Last updated on August 3rd, 2023
In this article, we go over creative ways to attract more customers to your online business to boost your bottom line.
Every business needs customers; it’s as simple as that.
And there aren’t too many businesses out there who’d say no to more customers, either. In fact, most of them have trouble figuring out how to get those customers in the first place.
I mean, if that weren’t the case, no one would be reading this article, right?
But here’s the thing:
Getting more customers isn’t nearly as complicated as you might think. There are a plethora of ways to get them.
Which is precisely what we’ll be covering today.
There’s no one-size-fits-all here; every business has its own needs, which is why we’ll be covering the ins and outs for businesses of all types.
After this article, your customer-finding toolkit will be significantly fuller; it’s up to you to decide which of these tools are right for you.
So without further ado, let’s get right into how to attract more customers — starting with data.
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1. Data Is Powerful — Start Here
Attracting more customers is, in large part, about data; let me explain.
See, to get someone’s attention, keep it, and then entice them to buy from you, you’ve got to understand who exactly that person is.
For instance, if you sell high-end business suits, your target audience probably isn’t full of 20-year old college students, so marketing towards that demographic would be a waste of your time.
That’s why it’s so important to gain an understanding of your ideal customer through tools like Google Analytics.
Through tools like this, you can get introspections that you’d never get otherwise; and through those introspections, you can find out exactly what works well and what doesn’t.
So the first tip today is to understand your audience.
Get to know them like the back of your hand, and the rest of this becomes much more straightforward.
And with that out of the way, today we’ll be dealing with three categories of ways to attract more customers:
- First, we’ll cover how you can use content to get more customers.
- Then, we’ll talk about how improving your reputation can net you a more extensive customer base.
- Lastly, we’ll be discussing the power of excellent customer service & relations. (as well as some honorable mentions at the end)
We’ll mostly be focusing on how to attract more customers online, but many of these strategies can be applied to brick & mortar businesses, too.
So let’s start with the content side of things.
2. Identify Your Ideal Buyer Persona
You may have an excellent product or service, but if you don’t put it in front of the right audience, all your efforts might go to waste.
To attract more customers to your business, it’s crucial to identify your ideal buyer persona and target your efforts towards them.
But what is a buyer persona anyway?
A buyer persona is a detailed, semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer. You can identify your ideal customer based on the data of your existing customers or market research.
The more detailed you are while creating a buyer persona, the better. However, each buyer persona profile should include the following details:
- Demographics – such as age, gender, geo-location.
- Behavior patterns.
- Motivations and goals.
- Pain points – this will help you sell your product as a solution.
Additionally, you can also include:
- What does their daily life look like?
- Where do they spend most of their time?
- What do they do in their leisure time?
- And more – there’s no limit in what details you can include.
3. Sell The Solution, Not Your Product / Service
Regardless of your product or service, people will only decide to purchase if it makes them feel better or solves their problem.
With so many similar products and services today, you need to stand out from the crowd to attract more customers to your business.
And highlighting the solution to your buyer persona’s pain points is the best way to do it.
Remember, people don’t buy vitamin water just because they like its color or packaging. Instead, they buy it to help them boost their immune system.
People even buy Apple products not because of its products but how the brand makes them feel – fancy.
4. Word-Of-Mouth Always Works the Best
Happy Customers
Happy customers are your best allies – they will spread the word about how positive their experience with you was. People love sharing their experiences with others – and it’s free advertising for you.
And providing a positive experience doesn’t end when the customer makes a purchase. Post-purchase experience is just as important as pre-purchase. There are 2 ways you can keep a positive post-purchase experience:
- Provide excellent customer support service.
- Create the content on your website and social media that will further entertain your customers or educate them on how to benefit from your product.
Influencer Marketing
If you’re just starting and looking for a way to attract more customers to your business, it’s a good idea to invest in influencer marketing.
Influencer marketing works the same way. But instead of people spreading the word about you to their friends and family, an influencer reaches a much wider audience.
A social media influencer is a thought leader in a specific niche – people trust them and get influenced by them. Even though people know influencers get paid to promote products, a good influencer marketing campaign doesn’t feel like an advertisement.
