Week 4: Same Old, Same Old

My marketer friend quit and started a bakery. I tried to walk in the door and this big swatch of fabric popped up and blocked my way! I backed up; it disappeared. I walked forward, big cloth thing in the way again!

“Hey,” I shouted at my friend, “I can’t get in!”

“Oh, sorry,” she said, “You have to click on the banner to accept cookies.”

I called a business the other day and they didn’t think I was a scammer! I’m calling that a win.

What else has been happening recently?

Honestly, nothing much has changed. I took another couple trips to Willow Glen this week, and I’m also probably going to stop by Castro Street in Mountain View tomorrow to talk to some small business owners tomorrow.

(At this point, every time I go outside, I’ll see a random storefront, yell ‘Small business!’ and go inside to talk to the people at the counter. My friends and family keep teasing me about it.)

I’ve found that going up to businesses, talking to whoever is at the front desk and either interviewing them directly or asking them for a contact of someone to interview works pretty well. At least, it yields a greater than 0% response rate (unlike my cold-emailing campaigns). Usually, they’ll directly give me the contact of the owner or the ‘marketing person’ which is a much more effective way of contacting the business than info@xbusiness.com.

I’ve been able to interview businesses that are part of a fairly large variety of industries. I’ve hit everything on my list (beauty/nail salons, nonprofits, “tangible” services, “intangible” services, restaurants, snack services, and a new category called ‘other’) EXCEPT daycare/childcare businesses. For some reason, all of them think I’m a scammer. 

If any of you personally know any childcare-oriented businesses, please connect me to them (comment their contact or share my info with them). I… neeed…. INTERVIEWSSSSS!

So, interviews. Then what?

I’ve started examining my interview data for trends or commonalities I can identify by inspection. There’s a lot.

First of all, they ALL use Instagram. Out of the 14 businesses I’ve talked to so far, I think there’s only been one that doesn’t post on IG frequently, and that business has had the same set of customers for 43 years, so they don’t really need it. Honestly, this makes sense. Instagram’s free, easy to use, and is a hotspot for people ages 10-40, so their target markets are very likely to be on there.

There’s also more of a focus on websites and search engine optimization than I might have expected. More than half of the businesses I’ve talked to say that they pull in a lot of customers just by making sure their website ranks high in search results. This does depend on industry, though (for example, it’s a lot more helpful with things like beauty salons and tutoring organizations).

Probably the most important piece of information I’ve seen so far is every business’s reliance on word-of-mouth marketing. Like I said last week, I’m mostly interviewing businesses that have ‘succeeded’ or are doing well in marketing, and just about all of them say that WOM has been the primary driver for their growth. It seems that, for most businesses, after a certain point in their growth (which depends on the business itself – it could be when they acquire their first customer or when they acquire their first thousand) it’s driven almost entirely by their current clients referring them to others. It’s a snowball effect – the more customers they get, the more they grow! For businesses looking to stay small, it seems to be a pretty sustainable strategy, surprisingly enough. It seems that the reason most small businesses fail is that they just can’t get enough customers to get to that point. Naturally, that’s what I should focus my ultimate creation for this project on. How do I help businesses get enough customers to set the snowball rolling? That’s probably where all the other trends I’ve observed come in. I need to determine what tactics work and what don’t and incorporate all of that into my solution.

All according to plan, of course.

My last couple of sentences probably seem a bit vague. I assure you, though – I do have a plan, and it continues to develop the more information I collect. 

I’m not just saying that to reassure you that I’m on track with this project – I think I know what my final product is going to be! I’m keeping it a secret, though, at least until I’ve worked out exactly how to build it.

In terms of my short-term plan, I’m going to continue interviewing businesses for about two more weeks while simultaneously reorganizing and analyzing the information I have right now. After that, it’s full speed ahead on my solution!

Here’s to a fruitful week of interviews. See you next Monday (and wish me luck on college decisions)!

~Maya