing until your business gets the results you want.
Anyway I wish you the best of luck. I hope you found this helpful. Feel free to leave any comment you think will add value to this topic.