When I hear about great small business customer service I just have to talk about it! Lon from FlashZebra.com (a manual off-camera flash distributor) sold Johnny two cables. Well when he opened the package only one came. John emailed Lon and within minutes got an answer that his second cable was coming and that the shipping costs were being refunded for John’s trouble. WOW!

Lon has done a great job of choosing a niche! He sells camera cables for flashes to serious photographers. Also he has camera cables that John couldn’t find anywhere else on the internet. He is also doing a great job of generating incoming links.

I will keep an eye on flashzebra.com to see how it is going – love to see a little guy with a great concept!

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing – GREAT Customer Service
2. How DISC Personality Types Affect Customer Service Models
3. Is Customer Service Letting Your Lead Gen Down – Lowes VS Home Depot

So I met with a GREAT gal this week – Emily with Body and Mind Enrichment. She won our drawing at the WIN (Women in Networking) Symposium for a free Marketing Plan! 

Mary Dado of Business Writing, Ink and I started out by taking a tour of all the plants Emily has around her house that she uses in organic natural products that she makes like bug spray, itchy creams, ointments, oils, scrubs and LOTS more. I used her bug spray and itch cream – it is all natural (very nice!) and has a fresh, woodsy smell because it is made of herbs!! Emily also composts and makes things like tea from lemongrass.

Emily’s life is dedicated to healthy living through eating, exercising and working WITH nature!

We talked with her for a while and worked on her mission statement (still in progress) and discovered that she has been keeping the different parts of her business separate (pilates instruction, natural products and overall health instruction). Through analyzing her favorite clients we found that it was people she helped with their WHOLE lives that she most enjoys working with. We also discovered that she does her best lead generating by attending networking events and having a table. She needed to have some materials that she can put on the table that show her products, her services and that tell people what she likes to do. It is VERY hard to sell concepts like healthy living without showing pictures of how that looks. We decided that she would use a collage format for her materials and I heard from Emily just today that she got a tri-fold flyer together for her first show today (I will keep you updated on how that went!)

We also talked about her website (www.bodyandmindenrichment.org) which is not something that Emily is married to keeping in it’s current format. We will probably convert this to a blog where Emily can talk about her healthy living philosophy, her products and her services. 

Some neat things that Emily does or can do that could help differentiate her -

• She does a group meeting that features vodka infused with herbs (this one I can get on board with…:)
• I just saw today on Best Friends (Dog Town) that there is such a thing as catnip bubbles to play with Kittys – I think this would be a GREAT way to reach people who are dog and cat lovers without their having to be health oriented! 
• With a blog Emily could reach MANY more people with her ideas and also grow a following, making her an expert in healthy living

Related posts:

1. Small Business Marketing Case Study – Intuitive Organizing
2. Direct Sales MLM Case Study – Green Cleaning Products
3. SEO Copywriting – A Keyword Writing Case Study

So it was a great day in marketing! I spent some time with a wonderful woman today figuring out what her business model would look like and helping to pick a name and position for that business. I thought you might like to see what the process looks like!

Focusing On Her Goals - We spent some time looking at what kinds of work she would like to do. She wants to do writing projects for businesses (go figure with a name like Business Writing, Ink.) including documenting systems, blog content, technical or how to manuals and other specific writing assignments. We figured out that she DOES NOT want to write for consumers, no resumes or other end user type documents.

Brainstorming Names – We then hit the thesaurus to try and figure out words that would convey her message. We looked at “composing” as in composing documents and thought that we could maybe incorporate a musical theme. We looked at write and pen and script and ink. When we got to ink we had a revelation! Ink sounds like Inc. for incorporated. It was a very exciting time for us because when we paired that with Business Writing it sounded like a winner! Then we found that http://www.businesswritingink.com AND http://www.BusinessWritingInc.com were both available. I felt that it was important to find a url that would be creative enough to be interesting, but also to be able to point the correct spelling to the main site in case someone was sounding out the business name.

Logo Design – Now that we had a name we looked for images that would convey the writing aspect of the name. We checked out pen looking brackets, a document scroll and a couple of different kinds of inkwells. As of now the final inkwell has not been established, but I like the one below the best! We also looked for a font that would convey an old world look but was still creative. Below is the final look that we finished today. There may be some tweaking to do yet but it should be something like this:

What I love about this logo is the punctuation and how it makes total sense with the business that she is in. The fun part is that it is technically correct, but also helps to make humans recognize that Ink. represents Inc. in this example.

We finished a couple of more housekeeping issues like registering the urls and setting up her email address. We will be working on getting her blog / website set up soon and then she should be off to the races! Like I said to start – a very good day in marketing!

Related posts:

1. Niche Marketing IS My Niche! – How I Started
2. Niche Marketing Know Your Audience
3. Niche Marketing and Customer Service Go Hand In Hand