Want to get more potential customers?
What’s the hardest thing about starting and growing a business? For many small businesses, the answer is finding clients or getting customers. Customer acquisition is particularly difficult if your marketing budget is limited. Here are 18 time-tested strategies to help build your customer base.
Finding customers is one of the most difficult challenges for startup and established small businesses. You should start caring about this question from the project discovery phase.
Having a great product or service that you are sure many people will need isn’t good enough. Customers won’t find you, your store, your website, or your Facebook page just because you start a business. You have to go out and find potential customers and clients. In fact, customer acquisition needs to be an ongoing focus for most businesses. Even successful businesses will have customers or clients who stop buying for one reason or another. Those customers have to be replaced just to keep your business on an even keel.
Before searching for a customer make sure that the customers you are approaching are potential customers or not, and for that first, understand that what actually they are?
What are “Potential Customers?”
The definition according to Dictionary.com for Customer is “a person who purchases goods or services from another; buyer; patron”.
Therefore a Customer is someone who has already bought your goods or services. Whilst it may seem obvious to conclude that everyone else who hasn’t yet purchased your products or services is a Potential Customer, this is not the case.
Not everyone who hasn’t yet bought your products or services is a Potential Customer for an organization’s products and/or services. They may be perfect for some kinds of people, completely inappropriate for other kinds, and the average for others. The definition according to Dictionary.com for Potential is “capable of being or becoming”.
Therefore a Potential Customer is someone who is capable of becoming a purchaser of product and/or services from an organization. By understanding your Potential Customers, those most likely to buy from your organization, you can target your Communication Material accordingly.
The key group of Potential Customers is known as your Target Audience, the group of people or organizations that are most likely to buy from your company.
I guess that much introduction is enough for understanding a potential customer now let’s move ahead and discuss a bit about strategies that help us out in getting those customers.
So, How you can get or target customers?
Strategies To Target And Connect With Potential Customers Effectively
Are you rolling out a new marketing plan or looking to give your current one a face-lift? Columnist Steve Olenski outlines 10 steps to help you connect with customers and foster leads.
Brainstorming an effective marketing strategy is never easy to work — you have to make decisions on who you think your target customers are, then spend an enormous amount of time gathering and analyzing data about their consumer habits. It’s either time-consuming or expensive and often it’s both.
However, this time and monetary investment could yield game-changing results for your company. Are you starting to roll out your marketing plan and netting yourself some customers? Follow these 10 steps to be successful.
1. Survey Customers
You won’t be able to connect effectively with your potential customers if you don’t have a customer in mind. Survey current customers, as well as members of your target market, to find out how you can better present your product or service, or what aspects might be missing from what you’re currently offering.
Cast a wide net to capture those you think might be interested in your product or service, and use their data to shape your brand in a way that better resonates with your target market. Once you know who your audience is, where they hang out online and what they respond best to, then you can begin to market.
2. Research Your Competitors And Find Out Who Their Customers Are
An easy way to find out which kind of marketing campaign works and which don’t is by researching competitors in your industry.
Not only will this inexpensive effort give you some ideas to follow for your own campaigns, but this research will also reveal dark spots in your competitor’s process and present new directions for you to take your own marketing strategy.
After all, just by going into business in the same industry, you’ll be going after some of your competitor’s target market — you might as well use their example to make your service and product better for their customers.
3. Target Ads
Far cheaper than most methods of advertising, Facebook and Google targeted ads prove that a little can go a long way.
While most advertising in the real world only reaches whoever comes across a billboard, bus stop, or commercial, these targeted ads can locate the people who are most likely to need your service based on geographical location, demographics (including age, gender, education, and relationship status), interests (based on what they’ve shared or “liked”) and browsing activity.
By investing in targeted ads and paying through their Pay Per Click or Pay Per Impression method, companies can see a significant bump in their user engagement, conversion, and sales.
4. Smart Social Media
There’s having a presence on social media, and then there’s having a social media presence. When it comes to keeping customers, a little more effort on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram really go the distance.
Far too many businesses use their accounts to simply promote their own company, while smart social media managers strategize relevant posts, link to cool articles, answer customer questions as soon as they’re asked, and otherwise give online surfers the impression that there’s actually a human who cares.
These are the companies that retain their customers, give users new ways to use their service or product, and help solve problems as they come up.
Pro tip: For handling social media chat you can use chatbots also it would really help full for you to manage your chats 24/7. Get to know about how you can handle social media here: Social Media Strategies.
5. Respond To Every Email, Tweet, Facebook Comment, And Phone Call
When Paul English was still presiding over Kayak, one of the most valuable practices he insisted on implementing was to keep an extremely annoying, loud phone in the middle of the office to receive customer complaints. This ensured the calls were answered — by anybody, including engineers, developers, content managers, or even English himself.
