Small Business Owners – How to Create Your Ultimate Promise to Your Customers

The backbone of every successful small business marketing plan is the Unique Selling Proposition (USP).  Before you can create your USP, you must create the ultimate promise that you can make to your customers.  The promise that is so good, they will feel obligated to do business with you.

The ultimate promise will be the biggest promise that you can make your customer, and still be able to follow through, without putting undue hardship upon your business.  You do not want to promote next day delivery of a product that takes you 10 days to make.  If your promise will cause you to sink millions of dollars into new equipment and resources just to fulfill it, then you may need to scale it back a bit.

What you do want to create, is the biggest possible promise that you can give you customer, a promise that is also not filled by you competition.  This can be very tricky, especially if you are in a commodity-type business, where you are competing on price, such as a gas station or an office supply store.  What is a promise that you can make to your customers that goes above and beyond price alone?  What kind of promise can you make to your customers that will make them want to buy from you?

To create your ultimate promise, you will want to make a list of reasons that people become return customers at your business.  Do they come back for the service, specify which service. Do they come back for the dessert or the way you double-check each order before it leaves the shop?  Do they come back because you offer free childcare while the customer gets an oil change?  Look around at your competition.  Maybe you can slightly alter a process that you currently do, and create an atmosphere that no one else can give.

Make your list.  Try to think of at least 10-20 things that you can promise your customers when they visit your business, on-line or off.  Pick the absolute best, most bold promise that you can make.  This will be your basic building block to creating your Unique Selling

Proposition.

Word of mouth is the single, most powerful way to get customers beyond any other method.  Word of mouth is the free adverting that your customers give out to family and friends, because they enjoy your product so much, or they need to have other people buy the product in order to enjoy the product themselves.

A happy customer will ring the register for you many more times than even the smartest marketing campaign. Why, for the simple reason that people are going to trust the opinions of their friends and family much more than yours’.

In order for your product to spread via word off mouth, your product has to be viral.  A viral product is something that the person can’t wait to tell another person about, or a friend has to have the other half in order to have any fun with the product, such as calling circles with certain cell phone carriers.  These are excellent examples of viral products, because in order to get free calling in the calling circle, all of your friends have to have the same phone provider.

Another way to create a word of mouth atmosphere is to have a Unique Selling Proposition that creates an offer so individual to that business, that you are the only one that can provide the service. Your USP will show credibility to a prospective customer, will show how you are going to take away their pain (whatever it may be), and if written well, will remove most of the fear of the purchase decision.

When you couple unique, desperately-needed service, with a viral product and a solid USP, word of mouth will be much easier to come by. Word of mouth does take a certain amount of luck.  There is no way to force people to recommend something to their friends, but you can provide the perfect environment for such recommendations. Here are some quick tips to help increase word of mouth:

-Provide an atmosphere for word of mouth using coupons where the customer has to bring a friend to get a discount.

-If you are an on-line business, make it easy to send your page to a friend with a big “send page to a friend” button.

-Reward people handsomely for referring people to your business.  You can have a step-wise program that gives higher levels of reward to people that bring in more paying customers.

-Provide unprecedented customer service, especially if you are in a service-related industry.  Every employee needs to follow this as well.  A single bad experience by an employee having a bad day could cost you, not only that customer, but their 5-10 friends that may be told not to frequent your business as well.

Word of mouth has grown to be so important that there are companies that track word of mouth, or WOM units, which score a business on how viral a product is to spread via word of mouth.