The most crucial, and often the most difficult, aspect of achieving business growth is having the ability to attract new customers. Keeping your customers loyal to you can be testing, too, but at least at that point, you already have them through the door and buying from you.
Unless you have a brand new invention or something innovative to bring the masses to your brand, the task of bringing in customers is made harder by the fact most of your target audience is already loyal to a competitor and, in some cases, has been for many years.
How can you get them ‘on the hook’ and set up to turn their loyalty in your direction?
Hold a Giveaway
Just be careful about how you do it!
Giving away a product as a footfall driver can be dangerous, especially if it is just a ‘turn up and get it free’ type of offer. However, if you are saying spend $100 and get X free, especially if X is something rather nice, then you stand a much better chance of business growth and bringing in people who are likely to stick with you for the long term.
Of course, you can hold as many giveaway events as you like, but if your product is not of a good enough standard, you won’t be successful.
Create Excitement
The way we use the internet in 2013 makes it easy to create a buzz around your product. Whether you create a quirky video that you aim to go viral or drum up a large following on Twitter or Instagram, as soon as people are curious as to what you do, you have half the battle won.
Encourage your customers to tell their social media followers about your brand, or the latest products they have bought from you, too.
Show Off
What you don’t want to do is blatantly position yourself in the market and say, “We are better than this competitor because they are useless at X, Y, and Z.” It doesn’t look good when Apple, Google, and Facebook do it to each other, and if they can’t get away with it, it is unlikely you can.
However, you can go all out in promoting something that is unique and potentially life changing for your potential customers. A message that says “First Business to Achieve This,” or “Market Leading New Product” doesn’t need many more bells attached to it. Even in these times of global austerity, people want the best, often regardless of price.
Of course, once you have established your presence in the market, you can then rely on your customers to do the showing off for you, as they will be only too quick to use social media or your own feedback forum to write testimonials and review your products or services.
Bring new customers to your business and wow them so that they never leave. Remember, however, to avoid the mistake of alienating existing loyal customers by focusing solely on the new ones; show the people generating your profits some love, too.
Posterita is revolutionary new retail point of sale (POS) software that allows chain stores and single stores to manage every aspect of business growth via an easy-to-use web-based platform.
Photo Courtesy of (plantoo47) – Flickr
About Christine Corelli
