The Lockdown has change everything, including the way we do business. During periods of confinement, traders were the most disadvantaged for two reasons:
1. The fragility of finances that do not allow you to have a digital presence, as well as the time to manage a store and a website.
2. The knowledge to set up an eCommerce site and especially to give it visibility, combined with the fact that merchants rely on their local presence to meet customers without having to have a customer file.
The digitization of a business was not initially a priority, but the periods of lockdown have changed the situation, with a forced march towards digital.
However, opening an eCommerce store and selling on marketplaces (Amazon, Uber Eats, etc.) is not enough and will only be a side business.
A local business must base its strengths on its local presence while making the best use of digital (click & collect, Drive, take-out, etc.).
This means exploiting as a priority its local notoriety, that is to say:
This means exploiting as a priority its local notoriety. This can be achieved by
1. Contact existing customers: retrieve emails, mobile numbers, etc. In short, take a look at all of their files (in particular to identify “top customers”).
2. Make flyers to present your online store and distribute them in your catchment area to make yourself visible again.
3. Contact its customers via Facebook (via a local Facebook ads, or even by manually contacting all the people who liked, commented … a publication on the Facebook page).
4. Use Instagram with # about your city (ex: # colombes # nice…) and publish photos of your products with prices.
5. Put on your window the address of its website by highlighting promotions, top products, and drive.
6. Identify local Facebook groups (eg parents of city students…) in order to present your offer to them (eg parents of students with smart game offers…)
7.Use local classifieds sites (like Jiji) and selling products on sale.
8. Make Facebook Live with other merchants to pool your offers and mutually present your products.
How To Know Who To Sell To
To sell to everyone is to sell to no one!
This is the greatest of all the questions you need to answer before you can make sales. Your typical customer is called the “persona”. By defining a persona, you will better prepare your marketing actions.
You will re focus your promotions and advertisements on the products and services you are going to offer.
For example if you have a restaurant and your target is the worker, you will have to offer a menu adapted to the average budget of a worker to eat at noon (for example taking into account the average of the restaurant ticket) as well as the food that you are going to offer (traditional and nutritious dishes)
If you have a toy store, your cycle is undoubtedly the friends who want to give toys for a birth, for a birthday… and therefore you have to put yourself in the shoes of this prospect: what does he want? what are his problems?
You must therefore start by (re) defining your typical customer, your persona to know how you are going to respond to them.
You must verify that what you think about your typical client, because often we tend to think something of a typical client, and in the end realize that this is not true.
Here’s how to verify if your typical customer is the correct one.
This analysis will allow you to reflect on your action plan, by carrying out reflection work and answering the following questions:
1. What problems will my product solve for my prospects? What are my clients’ expectations? What do we need?
2. Why are they going to buy from me and not elsewhere? How do they “name” the product that I am going to sell them?
3. Who are my clients : Who is my core target and who are the more “occasional” clients? Who is the decision-maker in the purchase?
4. What is my catchment area and how profitable is it for my prospects? Where do my clients go? Where can they see my ads?
5. Who are the prescribers? Are there people or companies who can advise my customers to buy my products? If so, is their activity linked to the use of my product?
6. How does my offer differ from my competitors, what is my difference or my positioning, what would I like to highlight?
7. What media do my future customers read?Do they have specific habits?
Once this preliminary work is done, you should already know your customers better , what to say, and how to say it.
The goal is to be able to fill in the following diagram on your prospects:
What he thinks and feels
What he hears
What he says and does
What he sees and smells
Its problems and its benefits
Once you know who your customer is, and what they want, you can start to imagine your communication plan.
