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Home » Business And Finance Articles » How Small Businesses Build A Customer Base

How Small Businesses Build a Customer Base

Building a solid customer base is a necessity of any small business. Often times these smaller businesses cannot compete effectively with larger companies in terms of resources. For example, Tom's mini-Mart is not going to be a match for Farmer Jack's Grocery Chain. The later will beat them in parking, prices and variety every time! Therefore, there must be something more than just price to attract and retain customers. The good news is that many small businesses have benefits that larger companies don't have. They thrive in the realm of the "something else" that larger companies simply can't accommodate.

The first step in building a customer base is to define who your customer is. This is called a psychological profile. Take a piece of paper and write down the qualities that many of your customers have. Make sure to include hobbies, personality, income, employment states, distance from store, etc. Then go through and circle the qualities that seem to fit the majority of your customers the best.

The next step is to use the psychological profile to develop a marketing plan on how to reach your population in the most cost effective manner. For example, if many of your customers live within the same neighborhood, have children engaged in local sports and are pressed for time then your marketing plan should try and appeal to them. You may decide to stop by the local baseball game and give away free drinks, offer local delivery, give discounts for family members, or send flyers door-to-door.

Once you know who your customer is and how to reach them you must determine how to write your advertisements. For our busy neighborhood consider the following, "Mom's we know you are busy. That's why Tom's mini-Mart wants to give you a break. Call us and we will deliver your supper groceries in less than 30 minutes. If you don't feel like cooking, then we will send you a family size delicious homemade meal fresh from our deli department." The object is to write the advertisement so that it helps solve the problems of people in your market. If it makes them feel sad, happy or more convenient then you have done well.

Small businesses can compete because they are more convenient. Many times customers avoid large chains because they take so much time to navigate. Small business also has the ability to truly give good customer service. If you are unsure of how to maximize your marketing efforts then hire a good small-business consultant that charges reasonable fees.

And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Seven Deadly Trading Mistakes - Part Four

Right - we've looked at strategies and planning, so now we're ready to trade right? Wrong! At least, we're not ready to trade live.

Mistake Number Four - Not Testing

Trading is a great business, it offers potential levels of income and freedom that most people can only dream of. So it's quite natural that having got the groundwork out of the way, the novice trader is eager to get clicking those buy and sell buttons and see the profits roll in. But hang on - the preparation isn't over yet!

Imagine for a moment that you decided you wanted to become an airliner pilot. You spent time and effort researching the type of aircraft you were going to pilot, you read some books on how to fly, and one day you found yourself in the cockpit at the end of the runway. Clearly, without having actually taken some time to learn how to fly this machine full of passengers, trying to take off would be a disaster! So why is it so many traders believe they can read a book about trading and then leap into the market without first getting some experience?

If you were going for the pilots job, you'd take a training programme which would undoubtedly see you getting some no-risk experience in a flight simulator. This would give you the opportunity to make all of your early mistakes without crashing a few seriously expensive airplanes in the process.

As traders, we are very fortunate in that we, like airline pilots, can practise and hone our skills in a risk-free environment. Indeed we have the added benefit that we can simulate our activity with high degrees of realism at little or no financial cost at all.

I am of course talking about "paper trading". In the most basic sense of the term, paper trading means that we follow our trading plan exactly as if we were going to put real money into the market, but at the point where we would actually buy or sell, we simply make a note of the current price instead of opening a live trade. We would continue to manage the trade exactly as if we had real money in the market, and would exit accordingly, again writing down the exit price.

Going a step further from pen and paper, today's internet-generation trader can take advantage of software simulators like TSim+, which imitate a live trading platform. These programs have the advantage of making the paper trading experience much more realistic; they also cannot be cheated in the same way as a note on a piece of paper, that is to say we cannot conveniently decide to erase a trade we later decide was a mistake!

There are some who believe that paper trading is not worthwhile as it can never reproduce the emotional stresses that are involved in live trading. Whilst that is true to a certain extent, I would argue that if you are not sufficiently proficient at executing your trading plan in a simulator, why would you be able to do so with real money?

Paper trading gives us a great opportunity to put into practise what we have learnt, test new strategies, and tune our skills with no risk. Once a trader can consistently show a profit on a simulator, they are ready to take the next step - live trading. Again, this is not something to be rushed, and again, like airline pilots we can work our way up to this.

Just as the pilot is probably not going to make his first flight in a jumbo jet, neither do we as traders need to take a full-size trade when we start for real. If trading equities (shares), we can buy and sell very small amounts at almost negligible cost. If trading futures, we can usually start with "mini" contracts which are valued at a fraction of the price of a full size version. Whilst this limits our profit potential as we take our first steps in the live market, it very importantly also limits our potential losses.

With the huge array of software tools available to us, along with discount brokers offering cheap trading instruments, there is no need for any trader to get seriously burned on their first outing into the market.

Action: We must commit to testing and practising our trading in a risk-free environment before putting our capital into the live market. Only when we can show consistent profit on a simulator should we move on to trading real money, and then only in small doses.