How to Attract New Customers for
Your Business
There are so many marketing channels for a business owner to utilise
to attract new customers that it can often be challenge to decide which
channel to use. It can often result in spending most of your marketing
budget with few, if any results.
Many businesses focus on business networking and referrals as it often
results it a steady flow of customers and can keep you business going.
It can keep you afloat but it is not enough if you want to scale your
business. To do this you need to look at additional forms of marketing.
We will cover 3 of the more successful forms of marketing below.
We hope this will help to take some of the frustration away from attracting
more customers for your business.
Social Media Marketing
Social Media Marketing creates brand awareness and spreads the word
about your business. It relates to all social networks such as
Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and thousands of
more sites that users interact with on a daily basis.
Social Media has grown faster than the internet which acquired 1 billion
users over a 10 year period. In contrast, Facebook passed the 2 billion
mark in just over 10 years and 1 in 4 people now have a Facebook account.
Whichever platform you use, the premise is the same for all – to create
content tailored to users to drive traffic through engagement, whether that
is content, video or images.
The challenge for many businesses is that they don’t always use Social
Media effectively to generate business. Even though there are thousands of
platforms, registering with them can be overwhelming. As a starting point,
it’s important to register with the top 12 social platforms. These sites will
also provide search engine ranking power to your website from the high
level of authority that they possess.
It is important to ensure the content you add to your social network is
engaging so that people will like it and want to share it with their
friends. Also use good quality images and video and integrate keywords
where possible.
We recommend registering with the following top social media sites to
kickstart your social media marketing strategy:
Facebook, Google+, Instagram, You Tube, LinkedIn, Reddit,
Snapchat, Pinterest, Tumblr, Medium, Quora and Periscope.
Registration is important but updating the profiles is also of equal
importance. We suggest either outsourcing this work or managing it
internally. You or a member of your team will know your business better
than anyone else and are probably in the best place to know what
content should be added to your profile.
Facebook & Instagram Advertising
Facebook boasts a very impressive database of users and is expanding
at a rate of 11% year on year. With over 2.23 billion active monthly
users, it is able to collect an extensive amount of data on these users
of its platform. It knows their age, sex, likes and dislikes, who their
friends are, the topics they engage in, their location and much more.
As you can imagine, allowing advertisers to access this amount of
information has resulted in Facebook accounting for 25% of online ad
spend.
As well as the having the ability to access its extensive database, it also
offers a number of powerful services that can increase your customer base:
- Custom Audience – This enables you to add a pixel to your website and
create a custom audience from visitors who click on your ad; - Re-targeting – This allows you to take this Custom Audience of people
who have an interest in your service and re-target them with your ad
many times. Retargeting is very powerful as research states that buyers
often need to see an ad 2-3 times before they take action; - Lookalike audience – Facebook allows you to create a Lookalike
Audience of people who are similar to the people who have clicked on
an ad. For example, if 500 people click on an ad in a campaign,
Facebook is able to search through its database and create an audience
of millions of people similar to the people who were interested in your
campaign, allowing you to target this audience in a new campaign; - Video Advertising – Facebook allows you to create an audience of
people who watched your video for more than, for example, 2 minutes.
You are then able to create a custom and lookalike audience from this
audience allowing you to target them with a new ad campaign.
Facebook advertising is one the most powerful advertising
mediums available to businesses at the moment and when
utilised properly it can boost your customer base
extensively. Just note that as with all paid
advertising, it is possible to lose a lot of money
if you don’t know how to use the system
properly so tread carefully.
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Optimisation refers to the processes involved to
increase the likelihood of your website appearing and ranking
well in the organic (non paid) search engine results.
SEO is extremely powerful as more and more people are performing web
searches to look for products and services – the traffic to your site is
targeted, it gives the search engines what they want and it is a very cost
effective form of marketing.
There are many parts to Search Engine Optimisation, these include:
On-Page
This area focuses on content, keywords, design, layout, and
several parts of what Google requires for a website to get listed within their
search listings. Content could mean video, audio, writing, design, load time,
and elements surrounding web design.
Off-Page
This relates to social media marketing, content design,
backlinks, reviews, infographics, guest posts, and elements that are outside
of the control of your initial website design and publishing. This informs
search engines that your content is popular, and worth ranking.
Technical
The technical aspects of SEO include the structure of a
website, the correct use of a meta title and description tag, site speed,
images, code, errors, and basic back-end elements. The structure of your
site matters as much as the content as search engines crawl through the
code elements.
Local Search
Since 2015, Google has attached a lot of its focus on Local
SEO. It promotes local businesses and their corresponding services to
potential customers in a local area. All businesses need to utilise this
component of SEO as it helps businesses to appear in front of a typical
customer when they perform a search in Google & other search engines.
SEO helps business owners create fast, technically robust, user
friendly websites and it works on ensuring that they rank high
in the search engines. This will attract pre-qualified
potential customers to your website, which will in
turn increase conversion rates and revenue.
In this digital age, we believe these are the best forms of marketing to attract
more customers.
We are a digital agency serving clients in the south east. If you would like to
discuss how we can help you with getting more customers for your business,
you can schedule a 30 minute free consultation to discuss your business and
online marketing needs with us. Give us a call on 0845 055 9804.
