How To Attract Customers To Your Business

If you are a business owner, regardless of whether it’s new or established, one of the questions I am sure you are asking yourself is how to attract customers to your business. 

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of running a small business, so digital marketing can often be pushed to the side, however, if you don’t take time to attract customers to your business, it can be hard to stay afloat.

The good news is that there are tons of ways to attract more customers to your small business, and most of it is free! I am a big believer in organic marketing, and much of this is down to matching the customer intent. I will cover ‘intent’ later on so please read on. 

In this blog, I will cover essential marketing techniques that are great for attracting customers to your business.

How To Attract Customers To Your Business

The simple answer is marketing; the more complex answer is that it’s super helpful to understand more than just what social media channel to utilise, or what hashtags you are going to use. 

Marketing is broad, and if you wish to attract customers to your business, my advice is to learn the fundamentals and why it’s important. Depending on your business, some areas that can help you achieve organic growth sooner include:

• Marketing strategy and planning 
• The marketing mix
• The marketing funnel
• Branding like the tone of voice, and personality. 
• Customer persona development
• Value proposition
• Customer pain points
• Personal branding
• Social media marketing
• Keyword research

If you’re not reaching the right people, then how can you expect to grow your business? Let’s dive in and look at this in a little more detail, so you can decide which is the best way forward for you and your business. 

Why Understanding Marketing Strategy Is Key For Attracting Customers To Your Business

Marketing strategy and planning focus on the overall direction of your company’s marketing efforts. It also helps you determine where you want your company to go over time, as well as how best to get there.

While marketing strategy answers the why marketing planning answers the how such as the tactics used. By carrying out some exercises during this stage you can better understand not only yourself but your industry, and target audience. 

So what are examples of marketing strategy exercises? 

The 4 P’S: Product, Price, Place and Promotion

The 4P’s are a great framework for helping you understand important elements of your business and how they play a part in marketing it successfully, in order to achieve your goals and objectives. Understanding how this framework works put you in a better position for attracting customers to your business. 

The 4Ps consist of Product, Price, Place and Promotion. 

The 4Ps work together so it doesn’t matter in what order you use them, but that you understand how your business offering fits into each one. Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is your product or service, and what do customers want from it? 
• How does the product satisfy their needs? 
• How do your customers experience your product or service? 
• What value does your product or service bring to a customer?
• How does its price compare to your competitors?
• Where are your target customers hanging out?
• What social platforms do they use? 
• How do you plan to reach your ideal customers? 
• Is it the right platform? Do you use more than one? 
• Can your personal brand help promote your products or services? 

Just asking yourself some basic questions about the 4Ps can get you off to a great start in taking your business in the right direction that will speak to your prospects and fundamentally attract customers to your business. 

Understanding How The Marketing Funnel Works Is Key To Growth

Have you heard of the marketing funnel before? 

It consists of four stages: Awareness, Interest, Consideration, and Action. These are the different stages that a potential customer goes through before making a purchase. By understanding these four stages, you can create content that speaks directly to the prospect as they go through the buyer journey.

Awareness: At the very top of the funnel is brand awareness and this is all about introducing your brand to its target audience. You want to focus on creating recognition for your company or products. Impressions and reach metrics will give you an idea of brand awareness.

Interest: As soon as you have made interest users will begin engaging as they move down the funnel. This is your chance to build a relationship with your audience. Look out for likes, comments, clicks and shares.

Consideration: Social media is a great tool to influence the decision-making of your audience. Producing case studies, customer wins, testimonials and reviews can be great for this. If you can nurture your audience with regular and consistent content, they will move down the funnel.

Action: This is when your potential customer takes the final step to being an actual customer. This might be in the form of a DM on social media, or they might prefer to go through your website. 

Use Branding Effectively 

Do you know what tone of voice you use when communicating with customers? Or what your brand’s personality is? Understanding your tone of voice will help communicate your personality. 

Are you formal, or casual? Funny or serious? Upbeat and witty? Or matter-of-fact? 

Your tone of voice should come through in all your messaging as it will help you connect with your target audience, and attract customers to your business. 

What about your brand elements? Do you have your logo, typefaces and brand colours established? Does that compliment your tone of voice? These are all elements that might seem minor, but play a huge part in how your brand is portrayed to your target audience. Getting these right, will ensure consistency, and help you attract only those that are relevant. 

Your brand is what sets you apart from other businesses in your industry. When potential customers see your brand name or logo, they should feel like they’re about to have an experience that’s unique and memorable.

Create Customer Personas To Attract Customers

Do you fully understand the needs, wants and behaviours of your ideal customer? Often, we overlook the granular details of our target audience, but putting in a little effort to understand them better, can make for better communication through marketing efforts. 

You don’t have to go all in, and create a persona for every single customer, but rather, keep it small. The last thing you want to do is burn yourself out by all the new marketing frameworks you’ve learned. 

I find it helps to create a storyboard of customer personas and split it into different categories that will provide a deep insight all on one page. Some categories you might want to include are:

Basic description: What is their name, age group, sex, location, income, job title and description?

Biography: What’s their background both at and away from work? Do they have a family? What do they do in their spare time? What’s their financial situation? 

