Advice for Business Owners Looking to Attract Customers

One of the key pain points that business owners face is the problem of attracting new customers. On the one hand, the acquisition costs for new customers are notoriously high. On the other hand, consistent growth requires new customers. If you’re struggling with attracting customers, keep reading for some key ways you can boost your customer numbers.

Use Email Marketing

Businesses routinely struggle to develop a reliable ROI number for their marketing efforts. Yet, one of the easiest-to-track marketing methods also offers one of the highest ROIs: email marketing. As an added bonus, email marketing is also one of the cheapest methods to deploy.

You can set up an email capture right on your website with a free report or a newsletter, which you trade for a lead’s email address. At that point, you can entice them into becoming customers with a variety of tactics ranging from drip campaigns to straight-up coupons and discounts.

Embrace Social Media

Another one of the cheaper ways of attracting new customers is a strong social media presence. Yes, this is a case of spending your time or your employees’ time rather than financing a big marketing push. Yet, it also gives direct and often near-immediate access to your customers.

It’s a solid way of reinforcing your brand story and brand values. That can help convert new customers. It also lets you announce sales or events, which your existing customers may well share with their friends and family members.

Deploy Content Marketing

Content marketing is a bit more complex, but ultimately achievable in-house. The main thrust of content marketing is you provide your audience with high-quality content that offers them some kind of real value. So, let’s say that you restore furniture. You might shoot a video or write a blog post about how to perform basic repairs on furniture.

Assuming you do provide valuable and relevant content, you build trust with your audience. That trust should help convert audience members into customers when they finally need your services. You’ve already established a kind of relationship that your competitors, with luck, cannot match.

Ask for Referrals

Assuming your customers fit into your ideal customer profile, they also represent a huge untapped source of new customers. After all, the odds are pretty good that the people they know and spend time with are a lot like them. In other words, their friends will also fall into your ideal customer profile.

Asking current customers for referrals is a great way to get them to encourage their friends to come in and see you. You can make this an informal process or you can set up a full-blown referral program with rewards and tiers. You’ll have to judge for yourself which approach will work best for your business.

Contact Old Customers

Every business owner has a story about once-loyal customers who just vanished one day. While some of those customers simply moved on or even moved away, others simply got out of the habit of using your business or service.

You can often reignite that relationship by reaching out to those customers via emails or direct mail offers that provide a discount on their next purchase. For high-priced products or services, you may find a call is more effective than email or direct mail.

Offline Marketing

While many approaches for getting new customers to focus on online strategies, there are some offline strategies that are also effective. For example, a voice broadcasting service can make mass calls on your behalf. This can prove especially helpful if you’re launching a new product or service that your customers will like.

Similarly, direct mail campaigns can reach a large number of customers or potential customers. Depending on your specific needs, you can often target very specific areas like neighborhoods or zip codes if you’re sending out enough direct mail pieces.

Conclusion

Attracting customers can feel like a somewhat Sisyphean task, except you keep spending money instead of pushing a rock. Yet, there are a lot of ways of attracting customers that can prove effective and cost-effective. Email marketing has an excellent ROI, especially considering the very low financial bar to entry. Social media and content marketing can also help you connect with leads. Offline tactics like voice broadcasting, referral programs, and contacting old customers can also work well without breaking the bank.