Learn how to attract new customers, as getting a steady stream of new clients allows you to grow your business and fulfill your company's vision.
As a business owner, you're no doubt keenly aware that your client base is the lifeblood of your company. A steady stream of new customers allows you to grow your business and fulfill your company vision.
Farzana Irani realizes the importance of a strong client base for all small businesses, including virtual ones, which is why the web consultant with iAdControl.com/Fuzzworks UK recently asked the community: "What is your best approach in creating a client base for your online business?"
It turns out that a seven-step approach works best for attracting new clients.
1. Identify Your Ideal Client
It’s easier to look for customers if you know the type of consumers you seek. Without a composite of your ideal customer, you probably wouldn’t know where to start looking.
“Have a crystal clear picture in your head of exactly who you're targeting,” says Nicole Beckett, president of Premier Content Source. “Think about what makes those types of people happy, sad, scared, relieved, and then think about how you can make their lives a little easier.”
Narrow down the focus of your ideal client and avoid making broad target market statements, such as every woman, every man or all Baby Boomers. Few products appeal to that vast of a group of people, and overstating your market can prevent you from developing viable targeted strategies for attracting clients.
2. Discover Where Your Customer Lives
With your targeted customers in mind, “identify those places where they are likely to be found (media, online, offline, mail, etc.), and then create messages for them,” says Jeff Motter, CEO and chief marketing officer of East Bay Marketing Group.
Where you look for customers will depend on the nature of your business. Some good online locations include forums and social media pages, including your own and those of similar or complementary businesses. Offline, you can meet plenty of potential customers at conferences and conventions in your industry.
3. Know Your Business Inside and Out
Thoroughly understanding your industry and having a firm knowledge of your product or service is critical to being able to attract interested clients. When you know your product backward and forward, that fact comes through. The people who would be interested in your offerings can see how knowledgeable you are and may seek your assistance.
4. Position Yourself as the Answer
Give potential clients you come into contact with a good reason to try your services, which is your first step to making them loyal customers, suggests Jason Reis, owner and lead programmer for Flehx Corp.
“Provide value and establish yourself as having an in-depth understanding of the problems they are looking to solve,” he says. “This takes the form of creating content via webinars, blog posts, guest blogging, and getting out there and physically networking with people. From all this you will start to attract a following, and as long as you have a structured sales funnel setup, you will be able to convert the followers/fans into paying customers.”
5. Try Direct Response Marketing
Your best bet for reaching out and touching customers may be to use tactics to encourage them to complete a specific action, such as opt into your email list or request more information.
Create messages directed at your target market, suggests Motter. “Learn to create ads that attract your ideal clients by giving them something of value for free to get them started in your funnel. Learn all you can about direct response marketing practices, because they will teach you to focus on results that matter.
Create compelling messages that tell your ideal audience why they'd have to be a fool not to work with you. Show them you understand their pain, and can make it go away faster and cheaper than they could without you.”
6. Build Partnerships
Teaming up with businesses that offer complementary services offers you the opportunity to take advantage of synergy, which can be very effective in building a business. For instance, if you have a company that specializes in SEO, consider teaming up with a business that builds websites.
When all is said and done, nurturing relationships, either with other business owners or customers, helps you create a client base, Beckett suggests. “Focus on building human relationships. The stronger your relationships are, the more likely your customers will be to tell their friends about you. And, the more likely they'll be to come back.”
7. Follow Up
After your efforts to bring in business, always remember to close the loop, suggests Josh Sprague, CEO of Orange Mud. “Remember to set follow up tasks (follow up to sample sent, etc.), and execute your plan. So many leads and great conversations are wasted because you forget to follow up.” Doing this simple step can help you get your client base to grow.
Note: This article was first published by Julie Bawden-Davis on "American Express, Business Trends and Insights", August 31, 2021
Build a Passive Income System based on a Customer Network
Affiliate Marketing vs Referral Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a type of performance-based marketing in which a business rewards one or more affiliates for each visitor or customer brought by the affiliate's own marketing efforts (Wikipedia).
It is a great option to set up an online business without having a product or an organisation. Just sign-up on a platform for digital products and promote. Top sites like Clickbank provide statistics to navigate through the portfolio.
However, it is often confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships.
Affiliate marketing, a successful technique in the "make money online" business arena for digital products, is primarily campaign orientated, while a referral business strives to build a recurring passive income for the network members.
Why Build a Customer Network?
Let's face it: not all of us are comfortable thinking about becoming a sales person. Sales has a reputation of "talking people into spending money they don't have on things they don't need". This may be a common and somewhat extreme stereotype, but the connection of "sales" and "untrustworthy" is out as a negative burden, if we like it or not.
On the other hand, we all have existing relationships and a background which enables us to connect with people and build new relationships.
What if we used this positive aspect to build not only a network of people we like and value but in addition a customer network which generates income, especially the desired passive income?
Sounds unrealistic? It's not, let me show you how it works.
What we do is literally the opposite of selling: we build a network of customers, i.e. people who buy and consume products from one source. The network is built on word of mouth and personal relationships.
Of course, at some point we run out of the friends we already know in the process of building the network. We then use networking platforms and social media to invite people to join our group and benefit from the referral system we work with.
Now, look at the network scheme (right image above) to understand how it is set up: "Red" recommended "Orange", "Green" and "Blue" to become customer and join the network. They again recommended to their friends. Some of them only buy the products and others recommend further, to their own friends.
"Orange", "Green" and "Blue" receive commissions for all the customers they brought on board. "Red" benefits from everyone involved, i.e. the customers he referred to directly, "Orange", "Green" and "Blue" as well as all customers wo came in via "Orange", "Green" and "Blue".
This system is unlimited, everyone buys at the same price and all customers get rewarded according to the same commission scheme.
Interested in my business, how it works and how you can probably benefit from my work?
Become Financially Independent Now.
Attract New Customers Following Key Success Factors.
