how do you establish a new business where there’s other businesses way more establised than your new one with loyal customers how could one gain their own customers and create a good rep?
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You have to build a value and trust. Every competitor deals with the same issue. Let’s get some more information first. What is the industry? Are you established yet? How long? If not, where you at in the process?
home cleaning service , offering carpet cleaning , window cleaning , janitorial services and not established yet right now i’m just figuring out how should i approach it with promotion and running ads & getting the word out locally.
This was my business situation. I opened a print shop. There are about eight different print/copy center options within a 8 mile radius of me - franchises, big box retailers, and another independent.
Been open two years and NGL, I am shocked at how well we’ve done. First year I had to upwardly revise projected revenue 3 times. This year we hit our 2022 sales figure in Sept so Q4 is 100% growth. I did not expect this kind of performance from a “dime-a-dozen” print shop.
What I think we did right: selecting our team. They’re amazing. Soft skills out the wazoo, they’re great with customers in every way you’d want. We had a lot of people try us out because they didn’t like whichever company they were using. 99% of those customers came back again. The 1% that didn’t - we don’t miss them and we’re typically the type we’d recommend our competitors to anyway LOL
Also where we went right: differentiating ourselves in a crowded market. BRANDING is so important - both name and how you present your company.
For us, we stayed away from typical CMYK color schemes that a lot of printing companies used or text-heavy logos. We went with an animal mascot (beaver) and a 1940s looking round logo with the animal right in the middle - it could work as a clothing brand, TBH. Not cartoonish, just a nice classic brand. We live in an outdoorsy-rec town & the logo really resonated with the locals -people always comment on it. Then they started to ask if we sold the logo shirts my staff were wearing - so we started selling those in shop at $25 a piece. It floored me people wanted to pay to wear my logo! People always take our free logo stickers too because they think it looks cool.
We also actively promoted ourselves as a creative resource for new and small businesses. We share our portfolio of work through social media - I strongly believe the best way to promote us is to show our work and who we do it for. We tag the companies whose print projects we do, give a shout out to them, explain what they do if they are brand new, and that’s done a lot to cement those B2B relationships. None of our competitors do that. It’s positioned us and our reputation as the local small business design & print resource.
This year we reached out to nonprofits and offered a 20% discount on printing services. I guess this was an underserved market because omg, we gained about 60 nonprofit customers this year, some driving as far as 30 minutes away to work with us. We also promote them on socials, advertise their events, and offer some gift in kind printing when they hold their big annual fundraisers.
The needs of our small biz and nonprofits customers have caused me to update my own business model - I’ve had to add more designers (just hired our 4th yesterday after starting with only one), and this week we closed our walk-in retail service counter to became a print and production studio. It just made sense, nearly all of our work is B2B now, very little of our revenue was generated at the walk in retail counter. I never ever would have expected us to do such a change, but what we’re doing seems to be working. It’s hard not to go all in.
Don’t know if any of this is helpful as it just felt like common sense to me. I set out to create a business that I would try to seek out as a customer…a place with nice folks who actually want to help, get excited about what I’m doing, and are “authentic”.
If we can’t do a project - vehicle wraps, for example - I recommend the customer talk to another local, indie biz that I know will take good care of them. And I tell them, “if they don’t take good care of you, let me know.”
We never boast about being “the best”, I don’t put fluffy text on our website or marketing items about how our customer is always #1. We just show what we ‘re doing for others in our community and (hopefully) when a customer interacts with us, they walk away feeling appreciated & valued.