It is easy to become complacent once you’ve built your customer base to a certain level as a business, but it’s not enough to attract them, you have to keep new customers. It is important to remember your business objectives and the importance of continuous growth. Like a circus performer, you need to balance efforts to keep current customers happy, while building strategies to attract new ones. This often requires experimenting with different strategies and also using ones that have yielded positive results in past times.
A great example is your mobile provider. Likely they have great deals for new customers ie. Sprint offers you 4 new phones with a new plan. If you’re an existing customer you get nothing special. Meanwhile, your competition, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, try to steal your customers away by offering great deals and offering to pay any switching fees. You may gain new customers at the expense of losing existing ones, and ultimately losing these new customers when the next competitive offer comes around.
Having said that, here are a few ways that you can both attract and keep new customers that may work for you.
1. Prioritize integrity
One thing people often appreciate in a brand is integrity–doing what you promised and acting ethically toward customers, employees, and the society in general. Trust is important for new customers, and sometimes all you have is the first impression, so prioritize integrity. Be sure that you don’t overpromise and underperform because it could cost you prospective customers and result in negative reviews. Occasionally, a mistake is unavoidable and things might go wrong, especially in services where the performance occurs on the spot, rather than with products where effective quality control can catch failures before they reach customers.
Always communicate clearly and honestly with customers and compensate them for any inconveniences. Building a contingency plan for such rare occurrences ensures you quickly respond in a thoughtful manner to solve the problem and have a communication strategy to address customer concerns.
2. Have a Strong Brand
When you do a good job branding your business, targeting appropriate personas, you attract the type of people you’re looking for to your business. Effective branding appeals to the emotions of prospective customers and ultimately helps you build your tribe. A marketing audit helps identify holes in your brand and its performance, offering areas where increased attention might improve your brand image.
Good branding entails having a strong, clear message and brand imagery that encompasses your company’s ethos and ethics. What does your brand do and what’s its personality? What does it wish to achieve? Or are you appealing to? You need to give careful thought and then answer these questions. Once you’ve done so, you can create a logo that suits your business’s message. Ultimately, creating logos that represent your brand and resonate with your audience meets objectives critical to branding.
3. Be the Answer
People don’t buy products, they buy solutions to their problems, so position yourself as a solution to effectively attract new customers. When you’re able to do this, you stir curiosity in prospective customers and give them an incentive to try your products or services. In all of your messaging, be sure to show people how you can make their lives easier and how what you do fits into their life’s story. In doing so, you’re more likely to attract repeat customers.
4. Follow-Up
The reality is that your leads will convert at different rates. While some will do so quickly, others may take months or years. Create an effective strategy to follow-up on leads with the goal of moving them toward conversion at the right time, using the right follow-up messaging. This provides the opportunity to convert leads. In the least intrusive way possible, be sure to keep up with prospects and show them the value you could add to their lives. Some ways to convert leads into sales include offering first-time buyer discounts, creating immediacy in your appeal (such as offers that expire in a short time), or asking your leads questions to discover concerns interfering with their decision.
5. Try Direct Response Marketing
Another approach worth trying when it comes to attracting new customers is direct response marketing. If you can get customers to carry out a single action, that may be the first step in converting them. Give them something they likely find valuable for free as a way of getting them started in your sales funnel. Focus on creating compelling messages that as mentioned above, tell customers how you can solve their problems.
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