Any business owner is acutely aware that finding new customers can be the key to growing. In an ideal world, word-of-mouth referrals would drive your business growth. But this is a world of globalization and data sophistication, where a small business will be competing for the same market share with other nearby businesses and online from businesses around the country or even the globe. To beat those odds, businesses need to get creative when attracting new customers. More importantly, businesses need to know how to attract new customers.
How to Attract Customers in 3 Broad Strokes
1. Know Your Customers
The first step to attracting new customers is to discover your ideal customer, a point reinforced in this American Express Open Forum article. This means a detailed picture of your customer. Identifying a large group, for example “women ages 20-59,” will likely not get you close enough.
You want to know where the right customer lives, what their hobbies are, whether they own or rent their home, if they’re active on social media … and that’s just for starters. Knowing your ideal customer will allow you to craft viable marketing campaigns designed around their needs, ultimately attracting new customers.
That’s where Salesgenie can help. They can help you pinpoint the right prospects across a wide range of demographics, interests and behaviors, then manage those leads and create effective marketing campaigns.
2. Be the Solution
If you know your business inside and out, and if you have identified the customers you want to attract, then you can position your product or service as the best possible solution for them. You can design offers and service packages that demonstrate how well you know and understand customer needs. Test these with your customers and be open to their feedback on how to improve.
3. Get Top of Mind
If you truly know your customer and the right solution for their needs, you will be able to deliver targeted offers and messaging in the right format and at the right time. For example, if you know your ideal customer is searching on Google, you can design online ads that appear in search results targeting their specific searches. Salesgenie is a Google Premier Partner with this type of targeting.
How to Get Customers to Buy Your Product with Neighbors
This Entrepreneur.com article discusses an interesting approach to attracting new customers where one business makes a special offer to customers of another business. For example, suppose you run an insurance agency and have figured out that your ideal customer also takes their vehicle in for service at a nearby repair shop. With the repair shop’s permission, you can offer a free, additional “safety check” to their patrons for the opportunity to provide a no-obligation insurance quote. The repair shop gets the opportunity to upsell more business and you get leads.
Building relationships helps keep the focus on the human interaction of business. If you leave a stack of postcards with your special offer at the repair shop, your offer is now trackable and you have hard evidence of how well that offer does.
After all your hard work identifying customers and designing offers just for them, don’t forget the last step – the follow up. A quick check-in can say a lot to a prospect. For example, it can say that you’re thoughtful, dedicated and offer excellent customer service. Let Salesgenie help you manage your leads, and you’ll turn them into repeat customers.
