There’s no better way to get customers beating a path to your door than to be regarded as an expert in your field. We have all visited businesses only to come away disappointed because of the lack of knowledge and understanding of the person we talked to. Unfortunately that was sometimes the latest, newest employee who was just finding their feet, but honestly they shouldn’t have been let loose on customers until they had the necessary training in the firm’s processes and product knowledge. Even the most sympathetic of us, and that I must admit doesn’t include me, tends to come away with a much diminished impression of that potential supplier.

Never Stop Learning

Over two thousand years ago Aristotle was credited with saying that excellence was the result of training and habituation. Leaning the job and delivering to the standard every time. We can do no worse than follow his advice which is even more relevant today with our demanding customers. Learning from private study, attending seminars and workshops and on the job training, at Nelly’s elbow, as it used to be known when Nelly knew exactly how it should be done, is vital.

When that expertise is established there’s no better way to let the customer know of that expertise than the blog; a regular well-written blog that establishes your and your team’s credentials as experts in your sector. Each blog can cover a different topic in sufficient depth to demonstrate your breadth of knowledge, without providing the sort of do-it-yourself guide that would make you redundant, but giving prospective customers the confidence to ask you to do the work for them.

Advertise Your Business for Free

Today even the smallest businesses can create a website of their own for little or no cost; the blog could even become the landing page for your domain name creating an ever-changing and interactive home page for your business. Your blog could become a regular portal to a huge range of information sources that would bring potential customers back to your site time and time again.

Many businesses lose trade, not from less than perfect service or not particularly competitive pricing but because they don’t keep in touch with their customers. You can give your customers the opportunity to have an emailed notification when new material appears on your blog, which keeps reminding them of your expertise and brings them back to your door in a spending mood. It also helps to prevent your competitors slipping in by default because you have been forgotten. Providing the icons on your blog for readers to link to Facebook or Twitter will encourage the sort of viral marketing environment that has your readers passing on details of your business to their contacts.

Modern Methods Allied to Experience

This article is a distillation of many years practical experience in the real business world where every penny had to be made to work hard and two wouldn’t be spent if one would do. The world has changed beyond recognition since I joined the family firm, when Elvis Presley starred in Jailhouse Rock, and Paul McCartney and John Lennon met for the first time before forming the Beatles.

Conclusion

I might be considered living history by some and in fact a young lady in one of my business planning workshops this week was shocked when I admitted that one of my business email addresses had been in use since ’92 or ’93, admitting in turn that she had only been born in 1991. Despite this I have been learning something new every day and hope that my readers are getting value from my comments on modern methods filtered through years of experience.