There’s no doubt that one of the top priorities for your business should always be attracting customers. After all, without customers then you’re never going to be able to grow or even sustain your business at all. There are countless articles, blog posts and interviews both online and offline describing many of the most effective ways that you can bring in new customers to your business as effectively as possible. All of these sources are undoubtedly extremely valuable to any business and are definitely the kinds of things that you should be paying close attention to. But there’s one thing that these posts, and many businesses in general, seem to ignore, that being the question of how to attract the right customers. Not every customer is going to engage with your business in the same way, and some customers are simply going to be more valuable to your business than others. It’s hardly a radical idea to say that your business will benefit more from the kinds of customers who are going to engage with your business repeatedly and enthusiastically, rather than ones who are going to try your product once and then walk away. Now, this might sound like a rather complicated proposition, but it’s actually fairly simple. It’s simply a matter of adjusting many of your existing techniques. To help you and your business achieve that, here are some things that you can do to ensure that you’re attracting the right kinds of customers.
1. Do your research
Research should be the first step that comes before just about every action that your business takes and this is no exception. If you want to attract the right customers to your business, then it should go without saying that you need to know who that “right customer” actually is. Now, this obviously is more complicated than just thinking about someone regarding age, gender or race. There are always going to be products and business that appeal more to specific demographics, but things are often far less simple than that surface level reading. You need to look into the kinds of companies that intersect with your own. What kinds of businesses does your “ideal customer” also engage with or avoid? Do they have a predisposition towards specific marketing techniques? Look at the ways in which your competitors market themselves and try to see if you can get a decent idea of the most effective techniques that you and your business can also adopt. By knowing the kind of customer that will most benefit your business, you’ll be able to streamline your marketing in a much more specific and productive way.
2. Improve your SEO
Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is one of the most important, yet most frequently neglected aspects of many businesses marketing strategies. In the increasingly tech-dominated world that we live in, if a customer wants to find a business or product, it’s hardly surprising that they go straight to Google. Without well-integrated SEO your business is never going to get the kind of boost that it needs from search engines like Google. A lot of the time the issue that businesses have is not that they aren’t thinking about SEO at all, but rather that they assume that their SEO is already good enough. This is often because SEO used to be a far more simple affair than it is now. It used to be a simple matter of putting in the right keywords and phrases at every opportunity, no matter how it affected the content of your website. Not only does this technique make it close to impossible to create decent, readable content in the first place, but sites like Google now actively blacklist these kinds of sites. If you really want to improve your website’s rankings then finding a reliable SEO company should be high on your list of priorities. That way you can be sure that your site is going to feature SEO that is effectively integrated into high quality, well-written content.
3. Know your marketing methods
Another classic mistake that many businesses, particularly new ones, tend to make is that they assume that more marketing is always better. On the contrary, trying to cast as wide a net as possible often results in marketing that is both unfocused and ineffective. Remember, not every demographic or customer is going to be drawn in by every type of marketing. The key is to use that research that you have done to find your core demographic and look at which marketing techniques they are a most likely to engage in. That way you’re not only able to create marketing strategies that connect with the customers that you really want to bring in, but you also avoid wasting large amounts of time, money and energy on methods that you that would only ever appeal to the kinds of customer who aren’t going to be interested in your business in the first place.
4. Speak to them directly
Sometimes, it takes more than just “finding” the right customers. Sometimes you need to think about what it is that you can do in order to give your customers what they want. And what is the most effective way to find out what your customers want? Talking to them! Things like social media allow you to get instant feedback from customers as both a group and as individuals about what it is that you can do in order to improve their experience with your business. Of course, you’re rarely going to be in a position to completely overhaul your business to suit their needs, and nor should you want to. But by taking their feedback, you’ll be in a much better position to guide your company in the right direction to ensure that the customers that you want to attract are as happy with the service that you provide as possible.
There’s no denying that at least a certain degree of customers to your business are simply going to engage with it on a minimal level, or even just engage with it once and never again. However, by using these kinds of techniques, you greatly increase the chances of drawing in customers who are going to do everything possible to help your business grow.
