I have good advertising and marketing and excellent skills just no clients
Obviously, something doesn't compute
Two areas to look at.
1. New customer acquisition - In this era of everything on the Internet, people think they just need a website or a facebook page. Guess what, these are just like having an entry in the white pages of the phone book or a single line entry in the yellow pages. Everybody has one.
That would be called Advertising.
Making contacts and promoting yourself is called Marketing. And, that's done in dozens of different ways.
A car with a decal about your business, custom license plates, etc. give you mobile advertising. If the vehicle outshines everything around it, people will notice that you do fine work. If you're driving around in a dirty, dented, rusted vehicle that's not going to help.
Every person you meet is a potential client. Act accordingly.
2. Customer retention - Once you have a client, you need them to become a "raving fan" of your business. If you take care of them once, and they never return, you are doing something very wrong.
I can't tell you what that is. You need to analyze your interactions and determine why they don't return. They selected you once, and your job is to keep them coming back.
Businesses that successfully grow do it by referrals. In the consumer business, that's people talking about you to their friends, relatives, and business associates.
Happy customers get you more business very quickly. I don't always know about it up front, but I've found out as time passes that many of my new customers are actually referrals from existing customers.
I have a lot of business IT customers. In fact, so many that I don't do residential computer services at all, other than helping my business customers (and their employees) on their home computers. Why do I do that? Because those employees will most likely end up at another business sooner or later, and when someone asks "who do we call?" they recommend
ME.
Since I polished up my car (it was really just practice for my wife's Pathfinder restoration), many of them have asked me if I will do their cars as well. Since most of them know I'm busy 7 days a week, and nights too, I just laugh. Not really looking to make a career change.
I've referred the first of them to Wills (Windows and Wheels). I already know the quality of his work from the photos on this forum. He'll get two cars out of that referral, and most likely a lot of additional referrals from the client. So, his posts on this forum caught my eye, and it will get him some more work to do. I bet he didn't even realize he was "marketing".
Examine what you are doing. When you have a new customer, you should be re-inforcing your services.
1. Before you begin, tell them exactly what you are going to do.
2. Do the work.
3. When the customer comes to pick up the car, spend a few minutes reminding them what you did in detail. Don't just hand them the car and say "here you go" and collect the money.
Jim
