How to Attract Customers

Preparing to Attract Customers

Determine who your customers are. Send out a survey to your existing customers to see what age, gender and marriage status are. If possible, find out their working life and personal life preferences. It is recommended to have a vision of what an ideal buyer is when it comes to demographic and psychographic factors such as personality, values and attitudes.

Opt to attract a new demographic. If you want to attract a younger or older part of the population, keep in mind that your new marketing methods will have to appeal to their preferences.

Model your strategies on what your customers want, not what you want to give. Ultimately, if you don’t give your customers what they want, they will not return. For example, they may want to pay for products under $20, so perhaps you should adjust your inventory to feature fewer items over $50 and many items below $20. Your products will be closer to what they want to buy.

Consider increasing your budget for location, marketing and presentation. These are 3 important areas where increasing your budget to get yourself more visible may increase your profits.

Follow your competition. Take notes and try to emulate several of their successful marketing strategies. You do not want to copy them exactly, but see if their website, social media or print marketing strategies are reaching the target demographic to model your own strategy.

Attracting Customers with General Marketing

Choose a good location. Make sure you take into account the street, parking and adjoining businesses. If your ideal customers do not come by on a regular basis, your plan is unlikely to work.

Invest in signage. Once you have a brand, make signs that follow a consistent visual message.

Offer a discount. Plan a sale and you will attract more people. Make sure that you run the figures so that you are covering costs and getting a good return on investment.

Host an event or contest. With proper advertising, signage and specials, an art, open house or holiday party event may bring in new business. Make sure you set out a raffle or sign up sheet so that you can communicate with your new customers in the future.

Offer loyalty and/or referral discounts. Try a punch card or coupon for next purchase. Advertise it via email, website, social media, newspaper and radio to get the word out. Encourage your most loyal customers with bigger discounts, free products or loyalty bonuses. Word of mouth is extremely affective for attracting new customers.

Emphasize your expertise. Customer service and expertise attract customers who are looking to be treated well. Highlight this in your message and consider offering customer service or consultation free with your product.

Try several advertising strategies until you find the right fit. Although you should start with an idea of where you will find your customers, the reality may surprise you. Try a new 1 each month and stop using methods that haven’t worked in 3 to 6 months. For example, although your customer base is young and social media is the best to start attracting young people, posting a coupon in your local independent paper may yield better results.

Update your store information on Google, Yelp and all other online listings. Do the same in your local telephone book and local business directories.

Become a member of civic organizations. The Chamber of Commerce, Rotary Club and other charities tend to support each other, bringing more referral business to your door.

Attracting Customers with Online Marketing

Spend money on the back end of a website. Make sure your website is up, working well and very attractive before you invest in pay-per-click marketing, social media managers or anything else that is designed to funnel traffic to your website. If people are unable to use your website, they will not buy.

Offer them something for free. Post free content on your website, such as short video clips, tutorials, interesting articles, blogs, advice or a free e-book. Make a landing page, so that they you can get their contact information to offer them specials and promotions in the future via email.

Start social media accounts. Facebook, Foursquare, Pinterest and Twitter are valuable ways to attract new customers. Post sales, new products and links to sign up for your free content on the social media pages. Social media accounts are free; however, there is some cost in time and expertise in maintaining them consistently. Just like blogging, the value is in frequent use. Follow other businesses and try cross promoting on Facebook or other accounts. Blasting your followers with specials every day may not be the best way to get regular readers, but posting other interesting content between sales posts is a good marketing strategy. Try the Facebook ads and promoted posts to get new people interested in your site. You can use behavioral marketing to target your ideal customer demographics. Think of social media as a way to connect with your customers. You will attract reliable, repeat customers if you develop a relationship with them.

Consider offering free shipping. You will increase the “instant gratification” of the purchase and convince potential customers of the value they are getting. Make sure you can afford to offer the shipping. Consider that sometimes adding a free product or shipping will work just as well as taking a discount. People like to have value added to their purchase, but still feel like they are getting a quality product.

Give a well thought out loyalty bonus. Give something to people who purchase your product via email or Facebook. They are likely to be more pleased with their purchase and refer others.

Buy pay-per-click (PPC) marketing. Search engine marketing requires you to create an account with Bing, Google, Yahoo or another engine and pay a small fee to have results on the first page. Use your products and customer preferences to choose your keywords. PPC marketing asks you to bid for a per click price. You may be outbid by other companies for the same keyword or keyword combination. Your website will appear higher and attract more customers and clicks if you fine-tune your keywords over time. Remember that very common key words may be too expensive to justify with a small business marketing campaign. Try long-tail keywords (2 or more words) that are more specific to your region, products or brands. Use WordStream’s free keyword tool to research popular keywords before you bid for them on Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising.