Most small business owners mistakenly think that marketing is synonymous with advertising. They believe that if they put an ad in their local newspaper, run a Google Adwords campaign and stay active on Facebook, that’s all there is to it.

However, marketing is so much more than running various advertising campaigns. Marketing is every single encounter that you have with your prospects, customers and clients.

Marketing is the way that you answer the phone; marketing is the speed at which you answer your customers’ emails; marketing is how cheerfully and quickly you refund your customer’s money.

There is research to suggest that when a customer or client is happy and satisfied with your product or services, they will tell up to 10 of their friends. However, if a customer or client is unhappy with your product or services, they will tell up to 50 friends.

Obviously, you want to do everything humanly possible to make your customer’s day.

Last week, my family took a day-long trip to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin (a small tourist town on a beautiful lake).  The place was packed and it was almost impossible to find a place to park. Once we finally did find a parking place, we had to put twelve quarters into the parking meter.

Well, of course we didn’t have ten quarters handy so I went into the nearest store to see if they would give me change for three dollars. The woman behind the counter huffily answered that she was “not an ATM machine and if I wanted change I needed to purchase something.” She then abruptly turned away with a huff.

Needless to say, I won’t be entering THAT store ever again!

I walked into the next store feeling that it would be the same story. However, to my surprise the woman behind the counter smiled and said that “of course she would give me quarters for the parking meter!”  She cheerfully pulled out twelve quarters as she engaged in a nice conversation with me. She commented that my kids were adorable, how wonderful the weather had been and asked if I wanted a complimentary cup of coffee.

I ended up buying $50 of merchandise from her store. The store was http://www.genevagiftsandfudge.com/

Even if you don’t have a brick and mortar store, the various ways that you interact with your customers and clients will profoundly affect your business.  It could even be the difference between small business success and small business failure.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 6:00 pm and is filed under Business Planning, Marketing Planning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.