5. Run User-Generated Campaigns
Running user-generated campaigns is a great way to nurture current customers while indirectly attracting more customers at little to no cost.
But how can you run a user-generated campaign, you may ask.
Contests are the best way to run UGCs.
It’s no secret that everybody loves to win. It’s not always about the prize you win, but the thrill of beating other people.
For a chance to win a prize, you could simply ask your current customers to share photos of themselves using your product. But you can go as creative as you’d like.
6. Free Works Like Magic!
People are always excited to get free stuff.
And giving out free stuff works in 2 main ways for you:
- It gets you in front of more customers.
- Free products show people how your product really works and gives you a chance to prove value. If a customer likes you, they become your paid customers and might as well spread the word about you.
Pro tip: Make sure you evoke a sense of urgency by limiting the number of people who can claim the free product. Alternatively, you can restrict the time through which your offer is valid.
7. Get Your Business On Social Media
Social media has changed the way business is done – it lets you engage with people where they spend their free time.
If your business is still not present on social media, now is the time to do it.
In fact, the usage of social media is just increasing year by year. According to Statista, 3.6 billion people were using social media in 2020 worldwide, while it’s projected to increase to almost 4.41 billion by 2025.
But which social media platform is the best to attract more customers to your business?
It depends!
Before deciding on getting on any social media, first identify which ones your ideal customers are mostly using. While one audience might be using Instagram, another audience might only be using Twitter.
Pro tip: Get on more than 1 social media platform to reach different types of buyer personas you might have.
To nurture your current customers or attract new ones to your business, you’ll need to publish content consistently. Provide value to establish yourself or your brand as an expert in the niche.
The best thing about social media is that it allows 2-way communications. So always make sure you’re engaging people through your posts.
8. Improving Your Content
For many online businesses, content forms the backbone of customer acquisition and marketing.
And the reason why is it’s such a good way to provide value to people, which encourages them to join part of your “following” and eventually convert to a loyal customer.
It’s also been shown to cost 62% less than traditional marketing while generating around 3 times the leads.
Now, that doesn’t mean traditional marketing doesn’t work, but content marketing is definitely an avenue you might want to look into.
But how would you implement that sort of thing?
Well, newsletters may be a good start.
Creating A Value-Packed Newsletter
Remember when we mentioned bringing value to potential customers? Newsletters are an excellent way to do just that.
And the great thing is that the more value you bring to the table via your newsletters, the more likely your audience is to check out any of the occasional direct marketing pieces you send out.
Just remember, there’s a fine line between adding value to your audience’s lives and spamming their inboxes, so try for the former rather than the latter.
Remarketing With Email — Always Be Collecting Emails.
To start a newsletter, you’ll need emails to send them out to, so always collect the email of people who interact with your business where it’s possible.
Email marketing is just a great way to attract customers at a low cost while still maintaining a high impact.
Platforms like VipeCloud are great ways to take full advantage of email as well. VipeCloud allows you to automate communication with beautiful templates and keep track of the previously mentioned data through things like email interactions.
When done right, email marketing doesn’t require much time or money for small business owners. Once the automation template is set, you can reuse and tweak it going forward, effectively creating a low-cost, low-maintenance marketing machine.
SEO-Focused Content Marketing
Another low-cost, high-yield way to market with content?
SEO.
A strong web presence is critical to building a businesses’ digital footprint, and SEO is one of the best ways to make a presence.
But some of you may be wondering, what’s SEO?
SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of tailoring a website to show up near the top (or at least on the first page) of Google’s search results.
For any business serious about its online presence, SEO’s pretty much essential.
While hiring SEO experts might not be the best financial decision for every business out there, it’s essential to at least get the basics down when setting up your website. That way, your business shows up before your competition when people search for relevant terms.
To get a handle on SEO, there are tons of guides out there to help you take your first steps.
Engage With Bloggers In Your Space
To add on to the idea of SEO, bloggers are always looking for content to share. And as such, you might very well be able to offer them something worth sharing with their audience.
It’s a win-win for all parties involved, really.
And on top of the vital referral traffic, this could bring, you may even be able to strike affiliate deals with some of the bloggers — though the organic content is still preferable, since it’s better at building brand trust and sets a better precedent.
