Getting Seen: How to Attract Customers as a New Business
When you are first starting out as an entrepreneur, your principal concern is how to convince people to become your customers. It isn’t easy to break out in today’s crowded market, no matter what kind of business you operate. It is crucial to develop a strategy for getting people in the door and stand out from among your competitors. In this article, we will go over some tips to help you gain visibility and show you some real-world examples where these techniques worked for successful companies, so that you have something to follow if you decide to use a similar strategy.
1. Stand Out with Marketing
One of the most useful ways to help customers remember your brand is to develop a theme or association that you pair with the brand. There are many examples of companies using their brands to stand out. For example, in the last few years, Old Spice renovated its image and began to release ads, product containers, and other marketing materials that associate the brand with stereotypical manliness. It has turned out to be a winner: the idea of Old Spice as a manly brand has become stuck in the public consciousness. You can take advantage of this in the same way if you design a marketing campaign with a theme that ties your brand to a certain feeling, concept, or idea
2. Thought Leadership
Depending on your area, it might be possible to differentiate yourself by becoming a thought leader in your field. This is an ambitious choice for a new business, but it can pay off if you are in the right niche. Consulting firms like McKinsey, for example, publish academic papers about management and business both to raise awareness of their brand and to demonstrate the quality of their services. If you feel that there is an opportunity for you to take the lead in research or thought in your field, try it. It could catapult you to the top.
3. Concentrate Your Efforts
It is very important that you have a specific audience in mind for your brand. Decide on your target demographic, the group that you believe will be most likely to become customers of yours. Tailor your decisions about advertisements and marketing to appeal specifically to your target group. According to the Startup Donut, “reaching a smaller number of the right customers is better than reaching a far greater number of the wrong customers” (http://www.startupdonut.co.uk/startup/sales-and-marketing/how-i-attract-and-retain-customers). Don’t try to push ads to as many people as possible. Your goal should be to establish a core group of loyal customers who will keep coming back as well as spread positive word-of-mouth reviews of your company. That is a more effective and useful use of your time and money.
4. Referral Programs
Referral programs are great ways to convince your existing customers to become brand evangelists. You can offer them some kind of reward to help you gain new customers. There are many examples of this in the business world. Credit card companies are particularly inclined to offer referral bonuses to their customers who refer friends and family to their cards. Dropbox has a notable example: they give free users extra storage space for referring friends. The program vastly increased signups for Dropbox after its introduction, because its customers became highly motivated to bring in referrals. If you decide to start a referral program, strike a balance between a useful reward for referring new customers and one that will be too costly for the company. If the program is too generous, then the company won’t be able to make money on the new customers. If it is too stingy, then nobody will use it. Referrals can be two-way, in which both the original customer and the friend they referred get some benefit, or one-way, in which only the original customer gets a benefit. Both have worked in the past for different companies.
5. Keep Your Customers
When starting a new business first impression is everything. It can subconsciously affect a new customer with the type of vibe you have in your office. You can set the vibe to your liking by getting some furniture in the office. With any new businesses budgeting is very important so be sure to find some discount office furniture.
Customer retention is one of the most important problems to solve for any business, and doubly so for a new business.
The saying goes that the best customers are the ones you already have. Growth is good, but having customers that you can’t count on to return makes it hard to build predictions about how your business is going to perform in the short term, and therefore you will have trouble deciding when to expand or roll out new products. Have a plan for how you will keep customers, because retaining the same core group of customers gives you a reliable base.
Entrepreneurs have many different pressures on them at the same time. They need to play many different roles to get their business up and running, so it is not easy to develop creative plans for drawing in and retaining customers while dealing with all of the other problems that come with running a business. However, developing a good marketing strategy should be high on the priority list. Bringing in new customers, developing relationships with them, and using them as a base to expand is a beneficial cycle of growth, but it all starts with the first step.