How to Find Clients for Your Business

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So now you have it – a nicely-looking product and a perfect promotional plan. It seems there’s one last step ahead for your company to start dominating the market and earning never seen before profits, that is – to sell.

The truth is a majority if not all niches are packed. Competing companies offer the same good quality, low price, and a similar service. Because of such a variety of choices, consumers become more and more “pampered”. Thus, more than 50% of people claim that their expectations about customer service quality increase year over year. Moreover, around 30% of buyers refuse to continue dealing with a company after a single bad experience case, and almost ⅔ will leave ten to one – after the second case happens.

So, unless you’re going to offer space tourism services, acquiring potential customers will be a challenge. Nevertheless, it’s possible – otherwise, there wouldn’t be market leaders and outsiders. In this article, we’ve compiled a few recommendations that might help to break lead gen processes free from deadlock and get more customers.

Ways to Find Customers for your Business

Develop a plan for customer acquisition

Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) vary depending on the industry and type of acquisition channel (organic or inorganic). For example, average organic CACs are usually lower than inorganic and can be from several tens (Retail & eCommerce) to several hundred (Luxury real estate, Higher education) US dollars per 1 new client. To increase marketing ROIs companies develop digital customer acquisition strategies and target prospects via the proper communication channels, at the right time, and with relevant content.

This all starts with the buyer’s journey. You need to determine what needs products or services address, what key points of contact are there, and how customers progress across the sales funnels towards making a purchase. You can also create Buyer personas or key account profiles and study prospects’ traits that may influence their behavior and motivations.

“Work out Buyer personas to customize targeting approach”, source

With a clear idea about a target audience in mind, you’ll be able to decide on:

proper demand generation activities

Say, you want to create awareness over a new cookie trademark. Depending on the target audience – kids or adults, vegans or “meat-eaters”, athletes or those who are on a diet – convincing arguments in ads or newsletter content will differ significantly, agree.

acquisition channels

By determining where potential customers usually chase down for information, you will know where to set up marketing activities.

acquisition costs

No less important are expenses’ and ROIs estimations. You can refer to market means or use helpful services, such as Google Ads, to approximate CPC, CPI, or whichever metrics refer to your business.

Try digital advertising

Digital advertising is a good option for companies that haven’t established any leads databases yet. PPC campaigns and paid publications can break website traffic from deadlock and bring first conversions. To experience these perks, you need to develop an overwhelming ad strategy that will include:

Channels

There are “conventional” ad channels that you can use solely or combine to achieve synergy:

niche-related online media

These are online magazines, news aggregators, rankings, blogs, etc. These platforms have a wide audience reach and are good to fill in TOFU and build overall brand awareness.

Facebook Ads

This social network is perfect for lead gen and nurturing. Its instrument, Lead Ads, allows for creating a “lead magnet” – a kind of form that asks prospects to provide names and email addresses in exchange for some value. Say, a whitepaper or one-time discount code.

To set up the campaign, follow these steps:

Sign up for a Business Account
Navigate to “Ads Manager” and click “Create”
Choose “Lead generation” from objectives, name the campaign, and click continue
Set up details: page that you want to promote, budget, and schedule
Pay extra attention to audience settings – make sure that the demographics, interests, and behaviors you select represent the target audience’s segment.
Select ad formats (an image, video, slideshow, or carousel)
Write a headline, message body, and CTA
Select fields that you want to add to a Contact Form
Click “Finish” and “Confirm” to launch the ad.

Google Search Ads

This digital marketing instrument is good for testing assumptions regarding search keywords, getting initial traffic, or conducting A\B tests for landing pages. Settings’ algorithm is similar to Facebook Ads, with the only difference being that you use a Google Ads account.

Also, pay attention to the following digital ads trends, in particular:

cookieless advertising – when companies don’t record users’ cookies and replace cookie-based targeting with AI-powered contextual advertising
Amazon Advertising – in the form of sponsored product ads, product display ads, or sponsored brands. Look into Helium 10 tools before advertising on Amazon
Programmatic Ads – when companies bid for showing every single ad in a real-time mode.

Creatives

Depending on the channel you use, creatives can include images, audio, videos, audio, audio, and others. All these shall be designed according to the creative strategy that explains:

distinguishing features of ad content
CTAs that the company will use for different purposes (to engage consumers, to get conversions, etc)
guidelines on visuals.

You can learn more about how to make creative strategies at Digital Marketing Institute.

Performance indicators

An advertising strategy shall also include pointers for campaigns’ success. You can use these digital marketing metrics:

number of conversions
CTR/CTA/CPI
website bounce ratio
number of unique website visitors
customer LTV
ROIs.

