Small Business Marketing Ideas – Preselling From Your Office Lobby

Do you have a brick and mortar office location or retail location that you customers come in to? Then you could be pre-selling your customers on your products and services before they actually even meet with you.

Your first impressions are critical in any business. Just like your first image of how you dress, your office should have the same image when a client comes in your door. A clean and professional look and feel will really make a difference in your customer’s eyes.

But… what about your office design actually pre-selling your customers? Most businesses don’t think about this. Just like every other piece of your marketing mix, your office is just one more thing that must sell your product or service for you. It’s another tool in your marketing arsenal and should not be left out of your marketing plan.

Here are a few things you can do to make your office waiting room really stand out and pre-sell your products and service to anyone that comes in before you even walk up and shake their hand.

Do you know some local celebrities? You should have your photos with them in your office. This gives the customer a better feeling of celebrity endorsement. Even if they don’t use your service or product it will make the customer more comfortable with you as a person. People aren’t going to trust you right away. This is just one thing to help them see that you aren’t a fly by night.

You could frame testimonials and photos of other happy customers. This adds social proof to your business and the prospect sees that other people have been happy with your results already so they too will be likely to be very happy with the results you offer them.

How many times have you been in a waiting room and seen a stack of magazines from all walks of life sitting there for you to read? This is a convenience that the business provides for you while you are waiting but is it really helping the business?

For your business, try replacing those magazines with industry magazines specific to your products and services. Do you have brochures and articles about your products and services? Add those to the collection of reading material you provide for your prospects to read. And as your prospect is in the waiting room, they may start reading those brochures and flyers and then ask about a specific product you have because they were pre-educated and pre-sold about that product.

You could also replace those generic magazines with customer case studies that go in to details on the before and after experience your happy customers had and how you helped them. Give them the details and show that your products or services work. The more specific you are, the more the prospect reading the case study will believe what you have to say and trust you moving forward.

How easy is that?

By making just a few small changes to your office lobby, you are making a much different impression to the customers and prospects that walk in your door. Give the prospects that walk in your door an avalanche of proof that you are the expert and the best choice for them. You can eliminate most, if not all of, their objections and fear of choosing you to work with in the first place. A simple redesign your lobby or waiting room for your business is just one cost effective tool to increase sales and help market your small business.

One of the things Sears Roebuck is famous for is their Craftsmen tools, especially their mechanical socket wrenches. Once, while buying one of these, I was confronted with the options of “Good,” “Better” and “Best,” a strategy for which Sears is also famous. Asking about the difference, I was told that the Best model had more notches, or teeth, inside the mechanism, allowing for finer adjustments when tightening a bolt or nut. Plus, in a tight situation, the extra notches make the Best model work, well, best.

For the past 30 years, the marketplace has increasingly become like that “Best” socket wrench; every year, it acquires more notches. Except in the marketplace, notches are called niches (I prefer “nitch,” but some say “neesh” – tomato, tomahto). And just as more notches in a mechanical wrench allow for finer adjustments, niches create finer and more elegant ways to serve customers, which they like – a lot.

As niches have increased in number, so have entrepreneurial opportunities, resulting in the most dramatic expansion of the small business sector in history. It’s difficult to say which one is the egg and which is the chicken: Have entrepreneurs taken advantage of niche opportunities presented to them, or have they carved out niches while pushing the envelope of an industry? The answer is not either/or, it’s both/and.

Webster defines niche as, “a place or position perfectly suited for the person or thing in it.” If ever a concept was “perfectly suited” for something, it is the niche and a small business. Indeed, as one small business owner creates a new niche, another is creating a niche within a niche. It’s a beautiful thing.

Rebecca Boenigk (Bay-nik) is the president of Neutral Posture, Inc., a Texas small business founded by her and her mother 20 years ago. Rebecca and 75 employees manufacture REALLY comfortable and ergonomically correct office chairs. She told me that her business is doing “just fine in 2009” because they fill a niche, instead of trying to be all things to all people.

In the future, there won’t be more mass marketing, mass media or mass distribution. But there will be more niches – lots of new niches.

Don’t worry; “mass” business models aren’t going away anytime soon. But they won’t grow like niches. And that’s good news for small business and the future of 21st century entrepreneurship.

More niches mean a healthier small business sector, which I happen to believe is also good for the world.

Write this on a rock… “Most small businesses will find success in the future by creating and serving niches.”