While nurturing your existing customer base is vital for your business, it’s important to continually cast the net wider to get new customers. This will improve your bottom line and cement your business’s presence in the industry.
Here are the best ways to get new customers for your business.
1. Leveraging your network
Regardless of the size of your business, your existing network is your biggest asset in bringing new customers into the fold.
Stay connected with your associates and foster your clients by providing incentives and rewards for their loyalty and support. By creating mutual value for each other, your network will become one of your most valuable resources that you will be able to leverage time and time again.
Existing customer base
Don’t disregard old customers just because they haven’t done business with you in a while. In fact, they can be a readily accessible, cost-effective and simple option to grow your business.
Regularly review your customer contacts and identify those who haven’t interacted with or purchased from you in the last 6-12 months. Engage these customers with a tailored special offer via direct mail, email or even phone. If you’ve fostered and maintained a great relationship in the past, they’ll be happy you remembered them and appreciate your genuine effort to win their business in a competitive market.
Business partnerships
Align your business with those with a similar ideal customer base but not in direct competition with you. Think of butchers and bakers, accountants and bookkeepers, car sellers and mechanics. They share the same customers but offer different services.
Successful business owners work together on strategies to target each other’s customers and generate new business for each other. For example, a baby clothing and maternity products website could partner up to offer discounts and deals to each other’s customer base.
LinkedIn is an excellent business growth strategy you can take advantage of to seek out and connect with like-minded businesses and customers.
Take the time to create and post valuable content that will inform, educate, and entertain your target audience. Keep it interesting by including different types of content, such as infographics, reports, videos, whitepapers, or links to relevant webinars.
Not all your content needs to come from you, but the more you can produce, the better. Suppose an article published by you on LinkedIn is widely shared. In that case, your name and business will be shared along with it, increasing your profile views, new customer enquiries and strengthening your position as an industry expert.
Reviews and referrals
It’s often said that referrals are better than advertising. While it is a highly valuable way of attracting new customers, you can’t just sit back and wait for your customers to refer their friends and family.
Take control by implementing a system for actively requesting referrals from your happy customers and building referral-generating activity into your sales process. For example, send a follow-up email after your customer has received their product or service, asking for a referral and/or review that you can use in your business. You can also offer discounts on future purchases or cash backs for confirmed referrals.
Your customers are far more likely to purchase from you once they have seen that many others before them have enjoyed successful experiences with your business and that you’ll reward them for sending friends and family your way.
2. Improving your website
Your website may look professional and include relevant information for prospective customers, but is it converting browsers to buyers?
Design and development
Site design significantly affects whether your browsers stay or move on.
You only have around 5 seconds to grasp your browser’s attention, so make sure your site is simple, functional and stands out by following the best post-click landing page techniques such as:
- An intriguing headline
- Prominent form
- Contrasting call-to-action (CTA) buttons
- Mobile-friendly optimisation
- Avoid too many graphics as this can slow your site’s load speed
SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) complements content marketing efforts by optimising content and making it easier to get new customers online. And it’s a relatively low-cost way of getting a new customer.
The goal is to rank high in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), so you can create a business presence that’s front and centre.
SEO best practices involve creating indexable content that search engines can read, sort and index by:
- Including your primary keyword/phrase in the title
- Adding related alt text to your images
- Uploading video and audio transcripts
- Linking internally within your site
- Speeding up your page load time
Great content
Content such as blog posts, eBooks, guides, and videos are the foundation of your advertising, and once it’s published, you can promote it via social media and email marketing.
Create clear, concise, and purposeful content to target your desired audience appropriately.
3. Paid advertising
Digital advertising is a key marketing tool for your business to get relevant ad copy in front of your ideal customer, quickly and easily.
Google Ads
Google Ads (formerly known as Google Adwords) allows businesses to reach anyone who uses Google to search for information, products, and services online. When used effectively, Google Ads can send you large numbers of targeted potential customers who want exactly what you have to offer.
Through Google Ads, you pay only for tangible results such as website clicks and business calls. This structure is known as a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign. You can set a monthly campaign ad-spend cap that Google will automatically follow, and you can choose to make your target audience global or local.
Facebook and Instagram
Facebook ads are only as effective as you make them, so it’s important to implement your Facebook strategy correctly from the get-go. This will ensure you reach new customers online without wasting time and money targeting the wrong people.
You can choose from strategies such as:
- Lookalike audiences
Lookalike Audiences are groups of users that are like your current leads or ideal customers. You will need to create a custom audience before creating a Lookalike Audience to increase the number of customers you reach.
- Partner categories
Creating Partner Categories is ideal for targeting users based on their purchase behaviours. Facebook’s data partners collect information about what their users’ activity is like on Facebook and can be used for creating powerful advertising strategies.
Using these tried and tested techniques as starter points, you’ll be well on your way to expanding your customer base and securing your long-term business success.
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