The Customers Who Say "I Didn't Know You Did That"
When a loyal customer is surprised by a service you've offered for years, that's not their failing — it's a marketing gap quietly costing you sales. Here's how to turn everything your business secretly does into a steady stream of social posts that reach people the moment they need them.
Dave Smith
# The Customers Who Say "I Didn't Know You Did That"
There's a particular sentence that should make every small business owner wince. It's the one a loyal customer says, almost in passing, after years of giving you their money: "Oh, I didn't know you did that."
It sounds harmless. Friendly, even. But sit with it for a second. Someone who already trusts you, already buys from you, already likes you enough to keep coming back — and they had no idea you offered a whole service you'd have happily sold them. That's not a customer's failing. That's a marketing one. And it's almost always quietly costing you more than any campaign you never ran.
The curse of knowing your own business too well
Here's the trap. You know everything your business does. You know it so completely that you've stopped noticing how much of it is invisible to everyone else.
The plumber who also does full bathroom installs, but whose customers only ever call about leaks. The accountant who'll happily handle your self-assessment, but whose clients assume that's "not really their thing." The café that does outside catering, the printer who does signage, the hairdresser who does wedding parties. You live inside the full picture every day. Your customers only ever see the slice they happened to walk in for.
And because you're so close to it, the broader stuff feels obvious. Surely people know? They don't. People are busy, distracted, and only half-paying attention to your business at the best of times. They filed you under one category the day they met you, and there you've stayed.
Social media is where you fix the filing problem
This is exactly the gap social media is brilliant at closing — and it costs you nothing but a bit of attention.
Every service you offer that someone might one day need is a post waiting to be written. Not a hard sell. Just a quiet, regular reminder that yes, this is a thing you do. The roofer who posts a tidy gutter-clearing job in November isn't being pushy. They're planting a flag in the mind of every follower who'll think of them the moment their own gutters start overflowing.
The magic of it is that you're not introducing yourself to strangers. You're reminding people who already like you about something they didn't realise they could get from someone they already trust. That's the warmest possible audience for the easiest possible sale.
How to find your hidden services
You don't need a brainstorm session for this. You need to listen to your own conversations.
Start paying attention to every time someone says "I didn't know you did that." Write it down. Each one is a flashing sign pointing at a service you've been keeping a secret. If three customers a month are surprised you do something, imagine how many never found out at all.
Then do the slightly uncomfortable thing and write out everything you actually offer. Not the headline service — all of it. The add-ons, the seasonal bits, the "oh, we can sort that too" jobs you mention only when asked. Most owners are genuinely surprised by how long the list gets once they stop assuming it's all common knowledge.
That list is months of content. One post per service, spread out, repeated occasionally through the year. You're not running out of things to say — you've been sitting on a backlog the whole time.
Show it, don't just announce it
A post that says "Did you know we also do X?" works, but it's the weakest version. People skim past announcements.
What lands is proof. A photo of the actual job. A two-line story about a customer who came in for one thing and left having solved a problem they didn't know you could solve. "She popped in for a trim and mentioned her daughter's wedding — turns out we do the whole bridal party, so that's sorted too." That's not an advert. That's a small, real moment that quietly teaches your audience what you're capable of.
The before-and-after of a service nobody knew you offered does more work than any "full list of services" graphic ever will. Let people see it happening, and the "I didn't know" disappears on its own.
Keep saying it, because people forget
The hardest part to accept is that one post won't do it. Someone scrolling past on a Tuesday isn't filing your full service list away for later. They're half-watching, then gone.
So you repeat. The same service, mentioned in different ways, across the year. Not because you've run out of ideas, but because that's simply how memory works — your customers need to hear it more than once, and at the right moment for them, not for you. The wedding enquiry comes when someone gets engaged, not when you happen to post about it. Keep it in regular rotation and you'll be there when the need arrives.
This is the sort of steady, unglamorous consistency that's easy to know you should do and hard to actually keep up — which is part of why we built Aunty Social to handle it for £29 a month, turning the things your business does into a regular drip of posts so the right service is in front of people when they finally need it.
The quiet win
You probably won't get a thank-you for this. Nobody messages to say "great post, now I'm aware of your full range of services." What you'll get instead is subtler and far better: enquiries for things people used to take elsewhere, simply because they finally know you do them.
The next time someone says "I didn't know you did that," treat it as useful feedback rather than a nice surprise. It's your business telling you, plainly, what to post about next.