Face to Face is Still Better Than Social Media

Face­book, Google +, Youtube, LinkedIn and Blogs all have their place in today’s mar­ket­ing world. If your com­pa­ny is not on any of these net­works, you need to be! Social net­work­ing is here to stay, and it’s still build­ing deep­er, stronger roots. In the past cou­ple of months, though, I have been eval­u­at­ing how I gain and keep my clients. I looked at my month­ly client list recent­ly and real­ized that I’ve met every client per­son­al­ly: Yes, every sin­gle one. Many of my reg­u­lar clients I’ve met in per­son sev­er­al times. I have com­plet­ed a num­ber of small con­sult­ing jobs for peo­ple I’ve nev­er met in per­son, but I’ve had a hard time retain­ing them for ongo­ing ser­vices. I believe part of that is because I haven’t met them face to face. It remind­ed me that face to face con­tact is still the best way to gain and keep cus­tomers. You can nev­er ful­ly replace peo­ple with dig­i­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tion. This blog post is just a friend­ly reminder to make every effort to keep your com­pa­ny as per­son­al as pos­si­ble, espe­cial­ly if you are a con­trac­tor. It is easy to get busy with fol­low­ing up on leads, bids and cur­rent jobs. I know what it is like. I’ve been there myself and see this cycle take place often. It is a relief to fin­ish a job, put your new cus­tomer into your email sys­tem, and stay in touch 100% dig­i­tal­ly from then on. Although it is hard, remem­ber to make an effort and fig­ure out a way to con­nect with your cus­tomers from time to time in dif­fer­ent ways. An exam­ple of what I’ve seen that works well: if you are doing a job near­by anoth­er one of your cus­tomers, stop by and leave a note or a small gift. If you know the cus­tomer well, knock on the door and say hi. Sched­ule a phone call from time to time and just say hi! All these lit­tle ways of reach­ing out to a cus­tomer the ​“old fash­ioned” way will only secure a stronger source of busi­ness and refer­rals in the years to come. What has worked for you? How have you branched out with face to face ​“mar­ket­ing” and seen results?