Stand Out From The Crowd

If you have been in business for a while you have probably already have a few regular clients and are beginning to the hang of being in business. You carry great products and possibly have the best service in town but you want more, you want to push ahead of the competition and stand out as the business to go to when people have computer problems.

To do this, you need to do something different, something that the rest of the computer repair businesses aren’t doing. Not only that, you need to bring attention to it. I discovered a perfect example on a computer technician’s website called ThorSchrock.com.

The city of Omaha, Nebraska was recently hit by a EF-2 tornado so this technician offered free data recovery to those whose computers were damaged by the tornado.

He has combined this with sending some sort of press release to the local media and has obtained some nice media coverage

Although he was offering a free service, it would definitely be worth his time. The media exposure and the good will it created amongst his community alone would make it worth his while, but when the owners of the damaged computers need computer repairs again, guess where they will go? That’s right, straight back to him. Smart move Thor.

When you think about it, other than the initial setup such as removing the hard drives and running the data recovery program, the majority of the process doesn’t need someone to be present as the data is being recovered. Would you give up a couple minutes of your day for 2 weeks or so go get this kind of exposure and look great to your community? I know I would.

We obviously cannot do the same thing that Thor Schrock did (at least until the next tornado), but there are things you can do such as:

• Human Interest Stories – Your business fixing old computers and donating them to the elderly, sick or poor
• Small Business Stories – How your business generated $xxx,xxx in its first year. Succeeding in a competitive market etc..
• Technology Stories – How your store managed to overclock a CPU to 8ghz (using liquid nitrogen as cooling) or how you are one of the first stores selling the newest, ground breaking processor

For more information on how to stand out from the crowd using local press, check out our article on how to write effective press releases. If you get it right, you can obtain advertising exposure that you could never afford via traditional channels. Always be on the lookout for similar opportunities and think outside the box.