What Your Past Customers Still Think You Do
What Your Past Customers Still Think You Do
I've been going through my business piece by piece lately, and I keep running into an older version of it.
The title under my name on this blog is a good example. For years it read "Marketing and Operations Strategic Business Coach." It sat at the bottom of every article I published, and it stayed there even after it stopped describing what I do.
Today I'm a Business Growth & Marketing Consultant, and that title fits the work better. Everything I've coached or taught has been for small business owners, online or offline. Shops and offices were part of my work before the internet was. The words just changed depending on who I was talking to, so many people have only heard the version written for them. I still coach. I still teach marketing. Those are ways I do the work, and they were never all of it.
A title is easy to change. The picture in people's heads is another matter. Someone who found me online a few years ago may never have heard that I work with shops, offices or non-profits. Someone who knew me back then may not know what I do today. Neither will know unless I tell them, and I suspect the same is true in your business.
Every Business Leaves an Older Version Behind
People form their picture of your business at a particular moment. When they bought. When you met at an event. When someone described you to them.
That picture stays where it was formed, while your business keeps going. You add a service and let another one go. You learn who you help best. You change how you work.
So the customer from your first year may still think of you as the woman who sold one particular thing. The client who moved across town may assume you still do exactly what you did the day she left. None of them is wrong. They're working from the last information they had.
The part worth noticing is that we help keep the older version alive. It's on the Facebook page you set up in your second year. It's on your Google listing, the sign in the window, your email signature, and in the sentence you say when someone at a chamber lunch asks what you do. Each of those made sense when you wrote it. Then the business changed, and nobody went back to update them because you were busy running it.
The Old Version Still Sends You Work
An out-of-date picture has a cost that most of us never connect to it. It keeps bringing you the old business.
Picture a bakery owner who has moved toward wedding and event cakes, which she enjoys and which pay better. Her regular customers still ask about the cookie trays she's been trying to make less of. Most of the calls are about cookie trays too. It would be easy for her to decide that's simply what people want from her. But those customers are asking for the bakery she told them about years ago.
The same thing happens in a service business. Someone who hired you for one project keeps sending you people who need that same project, even after you've moved toward work you'd rather be doing. She's trying to help, and she's sending what she remembers.
The customer who needs what you do now is the harder loss to notice. She doesn't call, and you never find out she could have.
An Update Can Be Small
Updating the picture doesn't mean throwing it out. Some of what people remember about you is still true and worth keeping. Marketing is still a big part of what I do, and I have no plans to pretend otherwise. You only need to tell people what's different.
An update is anything that has changed in your business that the people who know you would find useful to hear.
If you own a shop or a salon, it might be a new service, a different product line, new hours, or a change in who you serve best. If you provide a service online or from home, it might be a new focus, a refined offer, or a change in the kind of client you work with best.
The change may feel small to you. To someone hearing it for the first time, it may be the reason she comes back.
"Your business has changed. The people who know you may not have heard." -Dawn Hogan
Where To Start This Week
Pick one place people see often: the first page of your website, your Facebook page, your Google listing, or the sign by your door.
Read it as if you last did business with yourself three years ago.
Mark the first thing that's no longer true, or that leaves out what you most want people to know now.
Change that one thing.
Then add one line to the next thing your customers will see from you, whether that's an email, a receipt, or a note by the register. Something like: New here this year: [what has changed].
Your business kept going while people were busy with their own lives. Give them a chance to catch up.
Want Help Describing What You Do Now?
I'm opening a few free Reliable Revenue Audits before the end of the year. It's a 30-minute conversation about where your business is today, what I see, and what I'd focus on first. If you're not sure how to describe what you do now or who to tell, we can start there. [Book a free Reliable Revenue Audit]
