How Can You Bring More Customers To Your New Business?

Apr 20, 2018

Attract New Customers With These 5 Marketing Strategies

There are more than 100,000 small businesses that open all across Canada every year. And while some of these businesses turn out to be successful enterprises, there are also quite a few that fail during their first year.

In some cases, this happens because of a failed business model, but more often than not, a business’ inability to attract new customers is to blame for its shortcomings.

Are you in the process of starting a small business? You’re probably well aware of the challenges you’ll face in the months and years to come. Attracting new customers to your business is one challenge you can face head-on.

Let’s take a closer look at how you can attract new customers to your business and turn them into longtime customers.

Decide Who Your Core Customers Are Right From the Start

You might be surprised by how many small businesses open without identifying who their core customers are going to be. They open their doors and expect everyone to flock to their business without necessarily considering which kinds of customers they’re going to be targeting.

If you run a photography business, for example, you might want to consider specializing your services so that you hit one key demographic rather than trying to get everyone to show interest in your company.

By narrowing down your core customer base to, say, families or, better yet, families with babies, you can attract new customers more easily since you will be servicing one niche.

As you grow as a business, you can, of course, widen your approach and try and attract even more customers. But at the very beginning, it’s best to zero in on who exactly you plan on serving. It’s easier to start small and gain the trust of your ideal customers rather than starting big and trying to attract everyone at once.

Create a Multifaceted Marketing Approach to Attract New Customers

These days, you can’t attract new customers simply by putting together one radio spot or one TV commercial. You need to take a multifaceted marketing approach to marketing your small business so that it shows up on everyone’s radar and not just the radar of those using one specific medium.

The growth of social media has brought more ways to attract new customers. For instance, you can do it by:

Putting together a TV commercial
Writing a catchy jingle for the radio
Assembling an email mailing list
Creating Facebook ads and other online advertisements
Using a public relations team to push your product or service for possible media coverage

As you can see, there are so many different ways to attract new customers–and this is really just a small sample of the things you can do!

Show Your Customers You Know Your Business

Once you have started to attract new customers, it’s important for you to show them that you know what you’re doing. It’s why you should really start small by trying to earn the trust of a few loyal customers before shooting for larger goals.

You need to understand all the ins and outs of your business. That means that, if someone comes to you looking for family photographs from your photography business, you need to know everything from the best cameras to use to capture great photos to the prices you should be charging for photo shoots.

You only get one chance to make a good first impression, and if customers sense that you don’t know what you’re talking about they could take their business elsewhere.

So make sure you do your homework and are able to answer questions your new customers have.

Form Strategic Partnerships With Other Small Businesses in Your Area

One of the most effective ways to launch a successful small business is by forming strategic partnerships with other businesses and ingraining yourself in your local community.

How can do you this? Well, it’s not always easy, but in general, you should convince other businesses that they will benefit from teaming up with you, even though you’re just getting started.

Let’s use the photography business example again. If you’re attempting to attract new customers to your photography business, you’re not going to be able to do it by teaming up with other photography businesses since they are your direct competition.

But you might be able to do it by teaming up with a local youth sports league that needs team photos taken every season.

You also might be able to do it by teaming up with real estate agents in your area who would be willing to offer free photo shoots to their clients buying their first homes.

Think creatively about where your business fits in with regards to your local community and then find the partnerships that will allow you to attract new customers without much effort on your part.

While it can initially be tricky to get the ball rolling, you can really get your name out there and drum up business by using other existing businesses to your advantage.

Position Yourself as an Alternative to Similar Small Businesses

Unless you’ve somehow come up with a really unique business plan that is unlike any other business in your area, one of the biggest challenges when it comes to trying to attract new customers is convincing people that your business is different.

Your business might seem like something totally unique to you, but chances are it won’t feel that different from the businesses that already exist to your potential new customers.

You have to show them otherwise.

For instance, if you’re starting up an auto dealership and your business is going to be the first one in the area to offer free oil changes for life to customers when they purchase a car, make that one of the big selling points of it. You will, over time, become known for offering that service, which will attract people to you.

Your goal should be to find a relatively simple way to differentiate yourself from your competition. If you’re able to do that, you will, at the very least, get a look from new customers who are interested in finding out more about how your small business operates.

Optimize Your Website and Utilize the Data It Provides

In 2018, not having a website for your small business is simply not an option. You need to have one up and running, and it needs to be optimized to make the most of the traffic you could potentially be getting.

You should start by either working with an SEO company to improve your SEO rankings and where you stand on Google or educating yourself more on SEO so you can do it yourself.

From there, you’ll want to update your website often and attract new customers by providing them with the information they’ll need about your business.

Ideally, you want anyone searching for a business like yours in your area to find your company when they Google it. You also want them to get what they’re looking for when they visit your website. Additionally, you want to put any data you are able to collect about new customers to work for you.

Ask yourself some simple questions about your website visitors:

How are they hearing about your business?
What services or products are they looking for when they visit your website?
Are they browsing around on your website or leaving quickly after finding it?
Are people finding what they are looking for on your website when they visit it?
Is it easy for people to contact you when they have questions?

Your website could very well make or break your small business, so it’s important for you to maintain it and use it to learn about your customer base.

Listen to Your Loyal Customers and Make Changes Accordingly

While you will inevitably have to work to bring in new customers, you will have to work even harder to keep them. Just because people come to your business for a product or service once doesn’t mean they’ll be back again.

You should maintain a steady dialogue with people once you attract new customers and listen to the feedback they provide for you. That feedback could help you improve the way you’re doing things and allow you to access even more customers in the future.

The key to running a successful small business is continuing to fight to win over new customers at all costs.

As long as you never lose sight of your goals as a company and stay loyal to those who are loyal to you, you should be able to keep bringing new business in for years to come.

Start a Successful Small Business Now

In addition to these tips, you can learn to attract new customers to your business by using the tips on our blog. You can learn about everything from registering your new company to creating a strong logo for your business and improve your chances of being successful.