January 2019 – Building Relationships Breakfast – Woodinville Chamber
The morning of January 10, 2019 saw approximately 30 members of the Woodinville Chamber and guests attend the monthly “Building Relationships Breakfast” hosted by Chamber Platinum Member Fairwinds-Brittany Park.
The speaker was Christopher Burgess, the Executive Director of the Chamber.
He noted, how patrons are our businesses life’s blood, without them few of us would remain in business. We do our best to know who our customers are, what they want, and how they want it.
With this information, we strive to provide the goods or services which align with their expectations. In doing so, we rely on our own marketing efforts, as well as the most powerful marketing method of all, the word of that very customer.
Christopher discussed three areas he considered low hanging fruit which every entity can employ to help themselves and their fellow businesses to increase customer engagement, and by extension customer count.
Shop Local – Be Vocal
- Support your fellow Chamber members with your business;
- Express your satisfaction publicly, express your dissatisfaction directly
- Refer business to each other
Listen & Engage
Use free online tools to listen to what your customers are saying about you.
- Set up persistent search on Google persistent search for your name, business, keywords, etc. (See below for links to set up a persistent search)
- Social network listening/engagement – Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, etc.
- When kudos come, thank them
- Engage your followers/friends/peeps etc. Try to go beyond broadcasting to them, talk to them.
- When they re-share your content, thank them.
- When you like what someone has shared, a like tells them you liked it, a re-share to your network tells your network you liked it, much more beneficial to both your network as well as the entity whose information you are now broadcasting with your word of mouth endorsement.
Reviews
- Solicit reviews – Yelp, Google, and Trip Advisor;
- Survey; or
- Window sticker; or
- Bottom of receipt; or
- Shopping bag/take out container
- Write reviews on those businesses with whom you engage
- Positive reviews should always be public
- Negative reviews deliver in person directly (Don’t know who to contact? Contact the Chamber, we can connect you with the member business, they will want to hear from you.).
- Acknowledge all reviews about your business publicly. It matters not if they are positive or negative. If negative, take the engagement offline and deal with your customer directly.
Persistent search, a tool you can use:
Persistent search can be set up both for listening to references of your entity or interest being discussed in media or on blogs.
Google Alerts
Google provides the following information on how to create an alert.
Create an alert
- Go to Google Alerts.
- In the box at the top, enter a topic you want to follow.
- To change your settings, click Show options. You can change:
- How often you get notifications
- The types of sites you’ll see
- Your language
- The part of the world you want info from
- How many results you want to see
- What accounts get the alert
- Click Create Alert. You’ll get emails whenever we find matching search results.
What are some of your ideas for helping Woodinville businesses help each other?
Please leave your comments below or engage us on Facebook or Twitter.
