How do you help customers discover you? How do you nurture them? How do you deliver? 3 key questions for small businesses to understand their Income Producing Activities. Deb Brown browsing in a Galveston, Texas, store. Photo by Becky McCray
Recently I was reviewing the different Income Producing Activities we do at SaveYour.Town, and divided them into these three buckets. I thought the same structure might help you in reviewing your own business.
The 3 key income-producing areas of your business are discovering, nurturing and delivering. Knowing these three keys will help you keep your activities in balance and help you focus on doing the right things in your business.
- How are people discovering your business?
- How are you nurturing people once they discover you until they buy, and then after they buy?
- How are you delivering your work?
You need to do some of each in order to keep your business afloat.
People have to find you in the first place. That’s the discovery part. This is your marketing, advertising, social presence, and everything you do to make yourself easy for customers to find.
For a local retail store, this is likely about having a listing in Google Maps/Local and building awareness with ads or other promotions.
For a rural-based freelancer, this is more about building awareness online. Sharing information on different channels to be everywhere people might be looking.
People have to hang around long enough to make a purchase, and then stay connected and come back for future purchases.
For a local store, once they walk in the door, they’ll probably buy something. But they may never come back if you don’t have a way to reach them again. This could be an email list or a customer Facebook Group that shares the latest updates and useful information to bring them back.
For service providers, you don’t have items on the shelves to sell. This is where an email list is a powerful tool. You can send regular updates, useful articles and build connections that keep people around and help them decide to buy from you.
You have to deliver what you promised. This is doing the work. It may seem obvious, but doing the work is a pretty high priority. But I’ve seen an awful lot of people who had paying work to do who were tweaking their header photo on Twitter instead.
I told you that story to tell you this one
Next week, I’ll share things not to do in your business, and I wanted you to think about these basics of what to do first.
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
