While some small businesses cater specifically to older people, even if this demographic isn’t your target audience, you should still take measures to ensure that this group is well cared for and feel valued by your business.

To help ensure that this happens, here are three tips for better serving the older population as part of your small business. 

Keep Connected

For many older people, keeping in communication with people and businesses can be a challenge. Knowing this, you should take it upon yourself to stay connected with your older customers. 

To best do this, you should try to market to them in a way that keeps you in the forefront of their minds without being overbearing. Especially if you have a small business that is great for helping people maintain relationships, like working in food service or gifts, you should reach out to your older customers during strategic times of the year where they might be wanting to use your products or services. Additionally, older people also appreciate being sent discounts for things like holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. So if you can keep track of these important dates for your customers, you could get a lot more business by reaching out during these times. 

Give Them As Much Information As Necessary

When buying something new, it’s common to want to spend a lot of time researching and learning about the product or service. This is especially true for older customers, as they want to make sure that they’re spending their money on something they actually want or need. But when being told all the information they need, it can be easy to forget all of the details. 

To keep this from happening when you’re speaking with an older customer, you should get into the habit of writing things down to give to your customers. This way, they can refer back to whatever it was you told them. Not only can this make things easier for your customers, but this extra touch and attention can be very memorable. 

Support Organizations That Support This Demographic

If you haven’t spent a lot of time around older people, you might not know what they want, need, or how they interact. But if you don’t understand these things, you might find it very hard to connect with or serve this demographic. 

To help you learn these things, you might want to start supporting or volunteering for organizations that support this demographic, like Meals on Wheels or a local assisted living facility. You could learn a lot from the people who currently work there and learn a lot about how to best serve older people, too. 

If you have a lot of older customers for your small business, consider using the tips mentioned above to help you better connect with and serve this demographic.