You may not know it, but you could be hiding from your customers. The question of the day most marketers are asking small business is “Are your customers finding you?” I ask that, too. It’s a good question, and many companies really don’t understand what it takes to be located by their online customers-to-be.
Sometimes, it’s all in how you express it.
The better question is really, “Are you hiding from your customers?” Of course, no one thinks they would deliberately hide from their customers, but do you realize that’s what is happening when your contact and connection information is cumbersome to find or even non-existent?
First of all, consider the locations your business has a presence online. Hopefully, you’re not trusting your company website to do all the work for you without putting it out there.
7 Places Your Business Should be Active
- MerchantCircle.com
- Yelp.com
- Google Places
- Yahoo Local Business Listing
- Bing Local Business Center
- Twitter
- Facebook
Now take a look at your website for contact information. What good is it if all of those 7 places know your website address, but people still can’t reach you? Have you considered the different reasons they might need to reach you, and made it easy for them to get an answer?
Some very big names make that mistake. As a matter of fact, I’ve left help requests for MerchantCircle.com that were never answered concerning my MerchantCircle newsletter. I have practically quit sending one out through them because of the difficulty getting the code right.
Yahoo.com accidentally updated my local business listing over 100 times. It took forever to find the contact information to get them to quit sending me updates. Your inbox has limits, you know. After a day and a half, I finally figured out how to reach them and they controlled it immediately. There was no place to address the issue, only a FAQs page, and my issue was not on the list. How does a problem get resolved like that?
Is it possible that you’re hiding, too?
Check a few things:
- You should have a contact page, with complete contact information from your email, to your phone, to your business address, and even the names of other appropriate contacts.
- You should have all your social media handles displayed prominently for others to communicate with your business.
- Customer service problem resolution should be more than an email request. Make sure you have phone numbers for your visitors and times of availability listed.
- Do you use so many information fields in your contact form that no one will fill it out?
By the way, business cards can have the same problem. All of your contact information should be available on your business card. My mantra, “There should never be anyone who can’t find me with the resources I’ve paid to have available so they could.” Second to that is making sure those resources are in the right places.
I mean, think about it. A highly-functional, SEO website and professionally designed business cards cost some serious bucks. They’d better make it ultra-easy to
1. find me and
2. reach me…
or what’s the point?
Read Michael A. Cox’s hilarious post in Practical E-Commerce:
Quit Hiding From the Customers!
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