Building a Business on a Shoestring Budget
When we started jiveSYSTEMS, we had little more than 3 people who had faith in our vision to put the human element back into marketing, and a small capital infusion from one of my family members. From the outside, it looked as though we had a lot stacked against us. However, we know that we have a winning formula.
Here are the 3 primary components of our winning formula:
- Engage our members (customers)
- Identify and empower our advocates
- Give our community a voice
Let’s break the 3 components to our winning formula down:
Engage your members
To engage someone you need their attention. However, many people are subject to information overload. This causes them to filter more and more. We reach out to every single member that signs-up for a free test-drive with a welcome call, along with offering them a 1-on-1 training and strategy session. Our goal is not to overwhelm them with the versatility of our system, it is simply to help them identify and implement our service to get results, immediately—this gets their attention!
Identify and empower your advocates
I could bore you with graphs and statistics on this subject, but it would not increase the impact of my message and I know your time is valuable. A certain percentage of your members will be using your product/service like crazy! These are your advocates. Design a system to identify them and then build a relationship—they will become an invaluable source of information and your social media sales force.
Give your community a voice
You can approach this from many angles. Since we have a blog, I felt the best way to give our members a voice was to publish their success stories to our blog. Everybody uses our service in a slightly different way, so I really enjoy hearing what our members have to say. Sure, we have found some commonalities like following a first phone call with a video email recap of your conversation, and creating an evergreen bio video and linking to it in your email signature. However, the usage of web video in your marketing is only limited by your creativity. We and our members are finding new ways, almost daily, to leverage our service. The key here is to assiduously listen and respond to your customers needs—alone this strategy has brought companies back from the ashes and turned start-ups into empires.
Conclusion
There are many things you can do to grow your business, each one adding yet another to-do to your list. Not all growth is created equal. By engaging your customers, identifying and empowering your advocates, and giving your community a voice you are pretty much guarantying the success of your business in a very efficient and effective way. You will also notice that none of the 3 components of our winning formula cost any money to implement above your time and a genuine interest in the success of your customers.
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