Develop Your Brand With A YouTube Channel
Another great way to acquire customers is through strong branding.
Companies with good branding are great at catching the attention of new prospects, and one of the best ways to build a brand is through a Youtube channel.
54% of consumers want to see more video content from the brands they follow.
And 63% of people in the US use YouTube at least daily. So it’s very likely that your target demographic, whoever they may be, uses YouTube very often.
So if it fits your model, a YouTube channel is one of the best ways to give your audience exactly what they want and develop a strong brand behind your company.
Competition Analyzation — What Is Your Competition Doing?
In all likelihood, you’re already paying attention to the products and services your competitors offer — even if you don’t notice it.
But are you consciously noting how they’re marketing themselves?
The chances are that they aren’t going on pure intuition. Marketing is expensive, and as such, companies that implement it successfully have gone through lots of experimentation.
If you notice a competitor implementing a particular method over a long period of time, it’s probably yielding good results.
If you can single out the methods that get used more often, you can skip much of the needless experimenting and get right to the fun part:
profit.
9. Improving Your Reputation & Presence
The next marketing strategy to attract more customers is improving your presence and reputation.
A good reputation is paramount to bringing in more customers; most people will only become loyal to brands they trust, so here, we’ll be talking about precisely how you can build that trust.
Revamping Your Social Media Presence
In the modern age, every business needs to have some degree of social media presence.
Whether that need be a small or large presence is down to the specific business in question. Take State Farm’s Instagram, for instance.
State Farm is a multi-billion dollar behemoth with a monstrous marketing budget, but they’ve only minimally allocated resources into their social media pages.
That’s because they’ve likely determined that investing those resources into TV and sponsorships is more profitable in the long run.
You probably expected the Instagram to have more than 54K followers, right? Well, most of their posts only have 100-200 likes.
Every business should look for ways to leverage social media platforms, though.
Where things get tricky?
Building a following, specifically one that’s full of your target customers.
On top of that, you’ll need to create content that those customers are interested in on the regular.
All of this isn’t to say that social media is to be avoided; it can be very profitable. But it can also appear deceptively quick, easy, and cheap — when in reality, it’s just as much of a process as other forms of marketing.
Google Maps Isn’t Just For Brick & Mortar Businesses.
Even if you aren’t a business that has a storefront, you should have a spot on Google Maps.
Google Maps, contrary to popular belief amongst business owners, is more than simply a navigation platform. Many people use it to look up phone numbers, business hours, and websites.
The store above are online clothing stores, they don’t have physical storefronts, but they’re still on Google Maps, which means they’ve got the edge over their competition.
If you want to attract customers online and have a strong presence, you need a Google maps listing. Otherwise, they’ll likely see your competitors in the results instead.
Testimonials
Another massively underutilized way to boost your reputation are customer testimonials.
In fact, positive testimonials can increase revenue per website visitor by up to 62%.
Testimonials are one of the things that practically any business should have as part of their strategy; they’re just vital for building the trust you need to convert someone into a customer.
10. Improving Customer Experience & Relations
The customer experience is a vital piece of this puzzle.
Why?
Because your loyal customers can be some of the best marketers around.
Think about it, if Customer A has a good experience with your company, they’ll be all the more likely to recommend you to their good friend, Customer B, and so on.
Referrals, from both existing customers and adjacent businesses, are a fantastic way to earn new customers.
Which leads us to the first method in this section:
Referrals — A Classic Way To Earn New Business — And For Good Reason
Take some time to consider any adjacent businesses you could for strategic partnerships with.
Your customers could very well be valuable leads to another business in your field, and likewise.
And your existing customers can be great sources for referrals too, as I mentioned before.
Consider offering a discount for both customers and the people they’re referring to you to incentivize it more.
Or, you could create an affiliate program.
Creating An Affiliate Program
As a potential step up from just offering a discount for referrals, consider creating a fully-fledged affiliate program.
You could offer rewards and even commissions for anyone able to bring you more business; it’s another win-win.
You get more business that you wouldn’t have otherwise, and your affiliate partners make some rewards for helping you out.
