A former full stack developer turned digital marketing specialist focusing on big data, Saas, news media and high-traffic websites. Scott is the founding partner at Vetti Media, a team of marketers with over 15 years of experience in digital publishing. He has a degree in Political Science and Government from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
Scott Jordan is expert in Media Consulting and Web Development. In this blog, you will know how to start and market your business in a recession.
First, you need to know who you are trying to help.
To answer this question, you need to:
- Clearly define the scope of your services. Only focus on what you’re best at.
- Identify the cost of your services and your typical customer.
- Encourage repeat business. How often people would need your services and what is the long term value of a client?
You got to think who are you targeting and who are you trying to help? What is the goal of your business aside from making money?
In the beauty industry, there’s a lot of different things you can do as people tend to pay specifically for specialists and so this is the defining scope of your services. You can’t be good at every little thing because if they want something done right they’re going to go to someone who’s really good at exactly what they want and so you need to think a lot about that.
You need to know your skills, your expertise and start your own job.
Build-up a clientele and eventually turn that clientele into a full scale advertising agency marketing. It’s basically word-of-mouth.
Second, is to know the cost of your services. Who is a typical customer? You need to be really specific as these people will help you figure out who you are going to reach in the future. These people who do microblading and return to you or come back to you for your services will bring more people with them. So these people could potentially be worth thousands of dollars. Figuring out who these people are is worth your time. And on a long term basis you are looking for a lifetime value for customers who are really important.
In service jobs, your most valuable asset is TIME. So spend your time creating VALUE.
Things may be bad right now or they could be a lot worse in the future. We’ll never know. But there are a lot of opportunities out there. All you need to do is to SEIZE THIS OPPORTUNITY CORRECTLY then you can even flourish coming out of the recession.
How do you get your business going and how can you utilize the most effective and also the cheapest lead source available ?
The Pareto Principle also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. 20% of the work you do up front will pay dividends down the road, relationships last. 80% of it is profit you will get from new customers as referrals start coming in, you have the opportunity to earn more referrals from these new customers. One customer or key friendship will turn into many customers. Then you will gain recurring business as these people will come back again to avail your services.
You have to make yourself do it. Reach out to at least 3 people a day.
The more you do that, the more you establish these little habits and the more benefit you will reap in the end So you’ll realize that your best clients are CLIENTS GENERATED FROM REFERRALS.
Why? Because you’ve built TRUST, through PERSONAL CONNECTIONS, plus it’s FREE advertising.
So how do you go about generating more referrals during downturns in the economy?
First, provide VALUE. Everything you do should be about helping others. If you help others, they will turn around to help you. You need to provide information to people about things that they need to know or are struggling with. Be the first one to provide them the kind of information they are looking for.
Then MAKE NEW FRIENDS. Think of other businesses that cater to the same customers, that do not compete with you, but your relationship with them can be mutually beneficial.
For example, hair salons, nail salons, spa services, plastic surgery clinics, makeup stores, estheticians, bridal shops, wedding planners, photographers and high end retail. Think of incentives that would encourage them to help you.
You can also DRIVE NEW LEADS. You can do this by offering:
- Free Services
- Targeted Discounts
- Customer Feedback Programs
- Package Services
- Apprenticeship Programs
To make this special, you can either create personalized videos. You can also try giving them percentage discounts when they give you a review. You can also package your service by teaming up with other businesses from the beauty industry. In this kind of promotion, you and your partners are both sharing revenue and you could attract more people to visit your salon. And if you’re working in the beauty space, an apprenticeship program is also another way to get referrals.
Since you know already what your services or your products will be. Where you sell your products or services matters.
So these are the platforms you can use from the least expensive to the most expensive:
- Squarespace
- Shopify
- WordPress
- Custom
And some tools you’ll need to make all of these possible:
- Callrail.com – for tracking phone calls
- Rebrandly.com – for tracking vanity links / urls
- Clickmeter.com – another tool for tracking links
- Zapier.com – for connecting everything together
And to be able to track you sales, you may use any of the following:
- Vanity domains – custom URL’s for your business
- Vanity Links – links on your main domain such as Rebrandly, Clickmeter or Prettylinks
- Vanity Phone Numbers – track calls and SMS such as Callrail
Last thing you need to do is NURTURE YOUR RELATIONSHIPS. You need to follow up with your lead sources. It is very crucial and very important that you stay fresh in their mind. You can set automated text messages, emails, or schedules for following up. That way you won’t forget to reach out and you keep them engaged.
Watch the replay of Scott’s talk here: https://youtu.be/dp5vP7Z0lPs
