Directions for Customers Who Cannot Find You

Right address, wrong door

The phone announces that the destination is on the right. The customer pulls in and sees a row of storefronts, none with your name, and a sign listing twenty units without a single arrow.

Your door is around the back, up a flight of stairs, or down a lane between two buildings. The pin was accurate. It just stopped at the street.

Some customers phone from the parking lot. Some circle twice and arrive late and flustered. A few give up and drive home.

A map shows where the address is. A directions page shows the way to the door.

Where pins stop short

• Plazas and business parks, where one address covers many doors.
• Upper floors, reached by stairs or a lift the street does not show.
• Lanes and rear entrances, where the door faces away from the road.
• Corner lots, with the address on one street and the entrance on another.
• Large sites, such as farms, campuses and marinas.
• New buildings, not yet placed properly on every map.

The fourth is the hardest to spot from inside the business. The route ends confidently on a street with no entrance, and the customer stands beside the building with no way in.

Landmarks in words

Write directions the way a good receptionist gives them on the phone: from the way most people arrive, using things they can actually see.

"Turn in at the plaza sign with the green roof. Drive past the pharmacy to the far end; our door is the grey one under the blue awning."

Choose landmarks that will still be there next year: buildings, signs and road features, not another business's sale banner. And check the directions after dark, since some landmarks vanish at night.

Photographs of the way in

One photograph of the entrance answers more than a paragraph. Two or three in sequence answer almost everything: the turn from the road, the building, the door itself.

Take them where a customer would stand, at eye level, in ordinary daylight, and caption each one with what to look for.

Add the entrance photograph to your Google My Business listing as well, where many people look just before they set off.

Parking, transit and the last stretch

Say where to park and how: which spaces are yours, whether there is a time limit or a meter, whether the lot fills at lunch, and where to go when it does.

Give the nearest bus stop or station by name, the walk from it in minutes, and which side of the street to be on.

Then describe the last stretch for anyone who needs it: steps, a ramp, a lift, a heavy door, and where to drop somebody off close to the entrance.

A customer using a wheelchair, or pushing a stroller, needs that before leaving home, not at the bottom of a staircase.

Making the page easy to find

A directions page nobody opens does nothing. Link it from the contact page, from beside the address in the footer, and from the top of the booking page.

Put the link in every confirmation and reminder email, so it arrives before the customer sets off rather than after they are lost.

Make the address itself a link that opens the phone's map app. And check where the pin sits on both Google and Apple Maps, moving it to the entrance where each service allows.

A worked example

A recording studio occupies a unit at the back of a light-industrial complex: three long buildings, one street address, and a single sign at the entrance listing businesses by unit number.

The studio's door is deliberately plain, heavy and grey with a small sign, because the rooms behind it are soundproofed and full of equipment.

Most sessions start in the evening, after the other businesses have closed and the complex is dark.

Bands arrived late and stressed, having circled the complex in a van full of gear. Some phoned from the street, and the engineer, mid-session, could not always answer.

The pin on both map services sat at the complex's front gate, and the studio's website gave only the street address and the unit number.

The studio built a directions page: the turn into the complex, a photograph of each building's corner with its unit numbers, the door at dusk, where to park and load gear, and the walk from the nearest bus stop.

The page went into every booking confirmation, and the pins were moved to the studio's door on both services. The light over the door, which had been switched off to save power, now goes on an hour before each session.

Directions for every way people arrive

Most businesses have two or three common approaches: from the highway, from the town centre, from transit. Give each a short paragraph rather than one set of instructions that suits nobody.

Say where a bicycle can be locked and where a taxi can stop.

Couriers and suppliers often need a different door from customers. A line for them saves a misdirected delivery and a parcel left at the wrong unit.

Keeping it true

Directions go stale quietly. A neighbour changes its sign, a lot is repainted and renumbered, a bus route moves, construction closes the usual entrance.

Walk the route yourself twice a year, phone in hand, as if you had never been there, and update the words and photographs the same day.

When a customer mentions having trouble, ask exactly where they went wrong. That answer usually shows which sentence to fix.

The counter-case

A shop on a main street with its name over the door needs little more than the address, the parking and the nearest stop. A paragraph on the contact page will do.

A trade whose work happens at the customer's address has nobody to direct, though the same thinking works in reverse: ask customers for their own landmarks and access details when they book.

But for any business whose door is hard to see from the road: write the directions, photograph the entrance, and send the page before every visit.

The check

1. Follow your own pin from the main road.
2. Note where a stranger would hesitate.
3. Write directions using lasting landmarks.
4. Photograph the route and the entrance.
5. Describe parking, transit and step-free access.
6. Link the page from every confirmation.
7. Walk the route again twice a year.

Step two is where the page comes from. Every place a stranger would slow down or turn the wrong way is a sentence the directions need, and people who arrive every day stop seeing those places.

Specific, checkable detail persuades in the same way it guides, as covered in social proof counters that prove nothing.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.