Dear fwm: Christina Blenk Offers Marketing Suggestions for a Small Business Owner

Dear fwm,

I am a small business owner. I have a gutter cleaning company. Once I get clients I always retain them due to my work ethic. The problem I have is advertising and getting my name out there. I have had tremendous difficulty in getting clients after advertising several different ways. As a single mom with three kids, no child support, and a mortgage, I have to put food on the table. Any suggestions for what works?

Amy M.
ProPerfection

Hello, Amy! Thanks for posing this question to us—we’re sure that you will find just the advice you need from our expert contributors and of course from our community—many of whom are small business owners just like you.

We’ve decided to ask an expert to jump in here and provide a few pointers. Meet fwm Expert Contributor Christina Blenk, President and CEO of WomanOwned.com and a business owner herself (she also founded afsweb.net).

Here are a few suggestions for you:

First, you should get listed on http://www.angieslist.com if it covers your area and have your clients who love you rate you highly. It’s a great way to get those direct referrals for a business like yours.

Second, if you have a bit of money and are able to purchase some advertising such as Google Adwords, you’ll need to focus just on your city – which will save a lot of money.

Third, I don’t see that you have a web site--you could use an inexpensive system like Yahoo’s to get something started. Good pictures will be the best thing you can do for your business to tell the story. Clogged v. unclogged.

Fourth, I had a client who installed decks and got great response from a cheap flyer that he would print up and put in mailboxes in neighborhoods where the houses were nice. He said that was the best marketing he could do.

Becoming a “local expert” works if you know that the local paper might run a story on you. You could call the little local paper (they are doing much better with readership than the big ones and will actually talk to a business person) and see what they think of the story idea. Something like “Avoid costly gutter and landscape damage “ or “How gutter cleaning service will save you money and frustration in the long run” would be great article ideas to bring exposure to your business.

It sounds as if you have mastered rule #1: Take excellent care of your current customers!

Best of luck to you!
Christina Blenk

Recovery Matters

Life has its little annoyances, but few bother me more than The Cliché. Of course, every office has that one person who has a trite expression for every circumstance (“Hey! Working hard or hardly working?”), but that’s a whole other blog post. Today I’d like to muse about one of those times when I must admit that a cliché is absolutely true:

Problems can be opportunities.

There is no arena in which this resounds more than Customer Service. And of course, no matter what your business is, it is likely that you have customers. Every day presents an opportunity to make them happy. Bear this in mind: Every problem presents an opportunity to blow them away with great service. The recovery is far more important than the mistake.

Here’s a small example. I once made an error with a customer (it happens) by promising them a phone call from a higher-up in my company, and then failing to communicate this to said higher up. The customer actually had to get back in touch with me to follow up and see why no one had called! I did two things: sent a genuine apology and promised to make it right. I didn’t make it right, though---I made it better than right. I asked my superior to get his superior (a celebrity and heavy-hitter in business) in on this, which he did, and together they made contact, on a Saturday, and basically showed this customer that she mattered. She saw how we hustled, and she ended up much happier than if I had never made the mistake in the first place.

People expect to be made happy and get what they paid for; it should be the baseline level of service in any organization. Being blown away by great service, however, is different and this is what makes people remember you and tell others about you. Since a happy customer may tell one or two people about their experience and an UNhappy customer will tell an average of ten people, this tells me that we need a new statistic on what happens to those who experience great service in the form of recovery from a mistake or problem. I’ll bet they tell more than one or two people about you.

Since we’re sharing…fair is fair and I’ve told you MY mistake…tell us your great service story! Whether you were the customer or the service provider, we want to hear all about it.