In a perfect world, you’d have an unlimited budget to advertise your business to locate new customers and increase sales. You can buy plenty of online and offline advertising, conduct promotions to build traffic in-store and online, and launch a proactive public relations campaign to boost your product or brand’s visibility and consciousness.
However, this is not an ideal world. Realistically, most small businesses, as well as many medium-sized firms, have more great suggestions about how to peddle their products compared to available sources.
So, where do you start if you are looking for more clients? Learning to generate new sales leads is an essential skill for an entrepreneur. Even if you don’t consider yourself a seller in the perfect sense of the Willy Loman character from Arthur Miller’s play Death of a Salesman, you need to recognize that the opportunities for finding new customers range from cold calling names from the phone book to buying lists of potential customers to using more advanced Internet techniques like Search Engine Optimization to drive new business to your website.
Before you can find new customers, you have to understand your target audience. You need to know who your customer is, what value proposition you offer to customers, and what your opponent is currently offering in the market and where there are passages for a new entrant.
It would be best if you did some market research – whether that means hiring an outside firm to do the legwork or trying to do it yourself. There’s an underlying disconnection between your motive to increase sales and your client’s motivation to solve their problems.
To develop a marketing plan to reach new customers, you need to know better who you’re already selling to. “If I’m trying to expand sales, I have to find out who my existing customers are. What are their demographics? What do they look like?” says Jerry Osteryoung, which means doing market research.
You can get to know your buyers and segment the market any number of methods including by:
Demographics — analytical data on a community including income levels, age, gender, etc.
Psychographics — the attitudes and judgments of a particular demographic.
Ethnographic — examination of appropriate culture.
Buying habits — how what and where customers purchase goods and services.
Now, after all this little understanding, if your company is small, finding ways to bring in business usually hangs on the business owner’s shoulders. But business owners often don’t have much experience in purchasing or trading. If you’re a startup or an existing business looking for more ways to grow your consumer base, these strategies will be going to help.
Develop a plan for customer acquisition:
The secret to creating a successful acquisition plan is to know who would make the ideal customer. If you sell to businesses, consider what department is most likely to buy your products or services, what individual (what level of responsibility) would be the one to determine the specific purchase requirements. (Make some calls if you don’t know!) Determine how long the buying cycle is.
Is buying your product a decision that can be made quickly by a single person? Or are you selling something that has a long buying cycle, possibly involving multiple individuals? I additionally suggest that you create precisely the value proposition canvas along with the Business model Canvas that will help to comprehend the clients too.
Next, think about how the typical buyer finds products or services typically like yours. What circles do they travel in? Are they active in social media? Who are they likely to listen to or where do they look when they want to buy your type of product or service.
What could you do to get referrals and recommendations from those sources? Write all this information down and look for patterns. Then, to get more customers, plan ways to put yourself and your data where the people in your target market can find it when they are ready to buy.
Seek and follow business prospects on social media:
Don’t try to market to them on their social media feeds. Instead, try to develop connections with potential customers. Retweet or comment on their posts. Mention them if appropriate in your own social media posts (i.e., “@Smith gave a terrific performance on retail security at today’s meeting”).
Your goal: to get know and seen as a friend. Selling is a lot easier when you sell to people who feel like they know you.
Study your competitors:
What tactics do they use? Where do they advertise? Where do they network? What works for them may work just as well for you. By knowing all these things, you will be able to understand them easily and identify their next move.
Make your website more appealing:
It doesn’t matter if you have the best product possible in your niche and the best customer service on top of that—if your store’s web design is lousy, your online business presence is doomed. According to a Kissmetrics study, 93% of buyers consider visual appearance the most crucial factor when purchasing.
Also, establish your reputation by showing which companies are working with you and their reviews. They don’t need to be on the scale of a Walmart or Apple, but even small companies can add a degree of trustworthiness to your enterprise.
Use Coupons or Special Offers:
Everybody loves a deal, offering a discount to new customers on their first purchase. If you market products or services that need to be purchased repeatedly, consider making that first discount contingent on the buyer signing a contract for a year of service.
Attend Meetings and Seminars:
If you’ve been doing that and haven’t made contacts that could lead to sales, try new networking associations. Look in the newspapers to see what other organizations hold events that might draw your target market and attend some conferences.
Build your network:
Ask your friends if they know of people who can use your services or who may know others who could use them. If your pricing structure allows it, offer friends and business associates a finder’s fee for referrals that turn into jobs.
Ask for feedback:
Did they get a product that better served their requirements? Did they decide they don’t need the product at all? Did they postpone their purchasing decision? Did they find it difficult to place an order on your web site? Use what you learn to make needed changes, and watch your sales start to grow.
Conclusion:
“There’s a lot you can do that doesn’t require much more work,” Osteryoung says. “You want to make sure you have saturation but obviously you never want to alienate the customer. You never want to make the customer feel like you are hard-selling them.”
Sales often happen because promised customers hear about your products and services in several various ways and from different origins. The more often they hear about you, the more likely they are to consider what you have to offer when they are ready to purchase.
