When customers meet you, as I was saying yesterday, that they form a first impression of you, and that is in your look, your staff, your premises, your website, your emails, your messaging, your marketing, everything.
This is why marketing is everything, except the transaction of asking for the order and taking the money off the person. Everything else is marketing.
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Your Storefront
So for example, do you have premises? Do you have a shop, a store, or an office? When people come to visit you, what does it look like, outside?
On our building where my fire protection business is, we have a buzzer that you ring and then we meet you, but we had no roof over the door. When it rained, our visitors would get wet. So we added one.
We don’t want them to think that we are awful. Now we are not the type of business that has customers, but we might have. It only takes one.
And we want also want our suppliers to think that we are professional. So we added the roof and paid the expense.
I know it sounds ridiculous because everyone else would say, ‘Well, why wouldn’t you have one?’ but believe me, we didn’t have one.
We had to pay a lot of money to have it built on, and have it designed so that trucks wouldn’t hit it when they pass and so on.
Customers Entering Your Store
What do you do with them? Do they stand there when they come in?
Do you take them to a little area that’s got a nice seat, a nice little table, and provide something for them to snack on while they wait?
Do you provide a magazine to read that isn’t like a doctor’s waiting room or is three years old? Things like that. Little thoughts, little impressions.
What Does Your Customer See?
What’s on the wall, are there any posters, does it look professional? Now we haven’t spent any money. I am telling you that this is very simple. But it looks like we’ve put some effort in.
Email Signature
When you send an email to somebody, what does your signature say? Does it just say, ‘Kind regards, Jon Butt.’?
I get so tired of getting messages from people where I want to actually click and look at their thing, and they even haven’t put a link in.
Go to www.wisestamp.com and get one of their email signatures, they are free. It looks professional for your company and you can have everybody use the same one, obviously with their name, their email.
Just go and see how it works. It’s very clever and integrates with all of the major email services like Gmail, live, outlook, all that kind of stuff.
That makes you instantly look more professional. And you can add a link, the marketing message, links to your social media.
Your Social Media
Do you have social media? When was the last update made? Is it three years ago? How professional does that look?
And you don’t have to use twitter every single day, but people will look you up on twitter. They will. It will be better to have no account at all then to have one that is not regularly updated.
What would it take? Every Monday, if you don’t want to do twitter or Facebook, what would it take every Monday to just put up some sort of update? Something.
Share something from somebody else. Anything.
If you don’t like doing it, ask if one of your staff knows how to do it and may enjoy doing it. So it’s all about you. But that looks professional.
Your Website
How about your website? When did you last look at your website? This is not the reason for this podcast because I do this every day.
But we are just about to launch our website one on one training course. Which shows you how you can update or replace you website with one that is easily updateable.
You can do it really cheap, without having to pay a marketing company. Marketing companies and web companies do not know as of all, how to build websites that actually do anything for you.
They just want to win awards for the design. I’ll explain that another time. But trust me, this costs are minimal and you’ll end up being able to do it yourself, or one of your staff.
If you can use email, if you can listen to this podcast, you can follow our step by step course. Believe me.
Your Car
Do you visit customers? What does your car look like? Is it really old? Is it old because you can’t afford one? Are you a cheapskate and you think, ‘oh, I have had it for years.’
You don’t have to go and lease yourself a Mercedes or BMW or Cadillac, but you can get yourself a modern car. Or you can wash it. Whatever it is, you need to present something.
If you are the boss of the company and are going to see a customer and you turn up in an old car, they’ll think that you and your company is not very successful.
Why would they want to follow you? And this is not that you must buy a new car, but it doesn’t cost much to lease some. Why wouldn’t you use a company expense?
Your Staff
What about your staff? Do your service engineers turn up in tatty old vans or trucks? Do your service staff wear uniform? How often do you replace the uniform? Is it embroidered with the logo?
Do they know how to wear it in your company style? Do you even mention a company style? Do you have one? Do they wash their vehicles?
Give them a budget for putting it through a car wash once a week. Or do you just think that they are going to do it home? I doubt it.
Do you tell them how to present themselves, what to say to a client? Because they are quite often the face of your company.
The customer may never meet you.
You may be impeccably turned out in your Armani suit or whatever it is, but if your service engineer is some overweight bloke with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth and his shirt not tucked in, your customer may get another impression of your company.
What is that going to present? Especially if his shirt is greased, faded, and old. What does that say about your company?
Signage
Is the vehicle sign written? Are your leaflets and brochures modern? If not, there’s places like Vista Print (www.vistaprint.com),or Moo.com (www.moo.com) to help you with that.
There are other places as well like — www.solopress.com in UK. They are very cheap to get stuff done. You can get it designed on Fiverr (www.fiverr.com).
You can go to www.creativemarket.com, graphic burger (www.graphicburger.com), and get ready done templates.
Give them to designer, because you don’t need to do it yourself. Just look at what you are presenting.
Business Card
Your business card says a lot about your business. Go to www.moo.com and just pick one of the pre-made designs. They’re fantastic. People, if you pick one, people will say, ‘Gosh that looks good.’
You want to give a professional opinion. I don’t think a lot of people realize how they look to the rest of us.
When you turn up for an appointment, even at your work when people come to see you take the time to make yourself look presentable.
If you’re on the internet, you may think it’s trendy to try and look like Mark Zuckerberg and wear flip flops and maybe a pair of shorts and a T shirt, and to say ‘huh, I am an internet person.’
But people still look at you and think, ‘Uh, really!’ You don’t have to wear a tie. You don’t have to wear a suit, but there are ways of looking presentable.
It’s not that hard.
Drive Time Podcast
Today is Thursday and that means it is time for a Drive Time Podcast. Today is a very good one, and I listen to this regularly.
It is the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Jon Jantsch. This podcast has been around forever. He has marketing system and it is fantastic.
He writes great books and he is very professional. He knows great people. So he gets to interview top authors when they’ve got new books coming out.
Which I think is a fantastic way of interviewing people.
Because they’ve got interesting things to say and talk about. Listen to his podcast. I guarantee you are going to learn stuff.
I think I’ve recommended his books before and I’ll be recommending him again. You should be following Jon Jantsch. The guy is genius. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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