Second post of the Small Business Blogging 101 (SBB101) series.
You understand that blogging is a tool. It’s not a magic wand, a secret formula, or an esoteric social media gizmo that only the new-new marketing gurus can use properly.
It’s just a tool, and one that you can easily learn how to use, effectively, for your small business.
- The first step is defining the job to be done with this blogging tool.
- The second step is identifying the intermediate steps that will get the job done.
- The third step is figuring out how to use the tool to get those intermediate steps done.
- The fourth step is hammering away: using the tool, one step at a time, until the job is done.
Not so complicated. It’s a process, but it’s only a four-step process. And the first step is so easy, we can do it right now.
Yesterday I laid out several “jobs” that a blog can help you do:
- It can help you attract new customers to your business.
- It can help you keep the customers you already have.
- It can help you sell more to the customers you get.
- It can help you get back the customers you lost.
Eventually, you can (and will!) build a blog that is accomplishing all of these jobs at once. For starters, though, let’s pick just one.
Which one of those four options will give your business the biggest boost?
Focus on attracting new customers if you’ve saturated the local market, your sales are steady but not increasing, your customer base is dwindling, and/or you’re a relatively new business needing to build a solid customer base.
Focus on keeping the customers you already have if you’re a solid business with a good reputation, your sales are slowing or stagnating, you’re losing out to competitors, and/or you haven’t done much (if anything) to build loyalty with the customer base you have.
Focus on selling more to the customers you have if you’ve got some good methods of getting new customers already, you’re busy but not increasing in profitability, your profit margins are too slim to support operations, and/or you know you’re missing up-sell opportunities.
Focus on getting back the customers you lost if you’ve been hit hard by the competition, the market is changing and your customers are drifting away, you’ve had poor management or customer service issues knock out your customer base, and/or you’ve let big clients slip away through your own neglect.
Which one matters most to your business right now? That’s the one to focus on. There will be time to focus on the others later.
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at those intermediate steps, and that’s where things start getting fun.
