Just a short little slice of real life that illustrates some of what I have been writing about on these pages.
My wife, Lynn, decided to take her Mom out for a little drive this afternoon. She thought they could go down to Brighton and look at some women’s clothing stores, maybe grab a snack at some restaurant. Since we live in Hastings, and Brighton is about a 45 minute drive away, Lynn wanted to be sure the stores would be open, so I volunteered to do a search for “women’s clothing stores in Brighton Ontario” on Google Maps.
What followed was a perfect lesson in how to lose business. When I did my search, here is what I found. (Click on the image to make it bigger)
Do you notice the absence of red dots or little lettered tags for Brighton? In fact nothing comes up for “women’s clothing stores in Brighton Ontario” except stores in other towns. Well, Lynn knew that wasn’t correct because she had been in Brighton before. But suppose she hadn’t? What if she was a tourist or vacationer, or someone with some time to kill between appointments? If she had wanted to amuse herself by doing a little shopping, Brighton would have just dropped off the lists of possible destinations after a Google Search result like that. And people are doing Google searches when they travel. They can use their phones or tablets now. Don’t count on anyone seeing your Yellow Pages ad.
Not only does any clothing store lose business, but so could the restaurant, gas station and maybe the book store.
You might note that The Water Lily, owned and operated by Sue and Randy right here in Hastings, shows up. Good job Sue.
Because Lynn assured me there really were women’s stores there, I did a little virtual walkby. You can use Google to get a street level view of most towns and cities in North america now. So off I went to Google maps again.
You can see the little orange figure I have circled in the screenshot to the left. You just have to drag the little fellow onto your map where you want to take a look at the scenery, as in the next image.
What happens next is a new window opens, with an actual street view that is a 360 degree rotatable point of view from the Google Camera van, when it drove down the streets of Brighton a year or two ago.
I was able to scroll around until I had a good look at the store fronts on Main Street and got the next look.
There it was. The Dragonfly, a women’s
clothing store, just what we were looking for. So now I had the name of the store. Was it open? I went to their website and guess what? No hours of business!
Now I don’t mean to single out the Dragonfly. They had a nice enough looking website. They had even claimed their Google Places listing and uploaded some photographs, which is more than 70% of the businesses in small towns have done. The problem is, they seem not to have sat down and thought their internet strategy through. What are they trying to do with their web properties, the website and the Places listing?
One answer to that question should be “Provide potential customers with more information.”
Listing hours of business would seem like one of the most basic things they could do. As it was, they DID list their phone number. After making the call I listened to the recorded message that said they were open on Sundays, at 12:00 PM. So the Mom and daughter outing to Brighton occurred after-all. But if you are the Dragonfly, you have to ask yourself, “Are all potential customers going to be so persistent?”
If you are counting on that kind of persistence to make your business successful, I think you should think again. The internet provides you with a wonderful opportunity to give your existing and potential customers information about how you can meet their needs and wants. If you, as a business, are not using it, you should be. Once the information is on-line, it can work for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – for free if you limit yourself to a Google Places listing, and for only about $4.00 a week if you want a simple website. It is pretty tough for a business to get that kind of marketing value any place else.
Of course, you need to be sure your Places listing, or web site includes words and phrases that people might use when searching for a product or service. But how tough is that. See some earlier posts on this site for more information.
Whether you are planning to survive a bridge closure or not, take some steps to use the internet. And help your potential customers spend their money at YOUR store. Dragonfly, I’m talking to you.
The reason I posted was that, even though the Dragonfly had a Google Places listing and a website, they weren’t showing up on a search for ”women’s clothing Brighton On.” That was a great example of why you need to do the things I talk about in these posts and on this site.
