The basics of local business marketing from the President of ReachLocal.com Nathan Hanks from an interview with StreetFight. He’s got good point about customer retention, technology has not done a good job of helping businesses retain customers. Right now email is the #1 tool but that generally gets businesses to treat everyone on their mailing list the same. A relatively new contender in this space is DemandForce and there are specific offerings for Dentists like Patient Activator and Lighthouse 360 which actually connect directly to dentists practice management systems. I think we will see a lot more innovation on customer/client/patient retention in the next year.
Here’s what Nathan of ReachLocal.com had to say in his interview with StreetFight:
What are some of the things businesses need to do to keep from falling behind online?
First of all there’s being good at acquisition. When I say acquisition, like how do I go out and find a customer … And there’s a bunch of things you could do there but I think the big buckets are search, display and social media when it comes to online.The next thing I’d say is “convert.” You need tools to help you convert customers. Now people are going to your site or they are going to your social media page, how are they going to interact with you? Do you have video to capture their imagination? Do you need to have chat? Do you have a special offer? Do you have deals? Can I schedule online? Businesses need to think about their conversion tools. How do I get people to see me and how do I make it easy for them to actually do business with me?
And then there’s the idea of “retention”: how do I actually keep the customer? There really is a set of processes in terms of getting and keeping customers and in the space today, especially in the world of tech, it’s still very immature.
