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Rural OmniLocal. It’s the new buzzword. I know because I made it up. It means small town retailers using multiple channels to reach their customers.
This article is an excerpt from an interview with Bob Dunn. Hear the whole interview or read the transcript at BobWP.com
In the world of big retail companies, “omni channel” means using as many different channels as they can to try to reach their customers everywhere they are, everywhere they shop. Think of bricks and mortar stores like Walmart or Lowe’s that are developing their own website. They’re developing apps and all kinds of new channels to reach the same customers. You can also think of the eCommerce giants like Amazon who are building bricks and mortar book stores right now.
IBM Research’s Five in Five predictions included that in five years, buying local will beat buying online. They don’t mean buying online is going to go away, and they don’t mean that there will be more total sales in local stores than online channels. What they mean is that the experience of local retail will beat the experience online, for any products you care about. Any small business that has a bricks and mortar presence can actually use the same information and tools that are available for an eCommerce site.
What can local stores do? You can bring online tools like wish lists, customer reviews, recommended additional products and deep information about every product, and integrate them into a physical location, creating a hybrid experience. Technology enhances the in-person, in-store experience.
Our advantage as rural retailers is that we know our customers. We have the right approach. We focus on customer service. We put our emphasis on each person as an individual.
Think about the rural stores you’ve been in. They treated you like an individual person, they got to know exactly what you needed. They got to know the things that you liked. They got to know your preferences, and they would actually tell you if something was not right for you.
That kind of personal approach to customer service is a huge advantage in every sales channel. Ask yourself these questions: How could we provide customers online with the wonderful wealth of information that our sales staff has developed over the years? How could we provide the recommendations? How can we tailor this to each person? If you take that approach from the real world into the virtual world and extend that customer experience from bricks and mortar into an app or into an eCommerce site, then you’ve used the right approach to make it human, to make it personal, and to make it effective.
Think about what IBM was saying with their Five in Five prediction. In five years buying local will beat buying online because it will be nexus of these technologies working together. I think that approach is what makes that work.
Take the Missouri Star Quilt Company. Now some of you have heard of The Missouri Star Quilt Company and that can only be for one of two reasons. One is they get written about a lot in the technology and marketing fields because they’re so good with technology and marketing. The other reason would be you’re a quilter, in which case you definitely know the Missouri Star Company. They are a small local bricks and mortar business, started by Jenny Doan and her family in Hamilton, Missouri. They grew into a huge local business because Jenny would do quilting demonstrations, and they started posting them to YouTube. That was a really simple step initially.
You could watch Jenny’s demonstration on YouTube, and then you could buy fabric from them online. Now they’ve gone on with that over and above just the simple step of eCommerce site. They have a YouTube channel and every possible social network for outreach, and they’ve built their own app with quilting demonstrations. You can set your phone next to the sewing machine, watch the demonstration, hit pause, actually execute the maneuver, go back watch it again, make a correction. They’ve pulled together their videos into an app, and I’m betting they’ll develop a chat-bot to enter that sales channel, or what ever new channels come about in future.
They ship hundreds and hundreds of packages every day out of that store. It’s not just one store now, it has become a global destination. They’ve had people fly from Australia and then drive for hours, just to visit their store in person. It’s not enough to see her online, to watch the demonstrations, to connect with the store online, order, and receive the package. People want to see her in person.
What was a small store on a side street grew into a downtown business, then grew even more. Now they have split up into a dozen different locations in Hamilton. There’s one just for machines. There are several that specialize in different kinds of fabrics. There’s a gentleman’s area so that guys can go and lounge and watch the game. Then they have cafes and restaurants that they have helped bring about, because they needed cafes and restaurants when their customers come to town.
Missouri Star is huge now, but remember it started online very small with posting demonstrations and tying it to the ability to make a sale. Using that as a starting point, any business can take leveraging what they know, put it online so that other people can see it and tie it to the ability to make a sale.
This article is an excerpt from an interview with Bob Dunn. Hear the whole interview or read the transcript at BobWP.com
https://bobwp.com/insights-ecommerce-rural-businesses-omni-local-becky-mccray/
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
[…] Have a local business that wants to sell online? Focus first on the existing customers. That’s one of the lessons with Rural OmniLocal. […]