One of the biggest challenges for small business owners is attracting new clients. To sustain an enterprise, you need a healthy inflow of business, without which your market share could remain stagnant or even erode.
So, while taking care of your existing customers, you need to devise a strategy to entice new ones. But what specific steps can you take? Here’s what you should know.
Proven Techniques to Attract New Customers
Before you develop a strategy to attract and acquire new clients for your business, there are a few fundamental areas you need to address.
Define Your Unique Selling Points
Any marketing effort should begin by identifying the unique selling points (USPs). Ask yourself: What makes your product, service, brand, or business special? In other words, why should customers come to you instead of your competitors?
It could be lower prices, superior service, or special features in your product. By identifying the USPs, you can effectively leverage them in your marketing communications.
Determine Who Your Customers Are
Who will purchase your products? What is their age and gender? Where do they live? How do they make their purchasing decisions? What is their disposable income? Consider as many demographic, geographic, and psychographic factors as possible to profile your primary and secondary audiences in detail.
Design a Strong Brand Identity
Your brand’s identity allows your product to stand out and be remembered. After all, when a product blends into the crowd, it hardly gets noticed. So, make it stick with a unique, attractive identity that can grab the audience’s attention.
Once you have addressed the above three areas, you can move on to deploying our proven techniques for attracting new customers.
Search Optimize Content
Today, search engines are the ultimate tool for discovering local businesses, finding product details, reading reviews, and comparing prices. In fact, they are the number one information resource used by shoppers for purchasing decisions.
So, if you want to attract new customers, your product or business must turn up on top of search result pages each time a potential shopper searches for a product similar to yours. But how can you do that? The answer is search engine optimization.
This is about optimizing your digital content to rank higher in relevant search results on Google, Bing, and similar platforms.
Search engines deploy unique algorithms to identify material that best matches a search term or keyword. So, determining which keywords and keyphrases are relevant to your business and designing a keyword strategy is crucial for maximizing the impact of your digital content.
There are other on- and off-site SEO techniques that can help you with ranking. An SEO expert can guide you on them.
Invest in Social Media
The average individual spends 145 minutes on social media each day. So, if you want to find and attract new customers, this is where you need to be.
Start with identifying the appropriate networking platforms to build a presence for your business. This would depend, to a large extent, on your brand identity and your customer profile. If you want to target a Gen Z audience, then TikTok is a must. For a professional crowd, LinkedIn is important.
Once you select the most relevant social media sites, set up profiles and develop a content plan. Make your posts interactive, and include videos, images, GIFs, podcasts, and other mediums. Carry out competitions and opinion polls. And don’t forget to engage with your audience—respond to their comments, like and comment on their posts, and reshare interesting content.
Investing in social media influencers is another option to consider. Influencers already have a sizeable captive audience, which you can leverage for your business through product endorsements, reviews, and demonstrations.
Deploy Email Campaigns
Email marketing is one of the most cost-effective marketing tactics available for small enterprises. However, developing high-quality email databases is vital to optimize results.
To acquire email lead lists, you can carry out promotions and competitions on social media or set up a newsletter signup feature on your website. Leadar is another important tool for finding prospects and their detect disposable email addresses. You can also leverage LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator.
Once you have your databases ready, develop email sequences with tailored messages. Don’t forget to A/B test your calls to action.
Leverage Customer Loyalty
Your existing customers are an invaluable resource for attracting new ones to your business. Their testimonials and referrals will carry substantial weight in swaying new clients to purchase your products.
So, giving your present customers the best service possible and maintaining ongoing engagement with customized communications is critical. Also, encourage them to leave reviews and reward them for each customer they refer.
Advertise Online
Online advertising is not only inexpensive but can also deliver a better return on your marketing dollars compared to traditional advertising. This makes it a particularly attractive marketing tactic for small businesses.
Search engine advertising, for instance, can help your product or business appear on top of search engine result pages during relevant search queries. It follows a PPC or paid-per-click model, where you only pay based on actual engagement.
Social media advertising is another useful option to consider. Many networking sites allow businesses to launch highly targeted campaigns focused on a pre-defined audience group. They can also provide access to insightful data so you can track and adjust your advertising activities based on results.
Build Partnerships
By partnering with non-competing businesses, you can rely on each other’s strengths to attract new customers and bring in business. It is a cost-effective marketing technique for any small enterprise.
For instance, if you sell yoga mats, why not partner with local gyms and yoga studios to promote your products? You can leave promotional material at their premises, provide discounts for their customers, or even sell on-site.
Key Takeaways
Without big marketing budgets, attracting new customers can seem impossible for a small business owner. But with the right tactics, you can effortlessly bring new business and grow your market share.
SEO, social media marketing, email campaigns, customer loyalty and referral programs, online advertising, and partnerships are some of the most powerful marketing techniques to help your small enterprise reach new clients. But to maximize their results, first, ensure you identify your product’s unique selling points, define your audience, and design an impactful brand identity.