Finding Your Business
Particularly for retail businesses, letting potential customers know where your business is located is extremely important. Often, businesses use well-known landmarks to help clients find and remember their location. Such slogans as "Bridgeman's, across from the main entrance to the University of Minnesota," or "Matthews, Top of the Hill, Daly City," can be very helpful for the new customer. Think about how landmarks can help you. For example, if your knife sharpening shop happens to be at the crest of the hill on Main Street, your business cards, Yellow Page listing or delivery truck might say "Main Street Saw & Knife Shop—Get an edge at the Top of the Hill." This approach may be corny, but if it's effective, so what?
Your business name can also be an important tool. The "24-Hour Pet Emergency Clinic" clearly lets people know that they can get help in the middle of the night and is a far better name than "Miller Veterinary Clinic" when it comes to promoting your business. Similarly, the "Cosmetic Dentistry Clinic" tells potential customers what you specialize in. Of course, business names can serve a number of other valuable purposes, but in choosing or changing a name don't overlook the potential in terms of helping customers find you.
Never assume that customers will find you easily—or at all—once they get your address from the phone book. How many times have you looked for someone's office or shop a little longer than you wished to? Have you ever quit in disgust? Probably, most of the time you kept searching until you found your elusive quarry, but weren't in the best of moods when you finally arrived. Enough said, we hope. You don't want new customers to struggle to find you and to pass the word that you are "really out of the way" or "impossible to find at night."
Normally, it is fairly easy to eliminate problems people have in finding you even if your location is out of the way. For example, Santa Rosa Dodge capitalizes on the fact it is difficult to find through its Yellow Pages listing, "Hardest Place in Town to Find. But Worth It!" and then prints a map so customers can in fact easily locate it. It is an excellent practice for businesses to print maps in the Yellow Pages as well as on any flyers or brochures. If you are hard to find, or if you draw customers from out of town, it behooves you to do this.
We like The First Light Cafe, whose name tells customers that it is open early and which provides very clear directions, in the Yellow Pages, to its location.
Accessibility includes many obvious things beyond telling people where you are located, such as making sure your working hours are posted at your place of business and that you keep to those times. Being unpredictable is a rapid way to erode customer trust. Imagine how you would feel if you got up early on a Satur day morning, packed up the car for a long awaited ski trip, and, arriving at the tire chain rental store promptly at eight, no one was there, even though the sign clearly says, "Open at 8:00." You get a cup of coffee and return at 8:30, and still no one is there. You pace around, trying to rationalize traveling without chains, when finally at 8:45 someone comes to open up. If you have a choice, you probably won't ever again patronize that business and certainly won't recommend it to fellow ski buffs.
A number of retail businesses in all sorts of fields, from books to baby clothes, have found that staying open longer hours, especially at times when most people are not working, results in more than enough sales to cover the increased overhead costs. Your customers will tell others that there is one place in town where you can buy a bridal gown, lawnmower or a guppy on Tuesday evening or Sunday afternoon. Many businesses that have profitably extended their hours have done so by hiring reasonably priced part-time Sunday and evening help. Even professionals and others who traditionally work 9 to 5 should consider keeping their businesses open longer hours, or at least making some services available during times when others in their field are closed.
Using modern communications equipment creatively often makes it possible to offer extended access to at least some services at a reasonable cost. For example, one attorney we know of put a small advertisement in the phone book emphasizing that his office took messages 24 hours a day from people who had suffered personal injuries. He signed up over 30 new cases within a few months. Similarly, some dentists and many therapists are now taking evening appointments, and one friend very successfully offers 24-hour emergency dental care for his patients.
Having a website can be very helpful in directing your customers to your business. A website can provide vivid and accurate directions, maps, electronic coordinates
(for a global positioning system (GPS), a tool that uses satellites to find ground locations) and details about parking. As the Internet becomes increasingly connected with mobile phones, more and more people check a business's website to find its geographic location.
Was this article helpful?