Skills and Personality: Are they well respected in the client world? What kind of workers are they? Their seniority? What adjectives describe their personality?

What do they want to know about you?: What skills do you have that they want to know about? How can your product or service make their life easier? 

What are their pain points?: What causes them pain in both work and personal life? How does your product or service alleviate their pain?

What’s their ideal experience?: Does your product or service provider have that ideal experience? If so, how and why? 

Asking yourself some basic questions about your ideal customer can provide further insight you can implement into your marketing message. 

Use Social Media Regularly And Consistently

Something a bit more obvious, but still as important as all other marketing techniques. 

It is important to establish what social networks your target audience use in order to attract customers to your business. 

By carrying out some of the exercises I covered above, you will gain a deeper insight into your target audience. This transcends to social media, as you will have a better understanding of where they hang out, and how you can connect with them on a deeper level. 

It’s important to post at least once a week on each platform where you’re active—and even more often if possible. People are always looking for new businesses on social media, so the more often they see yours in their feeds, the more likely they are to become loyal customers!

Make Sure Your Website Is Up-To-Date And Easy To Navigate 

Your website should be professional looking, with clear information about what you do and how much your services cost. If photos of your products are available, include them! And make sure the site loads quickly—people are impatient these days!

Website speed is important especially as Google places more emphasis on mobile sites for ranking your content. If you have a web developer, talk with them about how you can enhance the user experience (UX) on your website. 

It will ensure you are consistently growing your website traffic, improving engagement and click-through rates and driving them through the marketing funnel. 

Carry Out Keyword Research

You don’t need fancy tools to carry out some of the most basic yet effective keyword research that will help your content rank. 

You can use Google’s keyword planner which is a free tool and will offer a breakdown of a number of searches, competition, and related keywords. You can also do research on Google, look at what your competitors are writing, and suggested searches at the bottom of the page. 

You can take the good and bad, and start putting together your keyword strategy. So how do you do this? 

1. Create a spreadsheet
2. On your first page, name it to seed keywords, and write down 4 or 5 keywords your website is found for. 
3. Create a second page of short-tailed (no more than 2 words) keywords and start adding to these based on what you can find on Google and the keyword planner. 
4. Create a third page for long-tailed keywords. These are often easier to target because the longer the search term or phrase, the more serious the search. 
5. Remember and include the breakdown of monthly searches, competition, and any other important metrics you wish to track. 
6. On the fourth page, you can start gathering potential blog topics. What are your competitors writing about, and can you do better? 

This is a very basic keyword research process, but you’ll be amazed at what you can find that will instantly help your content rank higher on Google. 

Use Your Personal Brand

Personal Branding is becoming more popular, as customers want to see the human element associated with a brand. You might wonder why this is, and it’s simple: trust. 

By taking advantage of your personal brand, you can reach prospective customers quicker than is sometimes possible on a business level. Your personal brand is what represents you as a person. You don’t need to do any fancy exercises to understand this, just ask yourself some basic questions, and ensure that whenever you are writing content for your website, or social media, it represents your personal brand. 

So how do you use your personal brand to attract more customers?

• Carry out a basic SWOT analysis of yourself. What are your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats? Think of real-life examples, the good and bad, that might make content. 
• What has got you where you are today?
• What do you see in the future?
• What values represent you? Think of all the adjectives that describe you. This should help you uncover what your value proposition is, and how your value alleviates the pain of your target customers. 

By answering these basic questions, you will probably come up with ideas and refresh your memory of times when you have achieved a lot or got amazing feedback from a customer. Use this in your content and show your audience who you are, and what made you. 

Get Involved In Local Events

Depending on your business, it can benefit massively but getting involved in local community events. Not only is this great for building trust, but word of mouth is still very much essential in marketing. 

If you own a bakery, maybe set up a booth at the farmer’s market on Saturday mornings. Or if you run a dog walking service, offer discounts for people who walk their dogs on Sundays at the park near your office. This will help build goodwill among the community around you, which will translate into word-of-mouth marketing opportunities later on down the road!

And Finally, Take care of your current customers!

The best way to attract new customers is by making sure you’re doing everything you can to keep the ones you have happy. 

If they’re happy with their purchases, they’ll tell other people about them—and those people may become future customers!

Some of the exercises I have covered are great for communicating with your existing customers on a deeper level. It’s not just the prospect you need to think of, but nurturing the existing customers in your business. 

How Does A Coaching Session Sound?

If you’re not reaching the right people, then how can you expect to grow your business? 

Your business needs to be visible and accessible to potential customers. The best way to do this is through understanding some of the key components of marketing. I understand this is not always easy, especially when you are busy with the day-to-day running of your business.

Sometimes all you need is a little confidence, in understanding why and how certain marketing techniques are used. It might just be social media marketing you need help with, or focus on understanding your potential customers better. 

Regardless of what you need help with, this is where I come in! I’ve spent years studying what works for small businesses, and the best techniques to fully understand how to attract more customers to your business.

I provide 1-1 coaching and consultancy and can guide you through the complete process, ensuring that you can implement from day 1, everything you have learned from me. 

If you are interested in a coaching session, please reach out today.