Look for and follow business prospects on social media

Around 4 billion people worldwide use social networks, so if your company isn’t listed on LinkedIn and Facebook – take a break from reading this article and create accounts right now and improve your social media presence. To better address leads, stick to simple advice:

do not send connection requests from empty or newly created profiles

These look suspicious in the eyes of both a lead and a platform’s spam protection system; at best, you may be left unanswered, and at worst – your account will be deleted.

use built-in automated tools

Sales Navigator or Facebook Ads have great options to fill in prospects’ lists – try related audiences, remarketing, suggestions, and other targeting settings.

offer value

An incentive may be either a comprehensive publication or whitepaper or some monetary reward. For example, praise prospects with extra discounts, if they share information about your company or introduce a friend.

use tools to post & follow up timely

In the case of many accounts on different social platforms, it may be challenging to manage publications of inquiries manually. Try SocialPilot, Zoho Social, Sprout Social, or others to automate content delivery and reduce manual social handling.

Cold email potential clients

While many marketers hold this technique in disfavor, it may show good results on a scale, so if you don’t know how to find customers, try this. After all, even if we assume the CTR to be 1%, by sending out 10,000 emails, you will get 100 “effortless” clicks. Sounds good, isn’t it? Of course, when it comes to cold outreach – safety is everything. Consider these principles:

don’t buy leads databases – collect information on your own, with either hands or software for automated email search
keep the mailing database clean and up-to-date – review existing contacts from time to time
after you did the email address search, take time to verify the findings – get rid of temporary, misspelled, catch-all, and other worrisome emails
always launch double opt-in verification and acknowledge with GDPR
don’t create email headlines or body text carelessly – if you can’t afford to hire an email marketer, there are many great free email templates for different business purposes.

Grow a social media following

To attract more followers, one has to contrive – but the result is worth it. Quality content alone is the lesser part of success – you need to make sure that the world sees it. Try these tips:

develop a visual style and stick to it

If your profile consists of variegated low-definition images from Google, it won’t look trustworthy. Whichever new image or logo you post, shall be matched up with an overall page’s style.

pay to promote your page

Positions on organic search results, e.g. on YouTube, may take years. You can go the easy way and pay for keywords, but the best “plan of attack” is to agree on a collaboration. Let ones who already hold a vast number of subscribers natively advocate your brand. It goes without saying – in exchange for a pleasing money reward.

interact with subscribers

Let your page look alive – reply to comments, repost reviews, and answer questions. You can also try polls or questionnaires, however, these require you to already have a substantial audience.

subscribe to trending profiles

Make an effort not to turn one’s social profile into a dinosaur-looking – track trends, follow popular bloggers, and pay attention to the most liked publications. Use these as a source of inspiration or to the hype on what’s trending.

Use coupons and special offers to attract customers

Although no one today is surprised by various forms of price slashes, they remain an effective selling technique. Around ⅔ of Americans claim that special offers are key factors that influence their decision to make an online purchase. Moreover, around 81% say they can’t help feeling to find an exclusive bargain during their entire buying journey.

Coupons are no less popular than price cut-offs. According to Statista, in the US, as many as 92% of people use coupon codes during shopping. To get the most from this selling instrument, the following are advisable:

diversify platforms and appearance

Use email search and automation software to launch regular newsletters with offers: Mailchimp, Snov.io, OptinMonster, etc. To make your offer even more noticeable, submit it to many discount aggregators at once. You can design either printable coupons or just codes for purchases on your website.

“Submit your offers to major popular local aggregators”, source

create urgency

An offer seems more attractive if it’s time-limited because no one wants to miss a chance that only happens once. One-off coupons serve as an extra good cause to make a publication on your social media profile, as well.

take care of the design

You can refer to examples from competitors or coupon code templates. Make sure the visual is no less catching than the offer it depicts.

add QR codes

A quick response code will speed up follow-ups, not to say it looks more contemporary than a link to a website.

Attend meetings and seminars that your prospects might attend

This recommendation refers to the B2B market or if one wants to get in touch with a rather “big fish”. Conferences are great for networking, relationship nurturing, and brand awareness building. So be ready:

prepare business cards – you can occasionally hand over these to your vis-a-vis during a session break
meet new people – don’t stick within a group of peers you’ve attended a meeting with, try to reach out to as many people, as you can
agree on actions – although a seminar isn’t a business meeting, try to cast some joint events for the nearest future
take notes – occasional phrases, phone numbers, or ideas voiced can become a good reference point during upcoming conversations.

Put your business name, phone number, and website address on anything that you can

If you want to be noticed, you shall ease the process of reaching out – as much as possible. Putting an email and phone number is a must, but it’s recommended to also get in touch via social media and messengers, such as WhatsApp and Telegram. Another good option is chatbots. Their popularity has increased significantly over the past 5 years, with 40% of buyers in retail and healthcare niches preferring to interact with a chatbot, rather than with human support.

Claim your place in Google My Business

This will allow prospects to see your company on Maps. You will also get an extended snippet on a search engine results page and be able to manage how your company information appears in Google.

If you own a registered entity, the whole process will be simple as ABC:

navigate to Google MyBusiness and sign in with a business-related account
fill in required fields, such as business name, physical address, category, and site URL
verify the submission with one of the preferable methods; typically, the approval process takes 1-2 weeks.

Conclusion: