The 12 Days of Relationship Building By Keith Loria

from BCA Insider - Holiday Edition 2021

Jeanette Lee Recognized with BCA President’s Award

days12the

relationship building

By Keith Loria

The pandemic brought in a lot of new customers to home recreation stores as people were drawn to billiard retailers to find activities to play while quarantined. And with the holidays coming up, it’s important for retailers to ensure that these new relationships are solid so customers continue coming back into the stores.

With the popular Christmas song in mind “The 12 Days of Christmas,” here are 12 relationship-building tips for the Holidays.

1Provide a Great Atmosphere

If your billiard store has competition, you need to quickly establish a point-of-differentiation to ensure that customers choose your store over others. One of the best ways to do that is to focus on the atmosphere. If you provide customers with an outstanding atmosphere, they’ll be more likely to develop positive and long-lasting relationships with you. Some steps you can take to provide a great ambience are to play music, add lots of light and greet people as they come in.

2Stay in Touch

One of the first things you need to do is to assume your customers will forget about you as soon as they step out of the door. This is important because you always need to give your best effort when trying to maintain customer relationships. So make it a point to stay in touch. You don’t want to lose communication with any of your customers if you want to make them come back. Keeping open communication lines through automated reminders or follow-ups on the phone is the key to turning regular customers into loyal and repeat customers. So the next time you have a new billiard product in the store, send your customers an email or a text message to let them know.

3Invest in Promotional items

Another great way to build relationships with customers is to give them something to remember the store by. Promotional items with your logo and branding will make you stick out. Items such as promotional pens, water bottles, T-shirts, and flash drives are great ways to promote your billiard store and make a lasting impression.

4Don’t REst on Laurels

Even the largest retail stores may lose customers if they do not develop over time. Customers become tired of seeing the same items over and over. They are looking for something fresh to keep their attention. It is your job to switch things up and keep the store looking fresh. Making your consumers happy is the key to success. If you want to keep growing, you must first figure out what your consumers want and then give it to them.

5turn to social media

Leverage your social media profiles to keep customers engaged. Post updates that will keep customers feeling happy and included even beyond product placement. Have contests or host virtual activities that everyone in your online community can take part in. Tweet out about news and events at the store. Add photos on Facebook and Instagram and ask your customers to post their favorite billiard images from home. This will get more people involved and increase your likes and engagement.

6Provide a sense of Security

People today are more worried about their private information than ever before, so retailers should make it a point to let their customers know that they are mindful of one’s privacy and security. Assuring the security of sensitive customer data by investing sufficiently in the right, up-to-date technology, or partnering with the right companies that will protect customers’ privacy, is an excellent first step toward establishing trust and loyalty with customers. Additionally, retailers should be transparent about the use and storage of customers’ data. Retailers need to understand that consumers are willing to share personal information in exchange for improved services and recommendations.

7offer discounts and specials

When you have a new customer, provide them with a special coupon for a return visit. For established customers, you can have a loyalty program where more purchases add up to more rewards. People love getting a deal or things for free, so think outside the box for ways to provide special deals that will keep them coming back again and again. With each in-store purchase, present a printed coupon along with the receipt that includes your branding and important store information.

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8Make it all about them, not you

Most people don’t care about you; they care about themselves, so keep the focus on your consumers. Tell them how you can satisfy their unique requirements and go out of your way to do so. So, by making everything about them, you can establish strong connections with consumers and make them feel unique.

9exceed customer expectations

Going the extra mile for a customer is always appreciated, but more so at the present time when people are still on edge over the pandemic and politics. Staying in touch, and expressing concern for them personally will go a long way toward establishing a loyal customer bond. When in-store, strike up conversations about their lives and show the personal touch. Go out of your way to explain the background of a product and offer up options that might be better for them – even if they don’t bring in as great a dollar amount. People will appreciate the honest approach.

10 focus on customer service

Encourage a culture of competent customer service among employees as the final stage in solidifying connections between store management, staff, and consumers. Allow workers to handle client concerns and provide training to ensure that employees understand how to serve consumers. Employees that are happy provide superior customer service. Customers are pleased when they receive better customer service. Creating an employee-centered culture in your store, where workers feel empowered to address customer problems and have opportunities to advance professionally, may lead to stronger and more enduring connections on all levels.

11 add Value to Their Lives

You need to add value to your customers’ lives if you want these business relationships to continue. To add this value, you need to understand your customers' current needs, as well as accurately predict and service their future needs. Adding value to their lives can also come in the form of selling high-quality products to them. You can also make their lives better by freely sharing your knowledge with them, as well as being a trusted guide when it comes to billiard-related issues.

12 ask for feedback

No one can tell you more about customer retention than customers themselves. Create a method of collecting feedback and develop your retention strategy around it. You can incentivize feedback by offering people who answer a survey a complimentary discount on billiard accessories. This will not only give you an insight into what your customers are thinking, but will most likely provide some great ideas on how to make the store better and entice even more people to walk through your doors.

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CREATING A WINNING HOLIDAY SOCIAL MEDIA PLAN

By Charles S. Donnavan

Billiard retailers can leverage social media for holiday marketing but they must be prepared to put in the time and effort to capture the attention of their target audience.

Social media is a powerful tool that can help create buzz and increase customer engagement during the festive season. It also ensures that brands are present on platforms that their customers rely upon.

