If you are looking for customer attraction strategies for your business, here are a few ideas. You can also download the text format of this article in pdf format here: marketing strategies to attract customers pdf.
There are many ways to attract customers to your business. Traditional advertising methods using banners, newspapers and flyers in shop windows shouldn’t be forgotten about. But there’s many online advertising forms which you should definitely use as well. Make sure you have a website up and running which showcases your business. From a website, there’s many other marketing strategies you can use to build traffic.
You should also offer something on your website which encourages visitors to opt in to your mailing list. From a list, you can build relationships and keep your subscribers reminded of your business. Most businesses now use email marketing for their business. So if you haven’t yet got an autoresponder, you should get one and put a sign up form on your website.
This is usually accompanied by some form of giveaway. Many businesses use discount codes to encourage people to sign up and become subscribers. If I give you my discount code, will you give me your email address?!
Customer Attraction Strategies – Target Audience
Depending on your budget you might want to set up a marketing campaign to drive targeted traffic (visitors) to your website. Who your target audience is should be determined before doing any marketing. How to know your target market?
First you should look at the type of people who you serve already. From this information, you should have an idea about who you are serving. Knowing your target audience is important because it will be easier to find them online with your marketing when you have a clear idea of who they are and where they hang out.
Google Adwords, Bing, Yahoo
Google Adwords is where many businesses start out. You can sign up for a Google Adwords account and start a marketing campaign for a small daily budget. Some businesses get outside help with their marketing campaigns, but you can easily learn this yourself.
Once you have a campaign set up in Adwords, you should aim your adverts to show only for the keywords you choose. So if you have a business selling gin in Birmingham, you could target people searching for keywords containing “gin” in your area. This could be “gin stores Birmingham” for example.
Sign up for an Adwords account here.
There are other platforms which offer the same service as Adwords such as Bing (Microsoft) and Yahoo advertising platforms.
These platforms serve advertising for businesses which target keywords. When someone types a particular keyword into a search engine, your advert pops up when a relevant search term is typed relating to your business. This works well for businesses because you only pay when someone actually clicks on your advert. If you’re careful with your advertising placement and keywords you use, you’ll only pay for hungry buyers!
Customer Attraction Strategies – Google My Business
Google My Business offers a free marketing space for locally based businesses. If you have a business which is located somewhere physically, it is well worth creating a free listing. Google My Business (formally Google Places) gives you a free listing which will often pop up in the search results right at the top of the page before the other results.
It only takes a short time to set up your account (less than an hour), and you can have free traffic to your website for a long time from a listing. You will need to prove you are at the address you state and a PIN code will usually be sent out to you for confirmation. Bing and Yahoo offer similar services.
Customer Attraction Strategies – Blogging
Blogging is another way many businesses build an online presence to attract their ideal customers. Businesses use blogging by writing content on a regular basis which will show up in the search engines and attract people to the business website.
Often a blog will be attached to the main business website. Blogging is a cheap way of attracting people to your website and is a long term strategy. Bloggers use different methods but generally you want to write about something which will attract the right audience to your business. This usually will be content which relates to the service you offer in some way.
A good way to start out if you lack ideas is to use Google’s free keyword planner to get ideas. Type your main keyword (of your business) into the search tool and look for the keywords which come up. Many of these keywords will make good topics for discussion on your blog. You can also answer questions with your blogging which your target audience regularly ask.
The Landing Page
The landing page is a specific page which you can build, with the goal of getting potential customers to sign up to your email list. On a website, a visitor can browse around and have a good look around.
But on a landing page, there are only two options: sign up or leave. This is useful when paying for traffic because generally people don’t buy from a website on their first visit. They like to get to know what the offer is and what kind of person/business is behind the site.
When you can collect your visitors email address, you can follow up with an email marketing campaign designed to offer value and build trust with your potential customers.
An email list can allow you to connect with your subscribers on a number of occasions and over a longer time scale than a website can achieve.
Customer Attraction Strategies – Email Marketing
Once on your email list, you can follow up with your subscribers over months, years and even decades. On a website, you only have a few minutes for your visitors to take some action. After that they are gone – potentially forever. So building an email list and offering some useful and valuable giveaway on your site is pretty important. See the power of email marketing.
To get started with email marketing you should purchase an autoresponder software. I use one called Aweber is is perfect for anyone starting out and usually has a free offer going for new starters.
Once inside you will be able to follow the prompts and set up a form on your site to help you collect emails. You will also need to create some offer you can use in exchange for your subscribers information. This should be a valuable offer which incentivises people to sign up to your email list. Once they do, you can send them a series of automated emails to keep in touch and offer value to them.
Facebook & YouTube Advertising
Facebook and YouTube have become two of the top advertising platforms you can use to build your business. With both, you can use video to create a message to target (very specifically) people who are suitable for your business. You can target people by their interests, location, connections, age, sex, incomes and a whole host of other demographics. With YouTube, you can target people who are looking at certain videos and this can be hugely useful to business owners.
So if you have a business selling BMW’s for example, you can target an audience who is looking at BMW’s and is located near to your (physical) business. You can also remove audiences who are less likely to make a purchase from you, saving you money on advertising.
Summary
So there’s a few ideas you can implement in your business to attract more customers. It’s a good idea to focus on one strategy first until you have mastered it, otherwise you can easily spread yourself too thin and get less done!
Paid marketing is much faster to implement than the cheaper strategies such as blogging and organic marketing. See also get traffic to your website free for more ideas.
With paid marketing, once you understand your numbers and see your campaigns working, you can leave them running and even increase your budget and keywords if you learn what is profitable. Some adverts will work better than others and it can take some time to understand how marketing will affect your business.
