It’s that time of year when you need to market your business and bring in some new clients. In some ways, this is hard work, but you can make the process easier with some of the strategies below. All you have to do is prompt customers for referrals and use target advertising for results.
Referral Strategies
Word of mouth is still one of the best ways to find new customers, it’s one of the strongest forms of social proof you can find, so if you can convince existing customers to tell their friends, family, and neighbors about you, it will create high-quality leads that become long-term loyal clients.
However, the keyword is “convince”; there’s no point in waiting around for these existing customers to spread the word; even if they like your product or service, they don’t always shout about it, so don’t miss an opportunity to follow up on a positive customer experience. Sometimes reviews can be unfairly negative and come from people your business hasn’t even serviced. In those cases, there are ways to remove negative Google reviews.
Networking
Networking is also an excellent way to build your customer and client base. Networking takes place online and offline these days, so search for industry-relevant communities and make connections with the intention of adding value to your groups instead of hard marketing.
Of course, your intention is to gain new clients, but it doesn’t tend to work if you are too direct about the process. Instead, start to build strong industry relationships, and the clients will follow. Again, this is the power of word of mouth and social proof, stay connected to the right people.
Incentives
Every business is concerned with their bottom line and wants to sell their products and services at full price; however, sometimes you have to speculate to accumulate, and offering incentives and discounts is an excellent way of doing this. It gives clients a chance to try services for less.
Think about introductory offers that allow new customers to get a taste of what you’re doing without committing to a subscription or a full-price item. Also, don’t forget your seasonal offers; like most businesses, you need to discount products and services at certain times of the year.
Target Advertising
You might have thousands of customers on your mailing list, but it makes little sense to target all of them with every product or offer. The days of blanket advertising are in the past; they have now been replaced with targeted advertising that’s more efficient and more effective overall.
Instead of sending the same advert to a thousand clients and hoping some get back to you, select the customers who have shown a clear interest in a product or have a lack in their lives that you can see from your data. Consider tenant mailing lists that target clients in key areas.
Website Improvements
If you haven’t updated your website for some time, you might want to write some new content and target some new keywords to refresh your search engine optimization. This process is easily forgotten in the day-to-day running of a business, but it’s important to keep on top of it.