Quick Thoughts - Meeting Your Customers Where THEY Are

Stop making me work to give you my money... please.

On Meeting Your Customers Where THEY Are

I found this one via a search, but too much trouble to actually find it in person.

I’m in Latin America this week and posting some things I’ve noticed here that compare or contrast to business I’m used to.

For the third day in a row I’m working from my hotel lobby while drinking garbage hotel coffee. Why?

As I cruise through all of the tourist areas of Guatemala, I can’t help but notice one glaring thing:

I can’t easily find the businesses to spend my money with.

Keeping in mind that I’m in tourist areas that are catering to international travelers - I notice that almost no businesses have taken the time to understand how international travels discover, shop and spend.

There are almost zero websites for businesses. Most businesses haven’t claimed their Google My Business accounts, setup their businesses on maps / yelp, or have any form of customer service in a language other than Spanish.

So, while the average tourist will kick off a search for a coffee shop by searching google, asking their map for “coffee near me”, or scanning yelp - none of these discovery tools work here.

They force me to What’s App them for information and then I can’t speak Spanish well enough to get the information I need without a lot of pain on my end.

This reinforces a concept I scream all the time to gym owners:

Meet your customers where they are. Where are they? How do they look for you? What are they looking for?

I’m certain there have been a dozen killer coffee shops I could have gone to in Guatemala, had I known.

Instead I’m in my hotel coffee bar typing this drinking absolutely shit coffee.