Don’t Be Afraid To Ask For Reviews
Plenty of customers do their due diligence on various review sites before they set out to make any purchases. And they might even be shown reviews when they’re searching around on Google Maps despite not actively seeking those reviews out.
And because of that, it’s critical that every business is mindful of which review sites their customer base is visiting; that way, you can ensure you’re shown in the best possible light.
Your best customers are an excellent source for 5-star ratings, so you shouldn’t be shy to encourage them to leave a review for your business.
The best time to ask for that review?
At the peak of their happiness during the sales cycle.
For instance, an auto dealership could ask for it at the time of delivery for any new purchases, or a SaaS company could ask for a review after any new implementations have been completed and all systems are good to go.
With a little bit of trial-and-error, you’ll be able to determine the moment that has the highest chance of success, and once you’ve found that moment, turn asking for reviews into a routine going forward.
11. First Impressions Matter – Make It Top-Notch
Pay very close attention to the first impression you make with customers. That first impression has more of an impact than just raising your close percentage.
Customers who don’t buy will have still decided how likable your business is, and if your first impression is strong, there’s a good chance they’ll refer it to friends and associates — or maybe even a review site.
I’m sure we’ve all seen the one-star reviews out there from customers who never even did business with the place they’re reviewing.
12. Add A Human Element
Another great way to attract more customers is by adding a human element to your customer experience, especially where it’s typically not expected.
Classic examples of this might be a restaurant manager asking patrons how their meal is.
Or you could have a more human touch appear in even less expected ways. If you’re an eCommerce business, consider including handwritten notes if customers have to wait longer than expected.
A software business could call customers sometime after successful roll-outs just to check up on how things are going and if they need any help.
The only problem with “high-touch” strategies like these is that they don’t scale well because of how time-consuming they can be. So when considering a method like this, keep that in mind.
You want to make sure the customer service precedents you set are sustainable in the long run; else, you might be worse off than when you started when you inevitably have to cut them off.
13. Honorable Mention: Online Paid Advertising
When it comes to paid methods for attracting more customers, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising giants such as Google AdWords, Facebook, and Bing have brought very powerful tools to businesses, both big and small.
What makes these platforms so great is their ability to build custom ad campaigns that can target highly specific demographics. Not to mention the complete control you have over your budget.
PPC advertising can be deceptively simple, but doing it well takes quite a bit of trial and a whole lot of error. There’s also the upkeep.
Just because a PPC campaign is super successful now doesn’t mean it’ll be perfect in 3 months, so it’s far from a set-and-forget method if that’s what you were looking for — depending on your industry.
Plus, PPC advertising is done best when you’re directing prospects to tailored landing pages, not home pages. So that’s another thing to build, test, and manage.
And let’s say you want to start using display ads. You’ll need to either make them yourself or hire a graphic designer. There are just tons of variables that go into PPC; it can’t really be done on a whim.
Again, that’s not to say PPC is bad by any means; no one would use it if it weren’t highly effective. It just takes work.
If you are considering PPC, I’d advise you to at least evaluate how competitive your keywords are.
PPC advertising is essentially a never-ending auction, so keywords with low demand are generally going to fetch lower prices per click than their higher demand counterparts.
If your first pick for a keyword is averaging only $0.10 per click and you earn hundreds per year from each customer, this might be a marketing strategy worth considering.
If each click is $25 and isn’t paying off, then maybe other methods should be your main focus.
14. Putting It Together — Build A Sales Funnel
And here’s where we take all of this and put it together, building your sales funnel. Every company should have a funnel that the majority of potential leads go through.
The first step of that funnel is going to be cold, where people are just getting introduced to you and your brand, and the end of that funnel is a purchase. (And hopefully, a conversion to a loyal customer)
The steps of that funnel are going to be different for every company out there, it’s up to you to decide which of these methods are right for your company.
Test things out; much of this is about trial and error; maybe you’ll find SEO is extremely profitable, or perhaps social media yields higher returns for you. There’s no right or wrong way; it’s all about figuring out which methods work well and in which order.
Conclusion
The main takeaway is to take all of these methods into consideration. You might be surprised how well some of them might work in your own business.
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