A savvy social media strategy must focus on building relationships with customers, share valuable content, incentivize customer loyalty, and use analytics to measure success or failure of campaigns.

Here are 10 Tips for doing things right this holiday season.

1. FOCUS ON YOUR CUSTOMER BASE

Not all holiday marketing efforts are created equal. Contrary to popular belief, do not simply copy your competitors’ strategies. Knowing your target audience is critical to a successful holiday marketing campaign. That’s why when creating a successful social media plan for the holiday season, retailers should focus on their own customer base. They must learn what motivates their audience and how they like to be reached out to. They should also make sure that they are using the most effective platforms for reaching them.

2. USE A HASHTAG (#) CAMPAIGN

Social media campaigns simultaneously are fun and helpful. A hashtag campaign will make your brand presence unique and will help your business stand out.

A hashtag campaign will help a business gain followers, but retailers need to create a plan ahead of time. The first step of the project should be to identify, complete and memorize a hashtag that sounds cool. Then, start promoting it on social media once you find that perfect hashtag. You can use various channels to promote your hashtag campaign. Do not stay to one channel alone while your hashtag campaign is being promoted. If you have begun your Twitter campaign, you can also start promoting it on Instagram or Facebook.

The Instagram posts accompanying the perfect hashtag create trendy news feeds for billiard lovers.

3. OFFER FREE MERCH

Giving away free stuff is always looked upon favorably and can be a terrific holiday social media strategy. Giveaways are something that every customer likes. Run contests where the 25th person to share a post gets a gift certificate, or invite people to post photos of their billiard activities, and award the best holiday-themed one with a prize.

Retailers can also make use of user-generated content by giving out a challenge to either make the most unusual score or the best trick shots, giving away something to the winner.

4. PRICE-CONSCIOUS MESSAGING

Holiday season marketing is all about the money. Most consumers have a strict budget that they stick to when it comes to gift shopping. That’s why billiard retailers need to focus their content for social media on the price point. Post content about the various discounts and deals that you’re offering this holiday season. Your strategy for social media should be concise and clear about the message that you’re trying to send to your customers. And that message is that you offer the best holiday discounts in town. Your social media posts need to be colorful and catchy, hovering around the holiday theme. Tell your customers that you make premium billiard items and accessories more accessible and affordable to them so that they can enjoy the true spirit of the holidays.

5. OFFER DISCOUNTS

The holiday season is a promotional time for all businesses to showcase appreciation towards their customers, so a great way for billiard retailers to do this is to roll out unbreakable discounts on new and old products and advertise it all on social media. For example, if you have a special discount on a billiard table and get the word out by social media with great photos and videos of the table, it would tempt customers to come in and make a purchase, or at the very least, bring consumers into the store to see what else you might have, give out the proper size and quality guides through social media posts so that customers can figure what they want best.

6. UTILIZE APPS FOR CREATING A POSTING PLAN

Create an editorial calendar for your holiday social media marketing efforts. It’s essential to put together a plan for what you’re going to post, when you post it, and how.

Many great apps can be used for attracting customers, and should be part of a social media strategy. For example, there’s Hootsuite, which allows retailers to create posts in advance and schedule them for specific days and times, making it easier to organize posts for the whole month of December without spending all day on social media. This way, there won't be any gaps in your social media activity.

You can also create a calendar on a desktop version of Excel to keep track, but you must post regularly and frequently throughout the holiday season.

7. BE DISCOVERABLE

Another vital way for billiard retailers to create a good holiday social media strategy is to make themselves discoverable. Go digital with your store because that is pretty much where most consumers are – even during the holidays.

Due to the possibility that your customers will be unable to visit your physical store because of COVID concerns, ensure that they can quickly locate you online. Update the channels you’ve been running and point people in the right direction on all your social media feeds. Several pieces of information are worth double-checking as well, including your business’s opening hours, website address, and contact information.

8. USE AN INFLUENCER

Influencer marketing is a strategy in which you work with an influencer with a more considerable following and a similar specialty to yours. You team up with that influencer to promote your brand/product/service and broaden its reach.

This is one of the most current marketing strategies, and it's also one of the most effective. A billiard store can connect with a noted player, trainer or someone who the community just knows. You’ll also need to make a strategy to execute influencer marketing flawlessly. To begin, you must first establish your objectives for working with an influencer. Goals may include everything from expanding your audience to boosting revenue.

9. LOOK TO THE PAST

Don’t be complacent with your social media plan, even if it seemed to work well the prior year. Retailers should analyze the data from last year or the previous years and learn from it. Note what platform brought the most traffic to your website, content that received the most engagement, or which channels brought the most conversions.

Social media marketing tools such as Google Analytics can perform analysis, scrutinizing previous data to help you create a better targeting plan with improved results.

Generate holiday-themed content and have a theme to create your visuals around. This makes a cohesive theme and shows your involvement in the holiday. Additionally, people remember visuals more than anything they have read. Hence, you should carefully curate this content.

10. UTILIZE GIFT GUIDES

When developing a holiday social media strategy, include gift guides to provide an easy way for people to find and buy products for their loved ones. The search for online gift guides rises dramatically on Google every year at the start of December and doesn’t slow down until Christmas has come to a close. Many people are in a rush, so having gift options right in front of them where they can easily find the perfect present will be appreciated and lead to further sales.