Business is hectic, business is crazy! There are so many different things to think about at any given moment concerning customer wants and needs that, oftentimes, the subtleties can just slip right on through the cracks. This is where we see the negative effects begin to compound on our businesses and weigh down potential for growth. Amidst the countless, seemingly minor, yet greatly impactful lapses in execution of good business practice, the way in which you convey your business through geomarketing is one of the most vital. The ready accessibility of your physical, brick-and-mortar location’s information, such as address, contact information, and hours of operation, being the first encounter for most, is a make or break situation. Let’s talk about some scenarios surrounding all these details, and ensuring you occupy the ‘make’ end of the ‘make or break’ paradigm.
Location
Don’t let poor portrayal of your location put your business in its place. That is first and foremost. In the scenario of owning a small business, or any business for that matter, to have all locations available, and preferably the locations most proximal to an individual conducting a local search, is very important, especially in the event of a new potential customer seeking to find your store. This is the first line of contact with customers, is educating them on where you physically are. A ComScore study showed that the majority of mobile phone users (27%) and PC and laptop users (22%), as well as 14% of tablet users, primarily sought physical address or location when conducting local online searches (Search Engine Land).
This is sought out before anything else. In addition to the scenario of owning a business, consider the case of a new person wishing to visit your business, but upon arriving at the location indicated, are unable to find the business anywhere in sight. Trust is lost and so is that potential buyer and every potential buyer as long as your location is incorrect on your online listing. Don’t jeopardize your potential for growth in clientele off of important, and all-too-often overlooked details, such as location.
Contact Information
Aside from merely showing up, the purpose therein of having the proper listed location, there is nothing more important and more central to business than the notion of communication, contact. For this reason, it is sensible and ideal to ensure that your contact information is accessible upon completing a local search query online and that it is not faulty. By ensuring that this information is conveyed correctly, you ensure maintenance of good customer service even when the customers are not in shop. In the scenario that your business’s contact information is not available on a search listing, potential customers are refused the most basic means of seeking your business’s professional guidance in their shopping process.
Essentially, we can call this amenity customer service, or in the case of having poor representation of contact information, no customer service. To not have a way for customers to be assisted even when they are not physically in your brick-and-mortar store will ultimately hurt the performance of that store. When people do not have a way to contact the associates of a business for service, they look to someone else for their business dealings. Roughly two-thirds, 66%, of consumers that switched brands did so due to poor customer service, but the greater take-away is that of all instances of customer churn from poor service, 85% of instances are preventable (Huffington Post). That being said, all businesses should take the small but necessary measures to verify that all of their contact information is correct within the scope of their geomarketing plan, so as to secure all lines of communication and service possible between company and customer.
Hour of Operation
While it is good to be able to contact businesses for service while you are out of shop, ultimately, it would be ideal to be able to meet with them on site to get some real person-to-person assistance in making your purchases… What?! You pull up to the store after spending 20 minutes in traffic over your lunch break only to find the shop wasn’t open?! But they were shown as open during these hours online! Guess what… You just lost a potential customer or, quite possibly, you lost a loyal, repeat customer who has become fed up with faulty information and the feeling of being misinformed.
Ultimately, this is a problem of inconsistency and failing to utilize means of updating search engine geomarketing information. Furthermore, it affects not only customer trust and reliability in your business, but also is detrimental to your overall daily selling potential. In the cases of most bigger businesses, hours of operation are fairly unwavering and change minimally. However, to the small businesses or businesses within a certain industry, having the ability to update operating hours quickly and in real time can save your wallet and your business relationships. In the case of changing hours seasonally, keeping information current on slower or more busy days, and just generally taking the effort and attention to always be accurate in your hours is a small effort to ensure maximum sustainability of business and associations.
Regulars
Also worth considering, aside from the outbound representation of your business information, is the way you address customers based on their inbound correspondence with your business. We’ll put it like this: What do you do for your customers in terms of geomarketing to appeal to their frequency of business with you? Let’s Start with regulars, namely. In the case of regulars, your business has their support, and as we all know, we want to do what we can to maintain that relationship first before working on adding new customers to our circle. The best way to keep customers? Reward them for being great customers! Of all consumers, 26% say they shop more frequently at stores where they can earn rewards, 17% plan ahead to take advantage of rewards and promotions, and 14% shop only where they can earn rewards (Access Development)
There is a sea of apps and services hinged on the notion of physical location, and with many of them, there is ability to ‘check-in’ to a place of business. What do this matter you may ask? We’ll tell you how it matters! it allots you a prime opportunity to reward your fantastic, loyal, and recurring client base. These rewards can be through discounts, virtual punch-cards towards a certain payout in recognition of all of your business. This works great for the customer because they have something to look forward to a strive for in buying from you, and your business benefits from all of the business you receive from your current customers as well as all of the new business you have earned from the publicity your customers’ ‘check-ins’ have generated.
Passers-Through and Not-So-Regulars
While we, as business owners, want to ensure that we are paying special attention to hang on to our current clientele by rewarding them for their mention of our businesses, we also must address the not-so-regular passer-through or passer-by. This is addressed in a different fashion than we that used to encourage our regulars. This approach will be more grounded in outreach marketing versus loyalty marketing, however still marketed with regards to geographical location.
To reach out to potential customers, as well as current customers, technological measures prove effective. A couple methods that are used in geomarketing to ensure the capture of attention to a general geographical area are geofencing and use of beacons. Through use of these technologies, one is able to either build a virtual fence around a determined area, hence the term geofencing, or individual devices can act as pinpoints for location by means of apps or GPS enablement, that being beacons. Both of these approaches work in tandem with one another and one picks up the slack where another may lag, being a perfect conjoined effort between the two. These will aid in the publicizing of your business, the marketing to entice and attract audiences within a market, and will help you find people and people find you.
Conclusion
In conclusion, there are most certainly aspects of our business that go overseen, perceived as unimportant, or deemed affordable of lapse in attention, and geomarketing practices fall within this parameter. In the scenarios of first time customers or recurring customers, there are ways that undermining the importance of these details can cost us business at a baseline level, and there are ways that not considering how to fully implement the utility of location services can hinder business from reaching its full local potential. Consider how services such as these could aid your business’s growth and contact Rave Retailer to learn more about the applications and benefits of geomarketing, today!