Your client base is the quintessence of your company. As a business owner, you no doubt know that building a healthy client base is the key to your success. Without a steady stream of new, paying customers it’s virtually impossible to grow your business. Fulfilling your company vision relies almost solely on attracting clientele and keeping them interested in paying for your product.
A simple, step-wise approach is the best way to ensure that you attract new clients.
1. Identify Your Ideal Client
Looking for customers is easier if you have absolute clarity on the type of consumers you aim to attract. It’s important to develop a clear picture in your head of the people you want to target. Take the time to consider their wants, needs, general personality traits, and then create an idea of how you can make their lives easier.
Making broad target market statements is an approach that should be dodged at all costs. Avoid assuming that you are selling to every woman, every teenager, or every student. It’s difficult to address a vast group of people – generalisations can rub them up the wrong way. Overstating your market will make it difficult to develop a viable, targeted strategy for attracting customers.
2. Locating Your Model Client
Once you’ve identified your target clients, it’s important to identify where they are likely to be found. Where you search for clients depends largely on the type of business you run. Consider whether it will be easier to connect with them via media channels, online, social media, email, or whether you’re likely to connect with them at conferences and conventions in your industry. Based on where you’re likely to find these customers, you’ll need to create tailored messages for them.
Automated tools, like lead scrapers. can help you quickly and easily find potential clients without spending hours wasting time on manual searches. By using these tools to generate client databases, you can escape the traditional minefields of buying lists which never work, or paying assistants to do the searching for you. Use these lists to contact potential clients in the most suitable manner, based on the customer identification process you’ve already completed.
3. Know Your Business And Position Yourself As An Authority
You need to have a thorough understanding of your industry and solid knowledge of your product in order to gain the attention of viable clients. If you truly know everything there is to know about your product, that confidence will shine through. Any people who might be interested in what your business has to offer will realise how well-informed you are and ask for your advice.
It’s generally a good idea to give potential clients a desire to try your services. If people think that trying your product will make their lives easier in some way, you’re one step closer to gaining loyal customers. Position yourself as someone who has an in-depth understanding of the problems your clients need to solve and create content that aims to solve those problems. Become a force to be reckoned with via webinars, podcasts, blog posts, and guest blogging gigs. Get out there and physically network with people.
Doing this will help you to attract a following which you can convert into paying customers, as long as you have a structured sales funnel setup to help you achieve your goals.
4. Give Direct Response Marketing A Try
Reach out to potential customers and encourage them to complete a specific action. Offer them value they can’t refuse in exchange for opting into your email. Alternatively, you can offer them tidbits of information and reward them with more if they request more information.
Create ads or develop messages that offer your ideal clients something free, thus getting them started in your sales funnel. Make your audience realise that your products or services can make their problems go away faster than any others.
5. Build Solid Business Partnerships
Synergy is an effective part of building a business from the ground up. Consider the benefits of partnering with businesses that offer complementary services. If you have a web design company, it could be beneficial to partner with a business that specialises in SEO optimisation. Similarly, if you run a research firm, it might be a good idea to team up with a business that offers tailored writing services.
Fostering real human relationships helps you create a solid client base. People will instinctively catch on to the fact that you’re all about nurturing relationships with other business owners, which makes you more likely to build strong relationships with your customers as well. Loyalty and trustworthiness go a long way, and you’ll find that word of mouth spreads quicker than any ad campaign.
6. Close The Loop
After spending all that time to bring in business, it’s important to make the effort to follow up. Contact people after you’ve sent them samples and ask for feedback. Send mails to people who have asked you for information and offer additional support should they need it. Connect with your fans and followers on social media and ask for their opinions on how you can improve your product.
If you forget to follow up, you are invariably wasting some fantastic leads and conversations. Just this simple step alone is a sure-fire way to get your client base to grow.