10 Ways to Get More Customers

10 ways to get more customers

How to get more customers – and how to get them consistently and predictably? As a small business owner you cannot afford to operate on a feast or famine basis, you need a constant flow of customers so you can manage your cashflow and pay your staff – and yourself – every month. 

Here are our top 10 tips to get customers and keep customers

1. Know and Understand Your Customer You need a good knowledge of your ideal customer, build up a customer profile – their hopes and dreams, their worries and challenges, what makes them happy, where do they hang out or congregate? The aim of marketing is to know and understand your customer so well that your product or service fits them and sells itself…there’s a magical power in feeling understood.
2. Offer incentives to existing customers. Your existing customers are your best sales people – as they are trusted by their friends and colleagues. You could offer discounts on future purchases, if your existing customers introduce new customers to you. Make sure you go out of your way to exceed your customers expectations so they will talk about you and recommend you. 
3. Look at your positioning. Have you created your unique position in the marketplace – a reason to come to you rather than your competitors – your wow factor, your secret source, your category of one? Is it consistent throughout everything your business does – your logo, website, marketing material, signage? Is it time you gave your brand a refresh? 
4. Don’t forget the basics. Can you put some flyers in local shops? Can you distribute some leaflets, or neighbour hood cards. Social media is not the only way to advertise your business – print is a really effective way to promote your business. Have you thought about a direct mail campaign – yes, people like getting letters in the post! Make sure you get your message right, and track your results – so you know what is working.
5. Advertising. It doesn’t have to cost the earth. There are local magazines, or online. Google pay per click is great, if you get your research right – and here I would always recommend using an expert. Facebook advertising is still super effective. Can you search out influencers for your product?
6. Use your local Newspaper for PR. Send a story to your local paper – they are often looking for local businesses to feature, or suggest to them that you could write a regular column as their resident expert in your industry.
7. Google My Business – if you haven’t set yours up yet – and 80% of small businesses haven’t – do it now – it is free and THE easiest way to get you found on Google
8. Network. Go to local networking meetings and make some new connections – there could even be people you could partner with in similar industries and pass on customers to each other. Get involved in local business associations and events. 
9. Explore New Ways to Sell.  Could you offer an online sales, and have customers purchase from your website, if you aren’t already. This way you could reach a much wider audience of customers, and be ‘open’ 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
10. Know Your Numbers The most important thing! Track and measure everything you do – a basic spreadsheet will do, to tell you for each piece of marketing what it cost and how many new customers it brought you. Then you can see what works. As Warren Buffet said “If you can’t read the scoreboard, you don’t know the score. If you don’t know the score, you can’t tell the winners from the losers.”

If you found our 10 Ways to get more customers useful, and you would like some help in getting more customers, and keeping your existing customers, have a chat with Rachel.  Drop me an email on [email protected] or book a call here.