The key to the growth of any business lies in acquiring new customers, but before we begin the steps necessary to secure them we must first find them. We will have to do a little thinking to determine our ideal and most accessible market niche. Once we've got that figured out, we will examine some creative and inexpensive ways to get the attention of those potential customers and increase sales for our business.
Utilize the internet for inexpensive marketing. This is where you're going to need perseverance. These methods take time to construct and bring to life.
a. Use Search Engine Optimization to get your website placed higher in a search query. Your placement in a search result is not random. The best web designers use specific SEO techniques to increase your chances of getting noticed.
b. Post a blog. Blog pages have several purposes. They attract search engines, which will generate more hits to your site. They are also one of many ways to establish yourself as an authority in your field. They also keep your current clients abreast of the latest company news.
c. Use social media outlets. This is an important marketing technique these days and involves constructing a web presence within forums and other social internet groups like Facebook and Twitter. This will generate more hits in search queries and generally increase awareness of your existence.
Spend a little cash to get the attention of your client base. This involves the methods we are all familiar with including mailers, business cards, car decals, advertising in print, radio, or on the web, a well made website, etc.
Maintain healthy relationships with your existing customers. Put some effort into keeping customers happy and impressed by your product and service. This can cause a current of new customers just by word of mouth alone.
Start by taking a look at your current customers. Are they sports fans, retired people, parents? Determine a category or two that the majority of your customers fall into. Try to narrow it down in order to avoid wasting time and money. For example, I know that our customers at my place of business, Timesheets.com, are generally small business owners, but not all of them will benefit by our product. Before I send out 10 thousand mailers, I should narrow down this category into a subset that best fits my product.
At first glance Starbucks franchises seem to be a good target for us. There are thousands of Starbuck's employees that need to clock in and out but, upon investigation, I learn that they clock in/out using their own cash registers. They have no need for our time tracking web service.
Last but not least, write write write! Getting your company name into print is a necessity for business growth. Start by writing a few press releases about recent news within the company. You can publish them on PR websites for a low fee or for free. If your news is big, you can publish it in the paper. In addition to press releases, write articles. By now, you are an expert on what you are selling so write articles on every aspect of what you do and what problems your product solves.
Press releases, articles, interviews, surveys, and other printed material will keep your name in the forefront of your customer's mind and it will establish you as an authority and increase your credibility. This is exactly what you need to be at the moment when your customer makes a choice between you and your competitor - and that is the difference between losing and acquiring a new customer.
Establish partnerships with other companies. Partnering with a company that can recommend your product or service can save you both money. For example, the Timesheets.com project and time tracking software is valuable for record keeping but most of our customers use the reports our software generates to send to their payroll company. An good partnership for us is one of those payroll companies.
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