DELIVERING IDEAS TO EMPOWER TODAY’S BUSINESS OWNER

This is Kevin O’Leary, chairman of O-Shares, CNBC contributor and small business investor. I’m here to share some useful tips and advice to empower the Spectrum Business community.

 

WIN MORE CUSTOMER MINDSHARE

Now if you’re a small business and you’ve been shut out of retail, staying in touch with your customer is a real challenge. If you don’t have a retail store, there’s no more walk-by traffic any more, it means we’ve got to go digital. That’s the way to do it. Pretty well everybody in America now has a cellular device. They have some kind of communication that they’re doing on their own all day long on a tablet, on a laptop, whatever it is. You’ve got to get some of their mind time. You’ve got to get their eyeballs; you’ve got to reach out to them.

 

Now, I’ve discovered something remarkable because I’ve got over 50 companies in my portfolio and they’re all doing this – all of them! All of them. Because we’re all in the same boat together on this thing. The majority of them do not have retail distribution currently. Yeah, some states are opening up but we’re way far behind where we were and it’s going to take a lot longer than people thought.

 

But remarkably, we’ve found something unique. In the old days when we would do an email campaign for example, now I’m talking about to existing customers at this point because many of us never even did that, we never even bothered, but what we’ve learned, and we’re sharing this data with each other, is we used to get two or three or four percent response, now we’re getting 15 to 30, from our existing customers. So it really behooves us to do these campaigns on an ongoing basis. And we’ve found that customers like deals. So, if we had a product or service that they used to buy maybe once a month, we offer buy three and get one free. That kind of thing really works.

 

Direct to Consumer Marketing

I keep saying it over and over again, direct to customer is so important, because even after this pandemic is over it’s going to be the highest margin business you’ve got. You’re thinking every day, at least 20% of your day, should be how do I reach more customers direct? Yes, I want to rely on my retail distribution. Yes, I want to work with all the people I worked with before in retail. But now, I have a new business I need to take care of.  It’s a new baby born. It’s a new child that’s going to grow up with me – it’s direct to customer. And you need to nurture it. You need to invest in it. You need to understand it, because it’s going to be how you grow and survive when we get to COVID 20, COVID 21, you know what I’m saying? I don’t want that to happen, but definitely I have to have a plan for the new economy.

 

Thanks for watching. For more of my small business tips and advice go to SpectrumBusinessInsights.com.

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