Perception is everything – however you must deliver
I recently treated myself to a breakfast out. It had been a good week professionally and personally, so why not? I arrived at the café – beautifully lit with a few people but not too crowded – ordered my breakfast and a cup of tea.
I took my number and sat down. The friendly waitress brought me some water and a clean glass, very nice!
And then the tea arrived…….
Now, I am a tea snob – I know it and I proudly own up to it. My kitchen boasts hundreds of different tea bags and anything taxing in my life is made better with a cup of tea. I am a proud VIP of T2 and even my children know that to get on my good side, you just need to make me a good, hot cup of half English Breakfast/half Earl Grey tea leaf blend and everything is wonderful with the world again.
But this tea was not wonderful. It arrived with a nice teapot but with the milk caddy INSIDE the cup (my pet peeve). OK, it’s OK, I thought, just let the tea brew and let the milk thing go.
I go to pour the tea and my world is completely upended at the discover of a TEABAG inside the teacup and merely hot water in the pot! All my tea dreams have been shattered……OK maybe a little on the melodramatic side, but in the lovely little tea pot sits only hot water, ready to be poured over a commercial, substandard bag of EB leaves. Not happy!
A few minutes later, my breakfast arrived. It was the most amazingly yummy breakfast I have had in some time and it really was very delicious.
But will I return to this café for breakfast anytime soon?
No.
Why?
Because they did not deliver on their promise to me, the customer, after advertising their tea as ‘nice’ and ‘brewed’.
Yes, I am a tea snob, but I enjoy a fresh cup of tea and I paid for more than a pot of hot water and a tea bag. The tea was important to me in this instance and my customer experience was severely diminished and any other positives from the occasion were overshadowed by the small matter of the tea.
But small things matter – a lesson learnt by this business, now they have lost a customer.
What small things are you overlooking in your business?
Is it something so small you could consider it insignificant, but it is fundamentally affecting your bottom line?
In today’s business world, we have lost the art of ‘clever’, over making profits and attracting big numbers, whether it be to our establishments or to our online platforms. We have lost the simplicity in asking for customer feedback, giving our customers solutions to simple problems and recognising that the customer is always right.
The best way to keep, grow and improve your business is by talking to, and LISTENING to, your customers.
Something as small as changing from fresh tea leaves to commercial tea bags has lost this particular café who knows how many clients in what is probably a bid to cut costs at the expense of the customers simple, small delights. Disappointing yet far to common place in today’s business world.
When I was a kid we moved into a new, old home. New to us, however 50+ years old, at the end of the front verandah was a black rose. Yes black, not dark red, deep purple or any other colour but BLACK.
Are you listening to your customers?
When offering your products and services are you giving enough information so that your customer can make a choice:
What do my customers want to know?
Why was my WordPress website hacked; it’s often an issue with the security that leaves the door open for the burglars to get in.
Non-secure Passwords and Logins
No. In fact, you should not have large images on your website. Large images make your website load slowly and page speed is a very important ranking factor for Google. People are impatient and they want the results of their search to appear quickly, and if your page is slow to load that won’t happen.
Be careful to lock your proportions so you reduce the width to the same percentage as the depth. You may need to crop the image if it doesn’t fit into the area you have allocated.
You can have a large dimension for a full width image for example 2050 px (pixels) wide, however you don’t want this image to be any more than 150kb (kilobytes) in file size.
Make sure you tell everyone including your friends about your new website. Your friends aren’t generally going to be your target audience, however in the beginning, the more eyeballs (traffic) you can get to your new website the better. Plus, often our friends don’t really know what you do and it can be a good refresher to remind them and a good way to get referrals from their friends.
What to do next . . .
Gotta confess I am a need to know girl, so when something this important comes across my desk I am telling you, YOU need to know. 
No matter what size your business is, you need a professional website to ensure your customers can recognise your product and contact you efficiently. Websites provide an effective platform for many methods of communication, however there are some aspects you absolutely must include and others that you need to omit to ensure your website is noticeable and achieves its desired objectives.
2. Google and Mobile Friendly
As much as some people do not like it, social media definitely has its place in the business world. Businesses are popping up everyday, run exclusively online and taking advantage of the huge audience available on social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, allowing people to make an income from home and connect to networks and groups within the same industry.
Have you heard the phrase “don’t feed the trolls”? This is valuable advice that will not only save you hours of personal turmoil and distress but also reinforce your credibility and professionalism on your social media platform. As tempting as it is to reply back to these keyboard warriors to justify yourself or defend your business, these exchanges can quickly turn hostile and aggressive, leaving a trail of abuse for everyone to see.
Hashtags are king in the Instagram world.
Hashtags help people who do or like the same things you do to find your posts. The hashtags help organise photos and video content, putting them into categories that help followers looking for things that interest them to discover your feed. You need to make them relevant.
Do you have your hashtags organised relevant to your posts? Or are they simply a big clump of copy and paste words you attach to every post? The higher your reach and the more engagement you get, the less Instagram will ‘allow’ you to just post the same 30 hashtags every time. And yes, a post all 30 hashtags, EVERY TIME, so think about your hashtags ahead of time. The best strategy is to have several collections of hashtags to attach to different posts. For example, your post about kids cooking should not contain #grownupfood or #dogsofig, but there are hundreds of hashtags you can come up with to describe kids cooking. Save these collections on your phone in Notes or Memos (as you can only use Instagram from a mobile device) and mix up your hashtags for each post. Save multiple groups of hashtags.
Do your research, stalk everybody’s account and make notes. Have a look at your target audience and find the ones that fit your content. Check out your competitors and see which hashtags are getting them the results you want. Whilst it’s not professional to simply copy a competitor’s hashtag collection, it also shows you have no imagination or creativity yourself, so just pick up a few and spice them up to fit your own brand. And don’t forget the social influencers! These people do exceptionally well on Instagram for whatever reason in their own industry. Learn from the best in your industry and have a good look around their well-established following.
Call Us: 08 9797 0889