Small Business Growing
Building Repeat and Referral Business: Events!
One of the most under-utilized strategies for building repeat and referral business is “events.”
By “events” I am referring to special gatherings that show appreciation and attention to your past, present, and prospective customers/clients.
Consider an annual event as one powerful way of growing your repeat and referral business.
In the current resource-constrained environment, many small business owners are either unable or reluctant to invest in events, but when it is possible for you to make the investment in putting on an event, the rewards can be significant.
Every year during the early part of December we do a holiday event to show appreciation for clients of one of our enterprises, our real estate business. We do this because we sincerely want to show appreciation and respect for the people who have and will support our business. The event gives us opportunity to renew relationships, build or sustain emotional connections, and demonstrate how much we value our clients as people.
Here is my point in sharing this aspect of one of our businesses: if you do not have one customer “reconnection and appreciation” type event in your business now, consider incorporating this into your strategy.
You don’t have to spend a fortune. You can find creative ways to stage some kind of event whose primary purpose is to express appreciation and reconnect. As best you can, of course, you want to offer something that provides an incentive for folks to attend the event. Some have found that doing something fun for kids is a nice way to bring in customers with children in their life. Obviously it depends on the demographics of your customer base and area.
Here are a few critical points to keep in mind as you think about orchestrating an event.
• Your first event is a learning process. But once you get a process established, you can repeat it with much greater ease.
• Customers and clients must feel appreciated if they are to return and tell others about us. The event will help achieve this goal.
• When done well, events create buzz among your customer base, and they will be anticipated and attended by many of the same people each time.
• Events are effective way to sustain any emotional connection you made previously with past customers. They will help keep people in your orbit.
There are lots of other good reasons to do events. Of course, the big concern businesses have is financial costs and time in preparing and executing the event. If you can start small and test the effectiveness of an event, you can better judge the usefulness for your business.
One thing is for sure. To build sustainable, repeat and referral business we must have methods to keep our relationships with customers alive and well. Events are one way to do this. Let me know if you would like to know more about what we do and how it works for us.
[Fran O'Neal provides consultation and installation of a simple, low cost, easy to use marketing and business retention system that helps small business owners get and keep more customers. Email Fran with questions or for more information on this resource.]
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"The Road to Repeat and Referral Business"
