5 Tips to attract more customers to your business
Photo by Hey Beauti Magazine on Unsplash
How can I attract more customers to my business? Where can I connect with more like-minded people? Outside of my local region, how visible is my brand?
Do you relate to the questions above? As an entrepreneur and small business owner, I spend a great deal of time dwelling on these questions. I know my niche, I truly believe in my skill, I am confident I can help many businesses define and communicate their story. What’s then, the most effective way to connect with them?
Well, in my journey to attract my ideal customers, I have found certain approaches are a lot more effective than others. Here are my top five tips to engage with the businesses you’d love to work with:
Tip 1. Clearly define and communicate your expertise
Whatever niche you specialise in, make sure you know it better or as well as your competitors. You would need to build trust in your new customers and the best way to achieve this is by producing content which positions you as an expert in your field.
Tip 2. Identify your ideal customers
Be very specific about the type of businesses you would love to work with. When you know who to talk to, you can approach them and start a meaningful conversation. To help you identify your ideal customers, I have created a handy workbook which is now available in the resources library. Knowing your customers can also help you pinpoint what areas of your services or products you may want to review and improve in order to make your offer more valuable and tailored to their needs.
Tip 3. Create content with them in mind
When you have developed a very clear picture of who you want to attract, you can then create the right content for this particular tribe. A valuable exercise is to carry out some research and evaluate what type of challenges they are facing and what ambitions they have for their business. You can generate a short questionnaire they can answer online, Facebook is always a good platform to do this, or you can ask them if they would be happy to have a 10-minute interview with you. Either way, pay close attention to the words they use when talking about their business as these are the words your content should adopt.
In my blog post, How to create great content, you can also find some useful tips on how to tell your story when producing your content.
Tip 4. Ensure your brand identity appeals to them
In business, ‘looks’ matter and a lot more than you think. Evaluate your current logo, colours, typefaces and photography style. Is your aesthetic conveying your true personality? Does it position you at the right level in the market place? Does it relate you to your ideal customers?
Your stationery, collateral, in-person events, digital presence, basically everything you do or say, should depict your personality. Ask yourself, what would I like to be famous for? What impression do I want to leave? If you run an event, what memory would your customers take with them? It is the memories we create, what makes an impact and drives people to come back to us.
Tip 5. Keep your content up-to-date and hang out in the social platforms that are right for you
Healthy and robust relationships are those that are nurtured and loved. And ultimately, that’s what we are aiming for. We want to create a solid and long-lasting relationship with our customers. Keep your communication with them frequent and develop regular content that informs and educates them. You want them to know you are there for them and you can solve their problems.
Be selective about the social platforms you use and feed them weekly. If you run an accounting firm, you may want to focus on LinkedIn and Twitter, where you can engage with your customers on topics that are of shared interest or provide them with useful articles, full of practical tips for their business. If, by contrary, you run a studio specialising in garden design, you probably want to have a very strong presence in Instagram and Pinterest, where you can display beautiful images of your work. Instagram will build your brand awareness among businesses in related industries, while Pinterest will direct customers straight to your website.
And remember, there may be many businesses out there with very similar services to yours, but none of them can think like you do. Your business has its own DNA, its own mannerisms, its own sense of humour, its own quirks...and these are the traits your customers fall in love with and base their decision to choose you.
“The highest reward for a person’s toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.”