Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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e-business

“Follow Me Home” Is a Solid Gold Gift

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First, let’s establish two maxims: one classic, one new.

Classic: The cardinal rule of customer acquisition – it’s not your customer’s job to keep your business top-of-mind, it’s yours.

New: Every year your website becomes less of a destination and more of a distribution center – develop a strategy that doesn’t depend upon prospects and customers returning to your homepage every time they need/want something from you.

It’s easier to keep a customer than find a new one – everybody knows that. The bad news is, with all of the mega-corp algorithms, online competitors, and cyber-clutter, keeping the attention of even our most loyal patrons is getting harder every day. But here’s the good news: For every example of how technology makes business more complicated, there is a corresponding tool or application that increases efficiency and productivity. Even for small businesses.

One prime example of how to stay on the radar screen of people who already know you – users, prospects, customers – is to practice what I call the “Follow me home” strategy.

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Mobile Computing Will Dominate Your Future

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What if I told you that seven-of-ten of the prospects and customers in your market can’t find your business? You’d be very disturbed by that, wouldn’t you?

Now, what if I told you that three-fourths of the calls your prospects and customers want to make to your business are not getting through? Would I be able to see the veins in your neck as you raise your voice to declare that such a thing would be impossible?

Well, in the past year or so, addressing small business audiences around the country, I’ve asked this simple question: “How many of you have a website that conforms to the small screen – a mobile website?” I’m sorry to report that the number of attendees who raised their hands – across multiple industries – was in the vast minority.

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How “the Cloud” can empower your small business

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One of the greatest products of human society is the marketplace. Webster defines it as a place where goods and services are offered for sale. 

Over millennia, innovations took markets from local to global, and now to the 21st century iteration – virtual. Virtual markets are powered by “cloud computing,” aka “the cloud,” and accessed via the Internet and a handy interface program presented on a screen of some size.

Historically, as trade expanded markets, products led the way because services were difficult to convey to the last mile of consumption. But technology has helped services catch up, and now digital services are delivered efficiently from the cloud. And more than anything else, this last reality is helping small businesses compete and grow in ways that were formerly the domain of larger companies. 

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Naisbitt’s Razor: The great small business advantage

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On my radio program, beginning in 1998, I started interviewing telecom experts on something called broadband Internet connection. It would be the replacement for dialup over POTS – plain old telephone service. At that point, like the Internet itself, the “big pipe” was so new that less than 4% of households and almost no businesses had broadband Internet connection.  

Reporting on this emerging capability, I made the easy prediction that the world would change when broadband became ubiquitous and broadly adopted – which it did. But the harder prediction – which I didn’t make – would have been that the real game-changer would take the form of mobile computing on the tiny screens of magic wands we call smartphones. Today, with mobile networks delivering fourth generation connectivity – 4G – almost everywhere, and 5G on the way, mobile computing has disrupted the marketplace in unprecedented ways by giving consumers exciting new expectations.

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