How to Attract New Customers to a Young Business

Attracting new customers is an aim for every business but is even more critical for new companies. How does a start-up gain enough profile to attract significant numbers of customers to be viable? It is a mix of knowledge, strategy, and hard work. We will outline here how to identify the type of customer you need, how to persuade them to shop with you, and how to retain them.

Know Your USP over Established Rivals

Every company has a reason that their customers choose them over rival firms. This reason is referred to as your Unique Selling Point or USP. These vary in many ways, and it could be the convenience of location, it could be price, it could be expert advice and service, or many other things.

Read:- 5 Ways to Excel Your Career Business Career

What is essential to know is what yours is? Incorrectly identifying what makes customers want to shop with you can be terminal for a promotional strategy. The most common mistake a new entrepreneur often makes is to concentrate too much on price.

The selling point is essential, especially for calculating profit margins and the sustainability of the business. But if you choose to compete on price and later on discover the customers would have happily paid more, you will have missed out on a lot of potential revenue.

Be Certain for Whom your Product or Service is Intended

Having identified what your USP is but failing to ascertain who it is for is another classic error. How can you know who to promote to if you don’t know who your target customer is?

We often hear naïve business owners dismissing this with a phrase something along the lines of, ‘our service is for everyone. Although this is perhaps a valid and admirable position, it is ineffective from a marketing perspective. There will always be a demographic where most of your customers lie.

Read:- Best Free Tools you can use when Starting a New Business

For example, if you make outdoor clothing, it may be evident that hikers, climbers, and skiers are your target audience. But it may be helpful to dig a little further; is it casual participants, experts, or pros? How much do they expect to spend, and what do they look to get in return for their spending?

All of this is essential before you try to reach your customers. Driving promotions towards the largest groups in your customer base will yield optimal results.

Find People in the Right Place

Now that we know who we want to attract, we must figure out where to find them. It can be relatively easy for some businesses to reach your target audience; take a local café, for example, it’s likely to be people who eat (everyone) in a particular location.

This café can then advertise in the local press, radio, and even community online groups, including Facebook. Imagine an organization looking for something more specific, such as a business that repairs and modifies guitars.

The repair shop will have a much more niche clientele than the café. They will be looking for musicians, and specifically those who hold an interest in modifying their instruments. Placing adverts in music magazines, gaining endorsements from known musicians, or even sponsoring local gigs could help.

Facebook again is a great place to promote anything if you know how to use it effectively; the guitar company could post in guitar modification groups and pages, offering advice and gaining exposure at the same time.

Use Eye-Catching Promotional Material

If we use Facebook or any other social media platform, the golden rule is to make our posts engaging. The most effective way to achieve this is to use visually impressive posts. This means using a mix of images and videos to showcase what you do and explain why it should be you your customers come to for that service. Consider hiring a professional video production Fort Lauderdale company. Having an experienced procreate your ads can make them more engaging, save time and be more effective.

Have a Clear & Concise Message

No matter how striking a social media post is or how eye-catching an image looks, they will do nothing for you if their message is ambiguous. For design in advertising and promotion, the notion of less is more is certainly relevant.

As a new business owner, it is tempting to try and convey everything you do in one post, but the post is just the bait to draw them in. Once you have their attention, all the info a customer needs will be found on your website.

Reward Referrals

We know that retaining customers is a crucial feature of a successful business. But what if we go one step further and actually have our current customers recruit more for us? This can easily be achieved with a good referral rewards program. Have your customers refer friends and family in exchange for a discount or reward.

Consider Free Trials or Introductory Offers

Everyone loves the idea of a freebie. This is human nature, but also, people don’t always like to start paying for something they first had for free.

Therefore, introductory offers need to be carefully set up. You must do enough to draw in new customers while not alienating loyal ones and making them feel unwanted. This is why we have recommended referral rewards, as well as introductory offers.

Read:- 9 Strategies To Maximize Business Productivity

To make this scheme work, you must monitor new customers and ensure they are not claiming multiple offers, take details such as phone, email, and address. Some may go to the lengths of creating multiple false accounts, but this will be rare.

Keep Track of How New Customers Found You

If we find that we are successfully gaining new customers, it is essential to know where they have come from? Asking them is the simple answer to find out. If you operate a physical store, then it might be as simple as asking when they are at the till point. This, however, is a rather unscientific method. If we are to use a more trackable method, such as a survey, we can better analyze our results.