At Zappos, Tony Hsieh values customer service so much that they build in customer service training for every new hire, regardless of the job. And its customer service has gone to such lengths as to go to a rival shoe store to get a pair of shoes that the site had run out of.
The point? Always answer calls, always care for your customers, and always fix problems as they come in — your customers will love you for it. You can use some of the best phone systems for small business to respond to your customer concerns and queries. It combines the features and capabilities of a traditional phone system at a lower cost and with more functionality.
6. Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has been around since the early days of the Web, and it’s still an overlooked but highly effective means to raise your brand awareness significantly.
And with the number of affiliate networks out there, who operate on a PPC (Pay Per Click) or PPA (Pay Per Action) basis, it has never been easier or safer to find your product being promoted by appropriate publishers.
eBay, Amazon, and certain marketing companies offer their own affiliate networks, but you can also try an exclusive PPA affiliate network.
7. Establish Trust In Your Community: Publish User Reviews, Get Likes, Syndicate Articles
With so many new, competing businesses congesting almost every industry, it’s getting increasingly difficult to stand out and grow a decent-sized following. To gain support, companies first have to establish trust.
As more than 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations, it only makes sense to start by publishing user reviews and sending samples of your product for trusted bloggers to review. By prioritizing customer satisfaction and showcasing positive user experiences, you can build trust with your target audience and foster long-term relationships with potential customers.
As your company keeps growing, start placing in-house content in big websites that publish syndicated content, like Huffington Post, Forbes, FT, Fast Company and Inc. Don’t forget to use your real name — people respond better to a human being than to a corporation.
8. Connect With The Right Influencers
Engaging with big players in your industry can be an extremely effective way to garner a wider share base. After all, if you can get the attention of a thought leader or an influencer, you have the chance to capture their fans and friends, as well as establish trust and credibility.
Reach out to appropriate bloggers or entrepreneurs at conferences or over Twitter, send them relevant and interesting blog content that might pique their interest, and once again — be a human being, not just your company.
9. Post Relevant Content On Blogs
Keeping a practice of continually and diligently publishing relevant and original blog content not only helps keep your company shining in the warm Google sun, but it also helps potential customers truly get to know your company and where it’s coming from.
The content doesn’t have to be self-promotional (and shouldn’t be), but it should offer context into why your product or service is important, suggest the best ways to solve industry-related problems that arise in the everyday lives of your target demographic, impart some valuable wisdom, and generally inspire people to share your point of view.
If you don’t have enough resources or writers on staff to keep rolling out a constant stream of content for your blog, enlist the help of a content marketing platform like Content.ly or a virtual communications platform like Commeta.
10. Craft An Engaging Newsletter To Foster Leads
One of the most time-consuming aspects of online marketing is generating leads. Often, that involves analyzing customer demographics and social media activity, putting out ads and online surveys, and updating user data from year to year.
However, new companies are cropping up to simplify the process of lead generation, and, in some cases — like LeadGenius — they even do the work for you.
A great way of nurturing prospects is with personalized email newsletters, A/B test advertising, and promotional campaigns. Use the data to fine-tune the efforts that work and scale your best campaigns.
Gosh, that sounds like a lot of work, doesn’t it? That’s why companies like LeadGenius exist — to help you develop and nurture your leads without compromising your time.
How Botsify can help you out in getting potential customers?
Botsify’s aim is to provide the finest of customer support that will help you out to leave a good impression on your upcoming and existing customers.
Now let’s have a look at how Botsify helps you out in getting new customers with its new features:
Video Call Support
Provide Real-time consulting to Customers. With a wide reach of the internet, real-time consulting is indeed booming at a high pace. Many of the businesses that need face-to-face interaction can highly benefit from a live voice or video chat. This feature allows the people to get quick support and help in real-time, this feature helps you to create engagement with your customers which directly helps out in increasing more potential customers.
Speak Multiple languages
Your chatbot is capable of conversating in multiple languages. You just make your chatbot in one language and make it able to converse in 190+ other languages with a single click using Google Translate. And Botsify.s multilingual chatbot is very useful for the person who wants to gain customers from different countries.
Built a multi-language chatbot
Automate Your SMS Chat
Now you can easily Boost Conversion Rate with Automated SMS. Costumers don’t want or like to wait. Automation allows businesses to provide instant communication to customers, giving them a delivery time, the success of an application, information on a new product or service, and more, all without the customer asking.
Final Thoughts:
Always remember that no matter how wonderful your service or product is, you won’t make any money if people don’t know about it. Customers will not find you, your store, your website, or your social network pages just because you start a business. Even successful businesses will have customers who stop buying for one reason or another. In fact, customer acquisition needs to be an ongoing focus for all businesses. So, In this Botsify can help you out by leaving a good impression on visitors by providing them 24/7 availability.
That’s great na!!!
So what are your thoughts about potential customers strategies?
Don’t forget to share your strategy with us in the comment section below that we can learn it…
If you like Botsify’s feature and want to try them then join a demo meeting with us.
